I sympathize with the board's fear of costly lawsuits. But the truth is we ought to have the highest standards imaginable for the people who will teach our children.

Lowering the bar in teacher standards is only an invitation for substandard teaching and decades more of teacher bashing. There must be a different answer.

Under education reform, Massachusetts moved forward by instituting state-wide certification tests that asked every teaching candidate to meet high standards in communication, literacy skills, and grasp of the subiect matter he or she intends to teach.

Now we know that 59 percent of our test-takers couldn't meet that high standard. The lesson of this first round of test taking should not be to "lower the bar" and accept into our most important profession individuals whose literacy tests demonstrated serious grammatical errors, misspelled words and poor sentence structure.

The scores on those certification tests don't lie - they shine a light on the problem of teacher recruitment. They indicate we must finish the job of reform by focusing on raising the abilities of those who apply for teaching jobs in the first place and by expanding the talent pool for the teaching profession.

We can begin attracting the best and the brightest teaching candidates in this country by raising teaching salaries and paying teachers like professionals. Teaching is an extremely difficult job, particularly in this age when students bring all the frustrations of modern life through the classroom door. Yet we continue to pay our teachers from the bottom of the pay scale. For a young person graduating from college with a small mortgage's worth of student loans, teaching in our public schools is simply not an option.

But, even with higher salaries, for most graduates of liberal arts colleges in this country, teaching in our public schools would not be an option. Our archaic hiring policies limit or bar from teaching many qualified students who did not major in education. The idea that Doris Kearns Goodwin could not teach history in a public school is ludicrous. Liberal arts graduates are not taking our state certification tests in large numbers because - even if they passed - they would be forced to go back to school for teaching degrees.

It is time that we break the "education school monopoly" and give public school principals the same right as headmasters at private schools to hire liberal arts graduates as teachers and hold them accountable for their performance.

We must also aggressively recruit and mentor young teachers by reaching them early and often. Just like our nation's Fortune 500 corporations, public schools ought to be at the campus job fairs at every university recruiting our best college seniors as the next generation of teachers. There ought to be "signing bonuses" for top graduates who enter teaching. There must be teacher mentoring and professional development programs so young teachers know they will not be abandoned once they make the decision to teach in a public school. We need to create incentives for applicants to the public school system.

These are among the real answers to our teaching shortage and to the crisis in teacher quality. The answer is to "raise the bar" in teaching standards - and then to reach out to those talented individuals who can clear the bar. This week, education reforms in Massachusetts took a step back. The answer is not to write a test that our teaching applicants can pass. The answer is to recruit candidates who can pass the test we already have.

John Kerry represents Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate.