The week of April 15 will see a first in education-obsessed Howard County: Teachers, who typically put in an extra 10 to 15 hours a week planning and correcting assignments on their own time, won't take work home or otherwise labor beyond the required 7 hours and 35 minutes. In union parlance, this is known as "working to contract."

In the real world, it's called making a point.

Teachers across the region are fighting mad about trimmed education funding and being shanghaied into foregoing raises to ease the budget vise gripping local governments. Increasing teacher ire is an attorney general's opinion lowering state-mandated compulsory funding of schools. Worse, legislators in Annapolis have threatened to withhold additional state aid if teachers receive pay raises this year, adding to the bunker mentality of teacher's unions across the state.

Ask Jim Swab, president of the Howard County Education Association, the union representing teachers, administrators and school support workers, about the "work to contract" action and he'll tell you it is an extraordinary response to extraordinary times.

"I don't think the association has ever taken such action, but we have never been under attack by bills in the General Assembly, and never has there been such a threat by a county executive to withhold money used to pay for student growth," he says. "We're on the verge of stepping back in time."

This promises to be a year of firsts for education in Maryland. Not so much in the conventional sense of initiatives and programs, but with regard to teacher salaries, the 800-pound gorilla that dominated union agendas throughout the 1980s. During that decade, growth in teacher salaries came to symbolize progress in education. But this is beginning to change in a climate of new economic and ideological realities.

With financial troubles across the region ranging from calamitous to merely troubling, county executives are swinging the budget scythe with gusto. Education, the sacred cow which accounts for about half of all county spending, is no longer untouchable -- and neither are the teacher salaries and benefits that account for the lion's share of school spending. New realities dictate that school funding fit the size of a jurisdiction's purse.

There's something else at work, too: a feeling that the school-reform movement should be centered around children and learning, not pay for teachers. There is also a realization that the rapid ascension in salaries through the 1980s was justified but cannot continue indefinitely. Consider the analogy offered by Edward Veit, president of the Teachers Association of Baltimore County. "There's a mentality out there that says Sparrows Point is going to open, that there will be a return to the good old days."

Mr. Veit suggests that the budget crunch of the moment makes this a propitious time to push other, non-financial imperatives such as more autonomy for teachers in making decisions and more opportunities to do professional work outside the classroom. He blames the salary focus on school boards and the county governments who ultimately shape the scope and direction of education spending. "It's always been cheaper to pay teachers and do nothing for the classroom," he says.

That strategy, buoyed by strong public support, has led to markedly improved paychecks for teachers over the past decade. On average, salaries rose better than 115 percent to $36,319 during the 1980s, twice the increase logged by the Consumer Price Index. Maryland teachers' pay rose from 10th to 6th in the nation.

In large measure, the gains made here were the product of the national movement toward education reform. In its 1983 report, "A Nation at Risk," the National Commission on Excellence in Education warned that "our very future as a nation and a people" was threatened by the "rising tide of mediocrity" flowing from our schools.

The specter of an incompetent, ill-educated America struggling to compete in world markets scared businesses into providing corporate leadership for what had traditionally been viewed as a public-sector problem. Education standards were lifted, course requirements for high school graduation and curricula were made more specific. Then, amid rising concern about a shortage of qualified teachers, the focus shifted to attracting and retaining the best and brightest students by raising chronically depressed pay levels.

In Maryland, the call to arms was further propelled by cutthroat competition between subdivisions, particularly Montgomery and Howard counties, the state's outposts of affluence. These jurisdictions built reputations on top-flight school systems defined by cozy class sizes, extensive gifted and talented programs and abundant resources. These counties, benefiting from soaring residential growth, set the pace for teacher salaries statewide.

In the boom years of the mid-'80s, teachers won hefty pay hikes eclipsing inflation and those of other county workers, with huge chunks of local school budgets going to enhance salaries and benefits. In May 1986, then-Montgomery school board president James Cronin defended his vote to use $5 million tagged for education improvements to raise teachers' salaries by saying, "If we fund the improvements and we can't hire new teachers, then the improvements are for naught."

