Imagine that you are a teacher in Utah's public schools. You work hard, employ innovative techniques and care about your students, who generally do well on tests and get good grades. Even more important, they feel good about their work in your class.
    Down the hall, another teacher does the minimum amount of work, avoids interacting with students and grouses about his profession. His students feel little encouragement and may even be belittled for their failures. But he teaches the district curriculum and has committed no serious violations.
    Under the Utah compensation system, both teachers get the same pay raises, based on their academic degrees and years of service. Does that seem fair? We don't think so.
    It's a system that does not encourage teaching excellence. But there is a way to change it. Tying pay raises to teacher evaluations would add weight to those evaluations and push teachers to improve.
    As things now stand, teachers with more than three years under their belts - considered "career teachers" - can be booted from their jobs or encouraged to resign if they break the law or do not perform up to their school district's standards, but these cases are relatively rare.
    Education Sector and the FDR Group, nonpartisan groups that research education issues, surveyed 1,010 KÐ12 public school teachers and found that 55 percent believe "it's very difficult and
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time-consuming to remove teachers who shouldn't be in the classroom."
    When there is little danger of losing their jobs and no monetary incentive to excel, some less-than-passionate teachers are bound to slide into mediocrity. Merit pay could change that. But teachers question whether merit pay could be distributed fairly.
    It seems to us that districts already have the tools to make merit pay work and weed out poor teachers who consistently fail to qualify for pay raises. Granite and Jordan use detailed teacher evaluations, developed over many years, and other districts have their own models. Principals can consider parent, peer and student input and specify goals and standards that must be met.
    If detailed evaluations were done critically and honestly, they could easily serve as a basis for merit pay increases that would improve teaching. It's done in business and other professions; why not in schools?