Denver residents last week approved a new and fairly radical pay-for-performance program for teachers. While ProComp is inordinately complicated and probably not focused quite enough on student achievement, it represents a huge symbolic and political victory for pay reform. Its solid adoption (58% to 42%) makes Denver the home of the biggest district-based merit pay program in the country.

Automatic increases are out the window, so in that sense ProComp will replace the traditional salary schedule. Instead, ProComp offers a colorful menu of options for building salary and acquiring bonuses.

It'll pretty easy for weak teachers to climb up the pay scale, earning as much as $4,000 just for showing up for a few days of professional development, getting a master's, and earning the perfunctory satisfactory rating on an evaluation. However, the cumulatively building nature of the plan seems to ensure that the real winners will be the teachers who work hard year in and year out. A goal-meeting 25-year-veteran math teacher in a hard-to-serve school, for example, could make as much as $97,400 a year; on the old schedule, she would have "topped out" at $57,190.

New teachers will have to enroll in ProComp, but veteran teachers can stick with the traditional salary schedule for up to seven years.