The Legislature this year approved $20 million for school districts to come up with performance-pay plans. The State Board of Education and the Legislature are each forming study groups to come up with more ideas. Perhaps the time has come for a workable plan to boost pay for teachers who are successful in Utah classrooms.

In the past, teacher unions have opposed differentiated pay. They said they feared assessments could negatively affect teachers whose talents are not easily quantifiable. Or, perhaps, the union was simply doing its job to defend all teachers - even mediocre ones. But the old single salary schedule is an anachronism in today's education world, where subjective evaluations can be supplemented by computer records of test scores, student participation and achievement, graduation rates, and even student and parent evaluations.

There are ways to objectively determine which teachers are excellent, which are mediocre and which are substandard. In the real world of any particular school, principals, other teachers, parents and students all know which teachers are superior and which ones are merely putting in their time.

Finding a way to translate that knowledge into teacher evaluation scores won't be easy, but neither is it impossible. And paying excellent teachers more should encourage excellence. That's the theory used in other professions, and, although public schools cannot be treated like corporations or law offices, teachers can be evaluated just as lawyers or business executives are.

The Center for Teaching Quality issued a report two years ago, written by a group of outstanding teachers gathered together to study compensation. They proposed several criteria by which teacher quality can be evaluated, along with ways to distribute performance-based pay and include teachers in formulating the pay system.

We urge legislators and education officials to take an open-minded look at such research and adopt a fair way to compensate teachers who go the extra mile.