A bold approach to school reform: sweeping changes to Idaho's education policy turned into a hot potato issue that's landed in the voters' laps.

• Author: Russell, Betsy
• Position: EDUCATION

Idaho Senator John Goedde (R) compares the changes under way in Idaho's schools to how the printing press changed religion.

A thousand years ago, elaborate stained-glass church windows told the story of faith to illiterate crowds. "Then came the printing press," says Goedde, "and suddenly the whole paradigm of how religion was taught changed, because books were mass produced and readily available for people who were learning to read."

Goedde says we're at a similar pivotal point today. "The technology is available for children to learn in a different manner, and teachers need to be able to adapt to those tools."

Idaho lawmakers adopted a sweeping school-reform plan in 2011 that requires two online classes to graduate and provides a laptop computer for every high school student. It also introduces performance pay for teachers based partially on their students' achievement, offers students who finish graduation requirements early a chance to take up to a year of dual-credit college classes on the state's dime, and pays for students' college entrance exams.

Perhaps most significant, however, is that lawmakers reallocated education funding to pay for all these changes without raising any new revenues. That is also where the controversy centers. To pay for the changes, the reforms cut into traditional school budget priorities like teacher salaries and brick-and-mortar school buildings. And those changes didn't sit well with many parents and teachers.

The Players

Idaho schools Superintendent Tom Luna was the reform's author, Senator Goedde its lead legislative sponsor and Governor Butch Otter its biggest booster. All three are Republicans who believed the state desperately needed to ratchet up student achievement and catch up with technology. "We must adapt or we risk becoming irrelevant. Research has shown the 1-to-1 ratio in the classroom helps improve student achievement," Goedde said during Senate debate, touting the laptop component of the reforms.

With a tight state budget, the leaders felt the need to make some tough changes. "We have to do something different," Goedde says. "We can't just continue to cut, cut, cut the current system."

The early version of the plan met resistance from the teachers' union, the 120-year-old Idaho Education Association. Dubbed "Students Come First" but known popularly as the "Luna laws," the reforms removed most teachers' collective bargaining rights, limited teacher contracts to one year and shifted tens of millions of dollars from teacher salaries to performance-pay bonuses, a move that was later softened by a follow-up bill in 2012. The plan originally called for cutting teaching positions and increasing class sizes, but the final version left it to local school districts to decide whether to...