Efforts to improve education in Maine continues to be a recurring theme in the race for governor as the fall campaign heats up. Several proposed reforms have resurfaced, including one that would tie teacher raises peer performance reviews. About 20 percent of Maine's high school students do not graduate with the classmates they joined in their freshman year. And candidates for the Blaine House agree that improved student performance must be a top priority for Maine's next governor.

It wasn't bad enough that Maine didn't receive a share of the first-round funding of the federal Race to Top funds. But when the second round winners were announced last month, Independent gubernatorial candidate Eliot Cutler was astonished.

"We failed in the first round -- we didn't even make the cut off, and in the second round, we were 33rd out of 36 states. We're not measuring up," he says.

Cutler says Maine's approach to K-12 and higher education is in need of reform. The Cape Elizabeth lawyer is recommending a number of proposals -- including some that have been explored before. Among them are plans to lengthen the school year, create charter schools to create new opportunities for high-performing students and -- one of the most controversial -- merging the community college and university systems.

Cutler says the dual system has created silos that preserve the status quo at a time when collaboration could benefit students and decrease costs. "These silos may benefit certain programs or certain professors, but they're not benefiting the kids," he says. "And you have kids that are caught between the community colleges and the universities, you have one university changing its curriculum in a way that another university in the same system doesn't realize it's doing. We're not using our resources well to the benefit of the kids who we're trying to educate. It's just an enormous set of mistakes."

At the local level, Cutler would would like to see a merit pay system for teachers that would be awarded through a peer review process. He says teachers need to be rewarded for doing a good job and that their work should be able to be measured by their students' performance.

"In Maine, because of our contracts, we reward seniority with no distinction whatsoever between good teaching and bad teachng, and that's really a mistake, when the one thing we know about education and about educating our kids is that it's good teaching that makes the difference," Cutler says. "You can argue about everything else -- there are theories that compete with eachother about everything else -- but we know that teaching makes a difference."

"I think Mr. Cutler is merely reflecting that conversation that's going on around the country, as opposed to looking at the actual research that's been done on the value of rewarding teacher pay for greater student achievement," says Mark Gray, executive director of the Maine Education Association.

Gray says Cutler makes some erroneous assumptions about the linkage between student test scores and teacher performance. Gray says teaching is far more complicated than just achieving good test scores. He says the merit pay approach has been tried before and discarded -- right in Cutler's home town.

"There have been several school districts that have experimented with pay-for-performance, merit pay kinds of concepts -- in fact, I think Mr. Cutler's home town of Cape Elizabeth experimented with this kind of a program approximately 20 years ago and ended up eliminating the program, because they simply could not afford to provide the kind of merit increases that were called for by the plan that they had put in place."

Maine Democratic gubernatorial candidate Elizabeth Mitchell says she favors community approaches to improving educational programs for students, such as Jobs for Maine's Graduates, which discourages school dropouts and helps students transition to employment.

But she says her administration would focus on Maine's youngest students to ensure that they are ready to learn when they arrive at school. "We need to strengthen and improve early childhood opportunities," she says. "All the evidence points to the fact that kids' brain development is early, and if we don't give them the stimulus and help the parents teach, as well as pre-school opportunities, they fall behind from the beginning. That's unacceptable."

Independent candidate Kevin Scott agrees that charter schools are desirable, but he says that as governor, all options would be considered to make sure that Maine students can compete.

"Everything needs to be put on the table as we look to advancing Maine's education, period," Scott says. "Longer years, shorter years, more schools, more programs, fewer programs -- everything needs to be on the table."

Shawn Moody, another Independent candidate for governor, says that, using a strategy that he employs in his own collision repair business, he would look at finding savings in the university and community college systems to lower tuition rates.

"I think there's some real economic savings and administrative savings -- you know, we've done it in our own business," Moody says. "We've centralized all of our back office functions and responsibilites. We have five locations ourselves, we have one of the lowest operating overheads in our industry. So we'd employ that lean practice into the University of Maine System and therefore the savings that would be driven from that would be allowed to lower the turtion and get more of our young Maine students here, get them educated and get them out there in successful careers in Maine."

John Morris, a spokesman for Republican candidate Paul LePage, says LePage also favors charter schools. He said LePage would eliminate excessive education costs that he says fund an unnecessary bureaucracy.

"Our kids deserve a better education," Morris says. "Twenty percent of our students are dropping out of school before graduation. That's not acceptable. Maine is in the top one-third in education spending, the bottom one-third in results. Our education dollars should be going to teachers in the classroom, not to fund a bloated education bureaucracy."

Maine's current graduation rate for high school students hovers at about 80 percent -- about five percent higher than the national average, according to the state Department of Education.