As the discussion narrows on what's to become of State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Luna's ambitious teacher merit-pay proposal in the Legislature, now may be a good time to take a fresh look at the alternative.

That would be the Idaho Education Association's weTEACH plan, which rejects most of Luna's pay-for-performance ideas but does offer a few potentially valuable notions which might conceivably become part of a revised iSTARS next year.

We still support Luna's vision, but it's not going to become a reality this year in anything close to what the superintendent had in mind.

WeTEACH is flawed, in our opinion, but it deserves an open-minded discussion: Decouplinf teacher pay from performance on the Idaho Standard Achievement Test.

There's no question there should be benchmarks for measuring student performance, but ISAT - the make-or-break test required of Idaho students - shouldn't necessarily be the Holy Grail, or at least not the only one.

Now that Luna has dropped the idea of trading tenure for bonuses, it's possible to consider some of the merit guidelines from weTEACH and perhaps incorporate them into a reasonable attempt at helping a system in need of revamping.

If a teacher, especially one in the latter part of his or her career, doesn't want to participate in ISTARS, there should be no penalty in the form of having to forego annual pay increases.

Group-based performance awards work well in other states, but must be linked to improvement in student achievement.

WeTEACH hews more closely to the philosophy that teaching is an art - not a science - than iSTARS does. That point of view has some merit.

That said, we like iSTARS because it is about accountability, results and creating an education environment intolerant of mediocrity. By contrast, weTEACH - taken as a whole - would create a bureaucratic mishmash in which performance would be meaningless. It would be the "Lake Wobegon effect" run rampant: All teachers would be above average.

They're not, of course, and neither are the students they teach nor the schools they work in. The idea is for them all to become better.

Still, we're talking revolutionary change here. Embracing performance-based education requires a conversation first, and not a short one.

Our view: Not everything about the Idaho Education Association's weTEACH alternative to Tom Luna's iSTARS initiative is merely union intransigence. What do you think? We welcome viewpoints from our readers on this and other issues.