It is amazing what treating teachers like professionals can do for teacher retention and student achievement. Rather than force teachers to take a vow of poverty and treat them all the same, regardless of how effective they are in the classroom, in recent years the Douglas County School Board has transformed its treatment of teachers, and the reforms are reaping incredible results.

In 2010 a new school board majority took over in Douglas County and embarked on a series of significant reforms aimed at delivering a world-class education for its students. In the years since, the already highly performing district has seen graduation rates rise, test scores go up and become the only large school district in Colorado recognized as “Accredited with Distinction” by the Colorado Department of Education.

These incredible accomplishments have occurred since the implementation of the pay-for-performance and marked-based pay system, which has allowed recruiting, retaining and rewarding highly effective teachers. Since the reforms were enacted, Douglas County School District has retained 95 percent of highly effective staff and 90 percent of effective educators.

Research has shown that two poor teachers in a row can have a devastating effect on a student’s education. That frightening reality is echoed by Kati Haycock, the CEO of The Education Trust and co-author of “Teaching Inequality: How Poor and Minority Students are Shortchanged on Teacher Quality” who says “the research shows that kids who have two, three, four strong teachers in a row will eventually excel, no matter what their background, while kids who have even two weak teachers in a row will never recover.”

The critical importance and impact of great teachers in undebatable. What is debatable is how well most school districts are at recruiting and retaining great teachers. Too often, school districts leave their ability to place and keep great teachers in the classroom up to chance, treating bad teachers no differently than great teachers.

But teachers, like any other profession, deserve to be rewarded for their hard work and results, and school districts that value great teachers will demonstrate that with more than just kind words. In Douglas County they implemented two significant reforms aimed at recruiting and rewarding great teachers: pay-for-performance and market-based pay.

Pay-for-performance is aimed at identifying and rewarding effective teachers with additional pay. To determine what an effective teacher looks like, DCSD developed, with the help of 100 teachers and multiple principals and assistant principals, a set of criteria that acknowledges teaching as both an art and a skill. The evaluation aligns with state requirements that flow from Senate Bill 191, which changed how educators in Colorado should be evaluated. Teachers who are deemed highly effective are up for raises that most educators in Colorado have never seen. Two years in a row of a rating of “ineffective” and a teacher loses their tenure and the district is able to let them go. This allows the district the ability to reward great teachers and replace poor ones.

The second major reform implemented in DCSD was market-based pay, which places positions into six salary bands, based on the supply of qualified applicants. Despite being a high performing district, DCSD struggled to bring in high-quality applicants for hard-to-fill positions. A high-ranking district official said, “[B]efore our market-based system was in place we had to hire whoever applied, whether the application was good or bad.” Now DCSD has more applications than open slots. That allows for a much more selective process which, in turn, has a positive impact on children’s learning.

Since the reform-minded school board took over in Douglas County in 2010, graduation rates have risen from 83.1 percent to 88.9 percent in 2015. ACT scores have gone from 21.4 to 22.1. In 2014, DCSD was named an AP honor district, with AP participation rising from 3,724 students in 2011 to 4,331 students in 2014.

Market-based pay and pay-for-performance gives DCSD an advantage over other districts in Colorado and nationally in the search for talent and the quest to bring them to Colorado. Because of that leverage, DCSD students will have an edge over other students in Colorado and the United States. Education is the one thing that consistently, constantly and permanently changes the trajectory of a student’s life. If the student is fortunate enough to have a highly effective teacher guiding their education, the trajectory of their life will be at a much steeper angle. The critical importance and impact of a great teacher cannot be disputed.

Read Groff’s report here [PDF].

Former Senate President Peter C. Groff, D-Denver, was a senior-level appointee in the U.S. Department of Education in President Barack Obama’s administration.