When the Georgia Legislature resumes next month, it will take up several bills to change schools in the state. Unfortunately, the proposed legislation will do very little to actually improve them.

That's because lawmakers remain fixed on the wrong priorities.

For example, House members devoted 10 hours this fall to public hearings on figuring out how to make it easier for applicants to win approval to open new charter schools, of which there are now 70 in Georgia. Charter schools are free-form public schools that operate under an approved charter, or contract, that spells out a plan for improving student achievement and provides benchmarks for measuring this improvement.

Certainly, the Legislature ought to encourage charter schools since many children could benefit from creative alternatives to standard-fare public schools. But all children could benefit from better teaching.

And that's what the General Assembly ought to make its No. 1 priority — fostering the nation's finest teaching corps.

Where are the 10 hours of public hearings on how to persuade the brightest students at the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech to choose teaching? The most effective teachers are those with high SAT or ACT scores and grade point averages, yet few of those high-achievers at the state's premier universities now go into teaching.

Those students should not have to come out of colleges of education, which have held the franchise too long without producing results. It's time to retire the education colleges and teach math teachers in the mathematics departments and science teachers in science departments.

In student achievement, experience matters and inexperience hurts. New teachers should serve longer and more meaningful internships. And they should have a deep background in their content area, especially if they are teaching math and science, which can't be faked.

To keep these smart, young people in the classroom, Georgia must abandon its one-size-fits-all raises that assure the lackluster teachers are overpaid and inspiring ones underpaid. The state must introduce a pay-for-performance system that rewards excellence.

Georgia also has to end the costly and counterproductive practice of handing out huge raises every time a teacher gets a master's degree, even if the sheepskin comes from a fly-by-night diploma mill and has no relevance to the teacher's content area. Georgia continues to reward teachers based on degrees on their walls rather than real accomplishments with their students.

As a result of this absurd policy, Georgia teachers have become the best customers of fast-food master's programs, where teachers essentially pull up to the drive-thru, order a quickie educational leadership degree and return home with credentials and higher pay in as little time as a month or two.

The state Department of Education is aware of this growing problem, but has done nothing to address it. Yet, a RAND analysis of student test performance in 44 states concluded that compensating teachers for obtaining master's degrees "is arguably one of the least-efficient expenditures in education."

"We can change the guns, redeploy how we organize the troops, but until we talk about the quality of the troops it will not move the needle," says Atlanta public policy consultant John Ahmann.

Consider what the research says about the role of teacher quality in student achievement:

Researcher William Sanders analyzed 6 million student records and evaluated the performance of more than 30,000 elementary school teachers. Teacher effectiveness emerged as 10 to 20 times as significant as per-pupil expenditures, ethnic makeup or economic background.

Her research led Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University to conclude, "... the effects of well prepared teachers on student achievement can be stronger than the influences of student background factors, such as poverty, language background and minority status."

Researchers examining data on more than 10 million Texas students from 1990 to 2002 found that variations in teacher quality explained most of the gaps in reading and math achievement. The research noted that students taught by three highly effective teachers in a row scored 34 percentile points higher in reading and 49 points higher in math than peers who had three consecutive ineffective teachers.

Given that tremendous body of evidence on the importance of teacher quality, what does the Legislature have in the works to improve teacher education and performance?

Nothing.

And that's exactly what will change in the achievement levels of Georgia students.

— Maureen Downey, for the editorial board