FOR TOO MANY young people in Rhode Island, the educational system is failing to provide the necessary knowledge and life skills for these students to realize their greatest potential. Rhode Island outspends most other states on education but achieves lower overall results.

Education represents one of the state’s largest expenditures, and we need to realize a far greater return on investment than we are getting. Rhode Island needs a better-educated work force to attract large new employers to our state.

I suggest the following changes:

• Provide life skills courses to non-college-tracked children. Increased options for vocational/technical training are needed for these students, along with specially designed courses in applied mathematics, basic psychology, economics and written and verbal skills.

• Let uncertified professionals who are content experts teach in our schools. With our current rules, a Brown University professor is not able to teach a course in any public school unless that professor has a public-school teaching certification. There are many dedicated, non-teaching professionals who would jump at the chance to help educate our children, but they are barred from doing so. This is wrong, and works against the best interests of the students.

•  Ban the practice of “bumping” in our school systems. Seniority does not necessarily make a great teacher. Bumping is a policy, mandated in most teacher contracts, that effectively forces out teachers with the least seniority when layoffs occur. Our children deserve, and we as taxpayers should demand, that the best teachers are available to teach. Our children’s education is not like piece-work assembly on an assembly line, which is where the concept of bumping began. Bumping has no place in any professional work environment.

• Convert day-care expenditures for low-income households into pre-school aid for these same households. Rhode Island spends $86 million a year on day care for low-income households. These dollars will have a greater overall impact on the child if instead of day care the money and child are placed into pre-school education.

• Provide incentives to the best teachers to teach in the toughest schools.

• Apply lessons learned from our charter schools to our education system, and allow the development of more of these very successful schools, which are leading in education innovation.

• Evaluate all teachers and administrators annually and provide incentive pay for the top performers, while providing mentoring, training and a financial disincentive to the worst performers. Our suggestion on how to implement a fair, unbiased evaluation:

• Evaluate teachers with the following criteria, using equal weighting for each: administration review, peer review, parental review and standardized test scores.

• Rank teachers on the basis of their evaluations into a top 15 percent, middle 70 percent and bottom 15 percent. The bottom 15 percent receive mentoring and additional professional development (outside of standard school hours) to help these professionals raise their performance. The bottom 15 percent give up 1 percentage point of their annual pay increase, which is placed into a bonus pool to be split by the top 15 percent as a reward for excellence. Teachers who remain in the bottom 5 percent for three years straight are terminated from their positions.

• Publish a model teacher’s contract created at the state level and make state aid to local school districts contingent on how closely the locally negotiated teacher’s contract adheres to the model’s guidelines. We suggest that only the following four items compose the model contract:

• Setting the local contract end date to coincide with the state’s fiscal year end. Since state aid is part of the local school budget, it stands to reason that the local teacher’s contract should follow the state fiscal year.

• Require teacher-performance evaluations and incentive pay based on these evaluations.

• Provide the ability for uncertified professionals to teach our children.

• Remove the practice of bumping from all contract language.

Ken Block is chairman of the Moderate Party of Rhode Island.