Richmond County parents should be encouraged that the school board is considering merit pay for principals and teachers. Frank Dolan, chairman of the board's finance committee, is pushing a plan modeled on the incentives in Superintendent Dana Bedden's contract.

Why not? What's good enough for the super ought to be good enough for principals and teachers. Usually pay hikes are determined by seniority and/or advanced degrees -- which is fine if teacher performance is improved by experience or higher education, but all too often it is not. "As bad as it is to say," notes Dolan, "I think some teachers are just marking time."

He's right, and the best way to get them to improve is to boost their salary for doing a good job. When students learn well and crack their test scores, then teachers should see it in their paychecks.

This is not a difficult concept to grasp or implement. It's done in the private sector all the time. Of course, it's not a perfect system. Mistakes are made -- sometimes employees are rewarded who shouldn't be or are not rewarded who should be. But by and large, pay-for-performance works. If it didn't, our nation wouldn't have one of the highest productivity rates in the world.

If incentives encourage most people to work harder and improve results, why wouldn't it work for teachers? Merit pay programs might also help to recruit and retain some of the nation's brightest and most ambitious minds, and possibly relieve the chronic teacher shortage.

Besides, with Richmond County sharing in the general malaise of America's education system, shouldn't we be looking to shake the hold teachers' unions and the education establishment have on it to try something new in hopes of making constructive change?

As we've often noted before, creating more charter and magnet schools would be the best way to improve the nation's public schools. It would force them to be more competitive and give parents a choice. But merit pay is certainly another reform that deserves to be in the mix.