No Child Left Behind, the federal education law, should be toughened to judge teachers and principals by their students’ test scores, and to block chronically ineffective educators from working in high-poverty schools, a private bipartisan commission recommended on Tuesday.

Every school day, Texas teachers willingly embrace the responsibility of shepherding our children toward bright futures. In return, it is our duty as parents, employers, and taxpayers to empower these teachers with the best tools so our students are prepared to succeed. “Teacher effectiveness” is the cornerstone of a series of innovative education recommendations recently released by Texans for Excellence in the Classroom, which are now being considered by the Texas Legislature. The Governor’s Business Council developed the report, “Excellence in the Classroom,” working with the nation’s leading education experts, researchers and teachers with years of classroom experience.

The crazy thing about the education debate in the United States is that anyone with an ounce of brains knows what must be done. Each political party is about half right. Republicans are right about the need for strict performance standards and wrong in believing that enduring change is possible without lots more money from Washington. Democrats are right about the need to pay teachers more but wrong to kiss up to teachers unions bent on preventing accountability.

Teachers in schools that participate in a program that overhauls their professional lives, in part by orienting their pay toward performance, are more likely to significantly raise student achievement than similar teachers in other public schools, the first broad evaluation of the Teacher Advancement Program has found.

The importance of education beyond the high school level is becoming more and more apparent, and thousands of young people across Texas and the nation are anxiously awaiting news of their applications to various colleges and universities.

Every school day, Texas teachers willingly embrace the responsibility of shepherding our children toward bright futures. In return, it is our duty as parents, employers and taxpayers to empower these teachers with the best tools so our students are prepared to succeed.

We strongly agree that Texas needs to empower teachers with better tools and increase financial incentives for effective teachers, especially those willing to teach in hard-to-staff schools.

I am a teacher who has read closely this group's recommendations. And it is clear that the nation's leading education experts, researchers and classroom teachers who developed the Excellence in the Classroom recommendations understand the extraordinary pressures and challenges we face every day in the classroom.

Out of the Longhorn State comes the most readable of the bunch, the Governor's Business Council's Excellence in the Classroom: Bolstering Teacher Effectiveness. The report's thankfully brief 15 pages contain a bevy of good ideas about everything from teacher prep to alternate route programs, connecting the dots between them in an admirably sensible way.

The Houston Independent School District started doling out checks Tuesday to the teachers who earned the biggest bonuses for boosting student test scores.