PHOENIX - The former chief executive of Intel wants to scrap the way public-school teachers in Arizona are trained, hired and paid.

And Craig Barrett, who is now a charter-school executive, is getting a bully pulpit to push for just that, with his appointment Monday by Gov. Jan Brewer as chairman of the Arizona Ready Education Council.

In a wide-ranging interview with Capitol Media Services, Barrett said Arizona's public-school children are doing far worse than the national average.

"We're kind of the bottom 10 or 15 percent of states," he said.

He said the prime goal of the council will be to get Arizona to adopt core national achievement standards for students, and then, using those as benchmarks, to make sure their performance improves.

But Barrett, while acknowledging Arizona is "not terribly high" on funding per student compared with other states, rejected the idea that more money is at least part of the answer.

Barrett said he does not even believe that the state needs to pay teachers more to attract the best and the brightest into education. The key is paying each teacher not only according to his or her performance, but according to the business practices of supply and demand, he said.

Put simply, if there's a glut of people who are willing to teach physical education, he said, the school should not have to pay that person as much as someone qualified to teach chemistry.

Andrew Morrill, president of the Arizona Education Association, said he has no problem with performance-based pay. Morrill said his organization was supportive of a series of changes in state law and at local district levels, though he said there still needs to be some base pay.

And he cautioned against what he called the "forearm approach," where someone new comes to the table, looks at various ideas that have been explored - and then uses a forearm to brush those aside for a new solution or " 'the one thing we need.' "

"It usually represents an incomplete understanding of the problem," Morrill said.

Barrett, however, said he does understand the problem in his current role as president and chairman of the Basis charter-school chain.

Charter schools are public schools that cannot pick and choose their students, get close to the same amount of state funding as district-based schools and cannot charge tuition. But they are exempt from many regulations, not only the pay grades that exist in most district-based schools but also the mandate to hire only certified teachers.

Barrett said the charter model works. About half of all schools in Arizona designed as high performers are charter schools, he said, even though they educate only about 12 percent of students in the public-school system.

"And they operate at a lower budget than normal K-12 public schools," he said.

"I'd rather take that conversation (about teacher pay) and turn it around to, 'Let's take the dollars that we have and pay teachers on the basis of performance and get content experts in the classroom,' " Barrett said. "And I think there's enough money to do all of that."

That, in turn, leads to Barrett's conclusion that while it takes some specific skills to know how to teach, the current process of educating teachers is not the answer.

"There's lots of ways to get that pedagogy besides that four years of classic, mind-numbing experience in a school of education," he said. Barrett said what's needed is someone who understands a subject and then gets a "boot camp" in teaching skills.

Morrill, however, said there's more involved in teacher certification than going through college and getting a teaching degree.

At the very least, Morrill said, it's an understanding by the state, as the chief source of education funding, that the people walking into a classroom and working with Arizona's children are ready from Day One.

"What you don't want is to let anybody in and then say, 'Well, don't worry about it because if they're not any good, we'll fire them within two or three years,' " Morrill said. He said that while there can be improvements in how teachers are trained, "that doesn't mean you end the formal practice of teacher education."

He also disputed Barrett's contention that the charter-school model is, by definition, better.

"When you look at charter schools as the entire class, their performance distribution is about equal to traditional schools," Morrill said. "Taken as a group, they're neither outperforming nor underperforming traditional schools as a group."

Anyway, Morrill said, there is no evidence that charter schools could keep up their performance if they had to scale up "to meet the enormous diversity across Arizona's student population."

Barrett has made no secret of his displeasure with the level of public education in Arizona. In March, he told the Arizona Commerce Authority that if Intel were looking for a site to build an entirely new operation, Arizona would not even be on the list of Top 10 choices.

On StarNet: Find education-related resources such as comparisons of private and

charter schools at azstarnet.com/education

AT A GLANCE

Aside from its broader mandate to improve education, the Arizona Ready Education Council assumes the duty of helping the state achieve some previously announced goals by 2020, including:

• Increasing the number of third-graders reading at or near grade level to 94 percent, from 73 percent.

• Boosting the high school graduation rate from 75 percent to 93 percent.

• Doubling the number of baccalaureate degrees issued at Arizona colleges and universities.

The council has no legal power but will report to the public, the governor and the Legislature on what progress Arizona is making in improving student achievement, and will lobby for changes and for accountability.