With a unanimous vote by its board of education this week, Cincinnati became the first public school district in the nation to replace the seniority-based pay scale for teachers with one solely based on performance. This remarkable step toward greater accountability in public education is made even more remarkable by this — rather than being dragged into it, Cincinnati teachers led the way.

Under the new merit pay plan, teachers will be evaluated on 16 criteria every five years by a panel of principals and master teachers. Based on their scores, teachers would be placed in a category: apprentice, novice, career, advanced or accomplished. Each level has a corresponding salary, from $30,000 for a “novice” to $62,500 for “accomplished,” which could be augmented with supplemental pay for national accreditation, additional education and other criteria.

School districts across the country have talked about merit pay for years. Some have initiated bonuses for outstanding performance. This is the first time professional development and evaluation have been directly linked to compensation. And it’s a link Cincinnati teachers, fed up with the tiresome accusation that public education is rife with complacent calendar-watchers, helped forge.

The merit-pay concept was included in the contract agreed to by the local teachers’ union in 1997. Teachers, administrators and education and compensation experts began designing the system the next year. It had a successful 18-month trial run in 10 Cincinnati schools and its final approval by the city’s 3,600 teachers in a vote this fall is a virtual certainty.

This new system does several worthwhile things: it weeds out teachers not up to job; it recognizes the difference between good and excellent teachers; and, especially important in a time of impending teacher shortages, it sends a message to young career seekers that public education is a challenging profession that rewards those up to the challenge.

It’s a fair system, but tough. All new teachers start as apprentices. They must be promoted to novice by the end of their second year or they are dismissed. Novices must be promoted to career by the end of their fifth year or they are dismissed. Teachers who are demoted as the result of their five-year evaluation can request a re-evaluation the following year, but beyond that there is no appeals process. Young teachers with the drive to succeed don’t have to wait for decades to pass by — they can request an evaluation for promotion every two years.

The connection Cincinnati is making between performance and pay is gaining a lot of notice elsewhere — Iowa, for example, already has announced plans to replicate it. Maine, which does a lot of evaluating with Learning Results and the new MEAs but little when it come to the value side of the equation, should do the same.