Yes on Measure 60

A solid majority of Oregon’s public school teachers, we feel confident in asserting, are dedicated people who do a good job.

But teachers, even the successful ones, are not clones.

Some teachers are just plain better at their job than others.

This hardly makes teaching unique among professions, of course.

Not every lawyer, after all, can deliver an eloquent closing argument.

But as we know, the silver-tongued attorneys command bigger fees than their colleagues who tend to get tongue-tied in front of jury or judge.

We think teachers ought to be treated the same way.

The best teachers should earn more money, and have more job security, than the merely adequate teachers.

That’s the basic idea behind Measure 60, and we urge voters to support the measure on the Nov. 4 ballot.

Unfortunately, Measure 60 has been tarnished by the reputation of one of its chief petitioners, Bill Sizemore.

We don’t go along with Sizemore on many matters — including some other measures he also got onto the Nov. 4 ballot (for one example, please see the editorial below this one).

But as we hope all voters will, we weighed Measure 60 on its own merits rather than on Sizemore’s. And we concluded that the measure would encourage teachers to excel by rewarding them financially for doing so.

And the better our teachers are, the better off our students will be.

The measure’s language is straightforward. It prohibits school boards from giving teachers pay raises based on the length of their tenures, and requires instead that boards base pay raises exclusively on teachers’ “classroom performance.”

That makes sense to us.

Teachers’ longevity certainly is a relevant factor in gauging their competence — horrible teachers, we hope, wouldn’t last long enough to accumulate much seniority, and usually years of experience translate to higher ability.

Yet how teachers actually perform in the classroom is, obviously, a far more revealing measure of their expertise than how many years they’ve put in.

However, the way almost all teachers’ labor contracts are written, the teachers who make the highest salaries are those with the most seniority.

Measure 60 opponents criticize it in part because it doesn’t define “classroom performance.”

But we think that’s one of the measure’s strengths.

Local school officials don’t need a state law to tell them how to distinguish a great teacher from a poor one.

Principals already know how to do that.

Measure 60 requires one other change. School districts that lay off teachers would have to, in deciding which teachers to keep, give preference to teachers who have proved, in the classroom and through their own academic achievements, that they are most qualified to teach specific subjects. Boards could not use seniority alone to determine which teachers get a pink slip.

That sounds to us like a logical way to run a school.

If students are going to suffer because their school has fewer teachers, then the school board should at least ensure that the faculty members who remain are the very best of the bunch.