Gov. John Baldacci plans to introduce legislation in the coming weeks that would link teacher evaluations -- and possibly teacher pay -- to student performance. He outlined his proposal in his State of the State speech last night.

Gov. John Baldacci plans to introduce legislation in the coming weeks that would link teacher evaluations -- and possibly teacher pay -- to student performance. He outlined his proposal in his State of the State speech last night.

"Teachers and principals are responsible for their classrooms and the students in them," Baldacci said. "Student achievement must be part of how they are evaluated. There are factors that contribute to student performance, some of them are outside the control of hardworking teachers. But we know that effective teachers get better results."

State law currently bars school administrators from evaluating teachers based on how their students do on measurements such as test scores -- a provision advocated for by many teachers and adopted in other states.

But David Connerty-Marin of the Department of Education says that the governor's legislation would change that. "Our proposal will remove that prohibition and therefore allow districts to make decisions to use that data in their own evaluation processes."

Connerty-Marin says the Baldacci administration wants to get rid of the prohibition to make it more competitive for federal grant money for education through the so-called Race to the Top program.

He says it would be up to individual school districts as to whether to use test scores to decide teacher salaries. But that possibility worries the state's largest teachers' union.

"If you're going to use the existing dollars, that means that to reward some teachers you're going to have to take money away from other teachers," says Mark Gray, executive director of the Maine Education Association, whose members are compensated by school districts based on their longevity and educational attainment.

Gray says teachers are open to changing the way they are compensated, and want to have a seat at the table with the Baldacci administration, as well as with local school districts. But they are concerned about how fair and accurate it is to rely on student test scores to determine pay.

"If I'm a high school math teacher and I've got four, five sections of math, and I might have a couple of algebra 2 classes, I might also be teaching a calculus class. How does my effectiveness as a teacher get matched up to the fact that I'm teaching a large number of students and I'm teaching students at different levels? Is it an average of all of the test scores of all the students that I see during a semester or during a grading period?"

But advocates of using student test scores in determining teacher pay say there are very sophisticated measurement tools that focus less on how high students score, and more on how much they improve.

Robert Meyer is the director of the Value-Added Research Center at the University of Wisconsin. He has helped school districts such as Chicago's develop teacher pay systems by measuring the teacher's contribution or "value added" to student test scores.

"What value-added does is focus on how much did your test scores go up over, say, the school year period, and can we make that comparison even fairer by controlling for differences in the kinds of students that the teachers are serving?" Meyer says. "Some teachers may have E-L-L students, disability students, kids on free lunch. Test scores are typically going to be lower for students with characteristics like that."

Meyer says that school districts that have adopted test scores as a measure of teacher performance do not depend on them solely. Administrators also consider in-classroom evaluation.

Student test scores can be used in other ways than just determining teacher pay, stresses Connerty-Marin of the state Department of Education. He says they can also help teachers get better.

"It's also about identifying who are the really good teachers, and then being able to use that and replicate that, and who are the teachers who are not doing as good a job and how we can help them do better?" Connerty-Marin says. "What kind of supports do they need to get better?"

More details on how Baldacci envisions using student performance in teacher evaluations will come out next week, when a spokesman for the governor says a draft of his bill should be completed.