ST. PAUL — Minnesota has a popular teacher bonus program and a new teacher evaluation law that educators insist needs dedicated funding to work properly. How the two will co-exist has long been in question.

Members of the state House Education Policy Committee began that debate Friday by examining four bills that would help merge the two systems.

One of the proposed bills would appoint a task force to study combining the programs; the other three would marry the two programs in different ways. Those three bills would open the state’s Quality Compensation, or Q-Comp, system so every school district could use it to help evaluate teachers. The proposals would require new funding in the next biennium budget.

Staffers from Education Minnesota, the state teachers union, spoke in favor of a proposal from State Rep. Kathy Brynaert, DFL-Mankato, who is vice chair of the panel. Brynaert said her bill was a “minimalist approach” that would ensure schools have the proper resources to benefit from both systems.

“There is a sense of urgency here,” Brynaert said. “How do we support this important work as it gets off the ground?”

Members of the business community and education reform advocates spoke in favor of a bill from State Rep. Sondra Erickson, R-Princeton, the Republican lead on the panel. Erickson said her approach would “streamline” the two programs by embedding Q-Comp as a voluntary part of the new teacher evaluation law.

“This would be a very good step for us to take as we implement teacher evaluations this coming school year,” Erickson said.

Rep. Carlos Mariani, DFL-St. Paul, has a similar bill to combine the two systems. He said the committee would continue to debate the four proposals in the coming weeks before sending them to the education funding committee.

When Minnesota’s Q-Comp system was created in 2005 it was considered a revolutionary way of rewarding teachers for exceptional performance. The system has been controversial but also popular, with about half of the state’s students attending a participating school.

Several studies of Q-Comp have found nearly every teacher who participates gets some sort of bonus.

New research by Aaron Sojourner, of the University of Minnesota, and Kristine West, of St. Catherine University, found schools that participate in the Q-Comp system get the equivalent of one month extra reading and math instruction.

In 2011, the Legislature approved a new teacher evaluation law that is being piloted this year and is set to take effect statewide in the fall. Under the law, 35 percent of a teacher’s score must be based on student performance.