The Legislature’s Joint Committee on Education and Cultural Affairs held hearings this week on a pair of bills that would bring more choice and accountability to Maine’s public schools.

The first, L.D. 1854, An Act to Expand Educational Opportunities for Maine Students, would permit school districts to declare their schools to be “open enrollment” schools, allowing some number of students from outside the district to choose to enroll there.

The second, L.D. 1858, An Act to Ensure Effective Teaching and School Leadership, would require school superintendents to put in place systems for evaluating teacher performance and would empower superintendents not to renew the contracts of persistently ineffective teachers.

Although neither bill goes far enough, both are reasonable first steps and should be adopted.

Parents and students currently have a measure of choice about where to enroll in school: to enroll in any given public school system, they just have to move there; to enroll in a private school, they need only pay tuition. Because the options for exiting the local district are inconvenient and expensive, this arrangement means that each district effectively functions as a monopoly. Unlike stores or businesses that have to compete for customers, each school district has its own captive supply of “customers.”

In the private sector, monopolies enable companies to overcharge and underdeliver. As competition increases, however, businesses compete to provide better service at lower cost. There’s no reason to think the public sector is any different.

Ideally, all public schools would compete for students, and all students would have the same range of choices that residents of communities without schools of their own now enjoy — the right to attend existing public schools or certain private, non-sectarian schools.

By contrast, L.D. 1854 would authorize only a limited degree of competition. Districts would have the option whether to open themselves to outside students, and they would decide how many students to accept, though they would be forbidden from selecting among applicants to choose the best students. Student choice thus would be limited by the number of open slots in schools within a reasonable distance of their homes.

Why might districts opt for open enrollment? So that they can have an ongoing measure of how their “customers” judge the quality of the product they provide. A school with excess demand for transfers must be doing something right, whereas a school that sees more students seeking to exit than enter needs improvement.

The companion measure, L.D. 1858, proposes to give school superintendents greater authority to improve the quality of the product they provide. It would require each district to formulate a plan for evaluating teacher performance.

Those evaluations then would be used positively to target and facilitate professional development. The measure also would require evaluations to be a “significant factor” in determining whom to lay off, when positions are cut. Ineffective teachers who fail to improve also could lose their jobs, even in the absence of layoffs.

The proposal avoids many of the obvious pitfalls in other systems of evaluation. It does not rely on the results of any single student achievement test to measure teacher effectiveness. Instead, it calls for a system that uses multiple measures of effectiveness and that will include a mechanism for peer review — the evaluation of one teacher by others, with ongoing conversations about how to improve at the craft of teaching.

No one enjoys being formally evaluated, and it is not easy to hear that one needs to improve. In teaching, as in any other craft, however, further improvement is always possible, as long as practitioners receive objective feedback about which techniques work and which do not.

It is important to remember that teachers are, right now, being evaluated all the time. Students judge their teachers. Parents make judgments about their children’s teachers, and they share their opinions with one another all the time.

Teachers judge one another constantly, too. When you tell your child’s new teacher that he had a particular teacher last year, his or her face will light up, and in the tone of their response you will hear relief and appreciation for the good work they expect from their trusted colleague. Mention another name, however, and the reaction might be the opposite.

What L.D. 1854 and L.D. 1858 aim to accomplish is to find a way to capture and use all this information, to enable schools to be better providers and to empower parents and students as educational consumers.

Joseph R. Reisert is associate professor of American constitutional law and chairman of the department of government at Colby College in Waterville.