Teaching and learning in Maine would undergo big changes under a reform agenda unveiled today by the state's education commissioner.  Stephen Bowen spent a lot of time on the road last year, traveling to school districts in every corner of the state. Bowen says he drew on conversations he had with students, parents, teachers, principals and community leaders, as he drafted his ambitious plan.  It also mirrors reforms that U.S. education officials have been pressing states to make during President Obama's first term in office.

Around this time, every winter, the magazine Education Week puts out a big research report called Quality Counts. The project always includes an annual education report card for every state in the country.

So, compared to a lot of places, Maine isn't doing that bad. The state got an A minus, for example, on early-childhood education. And it's overall grade of C puts Maine in the middle of the pack nationally.

But at the same time, the state rates alarmingly low on key measures SUCH AS learning standards and efforts to hold teachers accountable for their job performance.

"We've got to do more," says Stephen Bowen, Maine's education commissioner. "We've got to reach every single student that we serve and ensure that every single one of them walks out of our schools as high school graduates, who are ready for college, careers and civic life. Not some students, not even most students, but all students."

Bowen says he has the plan to make it happen. Reforms in the 35-page document are spread across five core areas. One, focusing on what kids are learning in the classroom, calls for changes that include more rigorous academic standards, curricula that mesh with them and a data system that measures student improvement over time.

Another section, called great teachers and leaders, argues for tough job performance standards for educators and statewide guidelines on teacher and principal evaluation that local districts can refer back to, as they build their own systems for grading their employees.

Maine is not alone in pushing these kinds of policy changes. Professor Patrick J. Murphy is an education policy researcher at the University of San Francisco.  He says states across the country are pushing similar reforms. "What's the driving force? It's coming out of Washington D.C.. To some degree this is the Arne Duncan master plan to coerce, encourage and arm twist the states into these reform measures," he says.

Shortly after he took over as U.S. education secretary, Duncan announced plans for a new kind of competition. He called it Race to the Top. States would be able to compete for millions of federal stimulus dollars. But to win the race, they had to submit proposals, showing how they would achieve reforms laid out by the U.S. Department of Education, reforms that look an awful lot like the ones Stephen Bowen is calling for in his plan.

"A lot of work on some of these pieces was done as a part of Race to the Top," Bowen says. "As you will recall, we did not do very well. I think we were 33rd out of 36, something like that. And the place where we got hammered in the scoring was around that teacher and leader piece. And really, I, as former teacher, and coming to this job not directly out of the classroom, but pretty close, knew that that was a focus area that we were going to have to build on."

It's also the terrain that's likely to be the most politically treacherous, as Bowen tries to get state lawmakers and the education unions behind his push to tie teacher and principal evaluations to student achievement.

"I think the places that have succeeded in doing that have taken a very collaborative approach," says Laura Hamilton, a behavioral scientist and education researcher. She's at the Rand Corporation in Pittsburgh. "Our district here in Pittsburgh has been able to put several reforms in place that, in other districts unions have objected to. So they are now doing performance-based teacher evaluation."

Hamilton says its the district's strong relationship with the teachers union in Pittsburgh that's allowed this to happen. Whether the same climate develops in Maine remains to be seen. Before releasing his plan publically, Bowen met with leaders at the Maine Education Association.

Chris Galgay is the union's president. "We believe in thorough evaluations, we believe in having an effective teacher in every classroom and we'll continue to push that," he says.

Galgay notes that the union has put forward its own proposal on teacher evaluation that opens the door to using student achievement data. Galgay says he's eager to join Commissioner Bowen and the other education unions around the table to work on a reform agenda.

The next few months are likely to be busy ones for all the parties involved. Bowen wants to see many of his reforms take effect by the end of this year's legislative session. In the interest of full disclosure, the Maine Education Association represents some employees of the Maine Public Broadcasting Network.