Rather than paying people more for taking courses and leading trips, try higher classroom scores.

The Portland School District's controversial approach to teacher incentive pay has been much in the news lately – thanks to some solid, in-depth reporting by Dieter Bradbury in the Maine Sunday Telegram of Aug. 31.

By taking advantage of generous credits for continuing education activities negotiated in their recent contract, more than a third of Portland's 650 teachers moved into higher pay brackets this past school year.

This increased salary spending by $850,000, almost triple the amount budgeted.

Moreover, several teachers' increases were startling. For example, one social studies teacher's salary moved from $51,300 to $67,000, an increase of more than 30 percent, largely for continuing education credits earned leading field trips abroad.

Another teacher's salary increased over 40 percent, from $40,400 to $58,600, for taking college courses and for writing letters of recommendation for students.

I believe teachers should be paid more, but the Portland approach is hard to justify.

It is a reflection of good intentions combined with mind-boggling naivete in the negotiation of the teachers' contract.

Where to begin? Let's start with the premise on which this most significant change to established policy was based, namely that "the best predictor of student learning is teacher learning." This is not what academic research shows.

All of the research I have seen reported shows a correlation between teacher quality and student learning – a subtle but substantial difference.

Teacher learning, if appropriately directed and effectively done, can certainly improve teaching quality. However, it does not hold true that teacher learning in general is correlated with student learning.

On this flawed premise the Portland school negotiators built a much more lucrative and easier-to-achieve salary schedule, giving generous credit for courses taken or extracurricular activities, and abandoning the traditional approach of rewarding teachers only when they gain master's degrees or doctorates.

They sweetened the pot further by moving the top of the scale from an annual salary of $64,400 to one of $78,400, by extending credit to all courses taken since 2001, and even by giving credit to probationary teachers for mandatory courses they needed to be certified to teach.

Given these conditions, it is a wonder that only a third of Portland's teachers managed to take advantage of it before the disclosures of the impact of the program forced a contract renegotiation this past spring.

The renegotiation addresses several of the most egregious aspects of the contract, largely by requiring mandatory periods at each of the new pay levels before one can advance.

Even with these changes, the contract remains flawed. In our schools we should be working toward improving teacher quality, and there are better ways of doing this.

When I was on the School Board in Cumberland-North Yarmouth in the mid-'90s, we attempted to negotiate a contract that would have tied teacher salary increases to demonstrated improvement in teaching practice.

We proposed developing a learning plan with each teacher and then, over time, assessing progress on that plan by a joint team composed of the principal and two or three fellow teachers.

We were prepared to substantially increase teacher salary levels based on achieving levels of competency. While our local teachers had some interest, the state leadership of the Maine Education Association would not allow them to consider it.

Now considerably more data are available on student learning and on teaching effectiveness that would make this approach much less revolutionary than it seemed back in the '90s. In fact, several schools and districts around the country have developed variants of this model.

The fundamental issue is that we will not improve student learning without higher-quality teaching.  We must find ways to bring more highly qualified candidates into the field and to reward those teachers appropriately who demonstrate particular capability in their profession.

To get widespread public support for teacher salaries high enough to attract and retain the best teachers, school districts need to be able to show that teacher quality is having a positive outcome on student learning.

Few people will support significant increases in school budgets while state test scores remain flat and international comparisons continue to relegate U.S. students to the second tier.

We certainly need new approaches to teacher compensation, but let's learn from Portland's mistakes and develop approaches that tie increases to teacher quality and student learning.