OVER THE PAST two years, The Education Partnership, a Rhode Island statewide public-education-advocacy organization, has advanced two landmark studies of Rhode Island teacher contracts (www.edpartnership.org); in them, we spell out the negative fiscal and management consequences of overly rigid, assembly style "factory-model" contracts. Regrettably, these antiquated roadmaps for school-district organizational behavior fail to treat teachers as creative professionals; fail to provide instructional leaders the flexibility they need to recruit, retain, or assign the "best and the brightest"; and make it virtually impossible to remove ineffective teachers from the classroom.

We are not alone in our low opinion of factory-style contracts. Adam Urbanski, a veteran teacher-union leader and reformer, acknowledges that in discussing collective bargaining in public education, we must "adopt what's best for the student as the shared value, the common denominator, and the litmus test for any specific proposal advanced by either the school district or the union" when negotiating a teacher contract. He knows that accountability for student performance and quality teaching must become central features of the teacher contract.

During the past three months, the Education Partnership has surveyed over 300 incumbent school-committee members and new challengers across the Ocean State.

They were asked to evaluate a series of the Partnership's suggested reform proposals. Forty-two percent responded, and respondents were found to be broadly representative of the entire spectrum of rural, suburban, urban-ring and urban-core districts.

What did we find?

These school-committee members and challengers are a remarkably highly educated group -- with 42.8 percent holding either a master's or Ph.D.-level degree! If we add to this group those incumbents or candidates who have obtained graduate-school credits beyond their college degree, that figure rises to 56 percent. More importantly, these extraordinarily high levels of educational attainment held constant among suburban, rural and urban districts alike, and across challengers and incumbents.

When these school-committee members and challengers reviewed our policy questions, we discovered that: 83 percent favored letting principals more easily remove ineffective teachers; 82 percent favored staffing assignments (of teachers) based on subject expertise rather than seniority; 68 percent favored replacing tenure with renewable, multi-year contracts; 62 percent favored giving added compensation to "hard-to-recruit" teachers; and 56 percent favored the concept of pay for performance, a concept opposed by 24 percent.

In addition, robust support was expressed for several major legislative proposals that school members were also asked to evaluate. Thus, we learned that: 84.5 percent agreed that a standard health-insurance package should be purchased at the state level, if it represents district savings (rather than packages negotiated individually by 36 districts); 82.3 percent favored the removal of professional-development training as a "negotiable" item in the bargaining process (i.e., they rejected the "if you're not going to pay me for it, I'm not going to do it model"); 73 percent favored establishing a statewide teacher work-day standard of eight hours, and a teacher work year of 190 days; and another 73 percent favored a minimum statewide employee-cost-sharing standard of 20 percent in the cost of their health insurance.

Once again, careful analysis of the responses indicates unequivocally that these views are not "suburban" views, or "rural" views, or "urban" views. They are the statewide views of a highly dispassionate, highly educated citizenry with a strong interest in the public good and the public schools.

Attitudinally, these findings are remarkable in one other respect; they reflect a strong movement away from the old factory-model, seniority-not-performance way of doing business. History demonstrates, however, that the actual implementation of organizational-reform proposals like these is not easy, and requires a concerted advocacy by our school committees.

In short, the powerful consensus demonstrated among this group of stakeholders on these issues is a necessary but not sufficient condition for real change. The real trick will be for board members to insist that these reform proposals are not tabled, but become part of the public-policy-deliberation agenda in our local districts. The policy voice of these school-committee members and candidates seems very clear. The students and parents of each district deserve to hear those voices in a public space.

Will Van Horne is the Education Partnership's director of data and strategic analysis.