With the school boards on their side, teachers couldn't lose. Montgomery County teachers in 1987 won a three-year contract that increased salaries by 25 percent. (The current contract called for increases of 6 percent this year and 6.5 next year.) Anne Arundel teachers are coming off three years of 9 percent increases; ditto for the contract expiring this year in Prince George's, and Howard County is in the tail end of a three-year contract of 6 percent raises after three years of 8 percent increases.

Yet there are those who suggest that a teacher pay remains too low. "Sure we've spent the last six years trying to make salaries more attractive, but they're still far short of what they need to be," says V. Thomas Gray, a lobbyist for the Maryland State Teachers Association.

Perhaps. But what have Maryland taxpayers gotten for their investment? There's some evidence, mostly anecdotal, that suggests higher teacher pay may be attracting brighter students to enter the teaching profession. The Deans and Directors of Teacher Education, a group of 11 public and private teachers colleges in Maryland, found this year that the Scholastic Aptitude Test scores of education majors in more than a third of the schools averaged 23 to 80 points above those of their non-education counterparts.

The University of Maryland at College Park's incoming education class last fall boasted the second highest SAT scores on the College Park campus. Grade point averages are better, too: Graduating education majors average 3.07 on a four-point grade scale, compared with 2.78 for arts and humanities majors.

"I'm not sure you can make a direct link, but higher salaries do make for an enhanced ability to attract people to the teaching profession," observes Tom Weible, associate dean of Education at UMPC.

Yet higher salaries haven't translated into much in the way of student performance. Schools around the state fared poorly in the state's first annual performance rating last November. Most school districts failed to meet stiff new state achievement and educational standards. Even the much ballyhooed Howard and Montgomery schools were only satisfactory at best. Students in half the 24 school districts failed to meet the standard of a 95-percent pass rate in their first try on reading competency tests.

Clearly, higher teacher salaries don't necessarily mean better-educated students. "At some point, we have to start weighing salary increases against other education goals or the ultimate losers, ironically, could be the kids. The school board and the teachers' union should consider whether their demands are really worth the sacrifices," wrote Michael Subin, chairman of the Montgomery County Council's education committee, in a Washington Post opinion piece last March.

If local governments and school bureaucracies are facing tough choices, so are we all. During the past decade, the case for higher teacher pay was bolstered by the salary squeeze teachers experienced in the 1970s. The new-found wealth of suburban school districts in the 1980s made large pay raises possible. Today, even the richest jurisdictions are facing the real possibility of having to lay off workers if pay hikes are granted. All of a sudden the issue isn't teacher's salaries, but balancing needs.

Compensation for those who teach our children should reflect the importance and dignity of the profession. Maryland has made meaningful strides in this direction. But it's time the focus moved beyond the narrow issue of salary to better teacher training, more equipment, smaller classes and greater emphasis children with unique needs.

This, too, will cost money and may not happen this year. Still, the question we should be asking ourselves is not whether teachers deserve more pay, but what will enhance the overall quality of education. Readying Maryland's children for tomorrow's competitive world will depend more on what and how we teach them in our schools than how much their teachers are paid.

State Teacher Salaries

This school year's salaries for teachers with a master's degree plus 30 semester hours of advanced study (the equivalent of one year beyond a master's).

COUNTY .. SALARY

Montgomery $54,523

Howard $50,113

Anne Arundel $48,870

Baltimore County $48,583

Prince George's $47,822

Carroll $47,519

Calvert $46,936

Queen Anne's $46,040

Harford $46,000

Talbot $45,366

Frederick $44,764

Baltimore City $44,442

Kent $44,048

Wicomico $42,700

Caroline $42,465

Worcester $42,379

Charles $41,548

Washington $41,442

St. Mary's $41,417

Dorchester $40,731

Cecil $40,968

Allegany $37,429

Somerset* $37,200

Garrett $37,158

* No scale for master's plus 30; doctorate shown.

Source: Maryland Department of Education

Joan Tyner is an editorial writer for The Sun.