Reforming Teacher Pay in Maine - Part 1

The current effort to consolidate Maine’s many small school districts is the latest in a series of recent efforts to improve the
state’s schools. During the past decade, Maine has enacted tougher learning standards, developed new assessment systems to
test student achievement, reformed the state’s school funding formula, distributed laptop computers to thousands of middle
and high school students, and dramatically increased state funding for K-12 education. Despite these efforts, student performance,
as the State Board of Education reported in a recent study, has remained “flat through recent years.”

What may have been missing from these attempts at reform was a focus on teacher quality. Studies suggest that effective
teachers can have a profound impact on student outcomes. Maine, like many states, has struggled to attract and retain top
teachers. The consolidation of school districts, however, presents the state with a unique opportunity to investigate how the
adoption of new models of teacher compensation could improve the effectiveness of the state’s teachers and correspondingly
improve student achievement.