Despite growing exceptions, the way we usually pay public school teachers is this: Teachers are hired, often at low salaries, for earning a bachelor's degree and taking a certain number of education courses. Actual knowledge or rigor of preparation is not much of a factor in these days of teacher shortages in all but the richest school districts. Teachers are often assigned to teach classes in subjects they know little about. Advancement and higher pay are mostly a painful process of accumulating seniority, and taking still more education courses. Those who are good, bad and even ugly at teaching move forward at the same snail's pace, towards the same limited top salary. At the center of today's Knowledge Economy, teachers are stuck on yesterday's Industrial Age career ladder. And yet we wonder why bright, talented young Americans are disinclined to become teachers.

Conservatives often blame teachers' unions for this factory-floor system of compensation. In truth, it pre-existed collective bargaining by teachers, and persists in states and school districts without unions.

Last week, one teachers' union and one school district broke the mold and agreed on a new merit-based model of compensating teachers. The Cincinnati (OH) Federation of Teachers (affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers of the AFL-CIO) and the Cincinnati Public Schools shook hands on a deal that would replace the seniority-and-credentials system with a career ladder, based on teacher quality evaluations. (For more information, see the school system's web site, or call Pamela Thomas in Superintendent Steven Adamowski's office at (513) 475-4178).

Once the system is fully phased in, all Cincinnati teachers will be regularly and systematically evaluated on 16 criteria of teaching excellence and classified as an apprentice, a novice, an advanced, or an accomplished teacher, with pay tied to performance. Outstanding teachers can advance to the top of the pay grade within five years (and can get accelerated interim pay raises by asking for more frequent evaluations). Experienced teachers can lose pay, or their jobs, for bad evaluations. The only credentials that will guarantee more pay are advanced degrees in the subject area for which the teacher is responsible. And the evaluation area given the most weight in the system, "teaching to learn," focuses on subject-matter mastery.

The new Cincinnati system, while revolutionary in its scope, is not perfect. Cincinnati will not directly link teacher evaluation and pay to objective measurements of student achievement, a shortcoming that Assistant Superintendent Kathleen Ware acknowledged and addressed in talking to the Cincinnati Enquirer:

"We want to be able to look at the classroom of a very high- ranking teacher and see students who are showing increases in achievement," Mrs. Ware said. "And if we don't get that, we'll need to adjust the criteria."

In addition, Cincinnati already provides salary bonuses for teachers and staff in schools with excellent records in boosting student achievement.

Interestingly enough, Vice President Al Gore addressed the teacher merit pay issue in a recent and little-reported speech to the Michigan Education Association. He called specifically for subject-matter competency testing for teachers, and more controversially, for linking teacher pay to student achievement.

We agree with Gore, especially in his blunt and direct linkage of better rewards for teachers with more accountability for competency and results--"invest more in teachers and schools and demand more in return."