A body has to be careful when wading through any plan put out by a political type, especially one in the middle of a campaign. All too often it seems as though the copy is written by lawyers. That is, it's written to be legal, not readable. Complete with Work Ready Community Certification Processes and even the occasional Bipartisan Task Force Review Plan.

Often enough, too, such a statement comes complete with just enough murky Clinton clauses so it sounds strong but isn't, and, if necessary later, said pol can weasel out of any tight spot he's got himself into--just in case anybody actually reads his plan and tries to hold him to it.

So we approached Mike Ross' ballyhooed Jobs Plan for Arkansas with all of that in mind, not to mention our usual cynicism--an occupational hazard among jaundiced old editorial types. So you can imagine our surprise, Gentle Reader, when we got to page 17, and Proposal No. 3.

What's this? Why, it looks like, reads like, feels like ... a real idea.

A real good idea.

So what if it's not a new idea? A good idea is rare enough in politics. Even the oldies but goodies need to be singled out, praised and celebrated. A campaign can't have enough good ideas--instead of the usual canned applause lines.

Today's example is Mike Ross' Proposal No. 3: Reform and Fully Fund Arkansas School Recognition And Reward Program

Some background: Once upon a time, a state you might have heard of created a rewards program for its public schools. The idea was to give the schools in the top 10 percent a hundred bucks for each student as a reward for their good work. The schools in the next 10 percent would get 50 bucks per kid. But how would the schools be measured? By recognizing (1) performance as defined by student test scores, and (2) improvement as measured by student test scores.

It was important to have the two measures and reward schools that ranked high in both those categories--separately. Schools that performed remarkably year after year, but could hardly improve much from their place at the top, would be recognized. And so, too, would schools that made double-digit leaps from one year to the next, but could hardly match those top-performing schools, which were often in richer school districts that served kids from wealthier families.

Naturally enough, such an approach was deemed too simple by the experts. So it had to be "improved" over the years. Somewhere along the way, the measures were combined. Schools were ranked by performance and improvement, somehow crammed together.

Never mind that the change defeated the whole purpose of the original plan. The top-performing schools normally wouldn't be rewarded because they couldn't improve enough. (How improve on, say, a score of 99 percent?) And the schools that made the largest leaps in test scores probably couldn't be recognized because they still couldn't crack the Top 10.

Mike Ross, who hopes to be your next governor, wants to change that.

In his plan, dubbed Proposal Number Three in his campaign literature, Mike Ross suggests rewarding performance and improvement separately again, as was intended early on. In our considered editorial opinion: It's about time. Past time.

The rewards program needs to be a line-item in the budget (thank you, Governor Mike Beebe, for proposing just that) and fully funded, as Mike Ross says. That way, this rewards program can reward two kinds of schools: the best and the most improved.

Here's hoping that the winner in the governor's race, whoever it turns out to be, pushes this idea through into legislation. Because it would be an important improvement itself. For schools, for education, for students, and for all who care about education in Arkansas.

Editorial on 06/20/2014