Special To The Bee

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is proving he is the reformer Californians hoped he would be when they elected him in 2003. It's his proposal in his State of the State address Monday to overturn teacher tenure and link pay to merit and performance that epitomizes his willingness to take on the powerful "special interests" that control Sacramento.

In California, most primary and secondary teachers receive permanent status, or tenure, after completing a two-year probation. Once they are tenured, it is virtually impossible to fire teachers regardless of their poor performance. According to a Pacific Research Institute study, a tenured teacher "cannot be dismissed solely for failing to improve student achievement." Worse, "If students consistently fail to advance under one teacher, there is no explicit provision that allows districts to commence the dismissal process."

As Schwarzenegger correctly said in his State of the State address, "An educational system that rewards and protects a bad teacher at the expense of a child is wrong."

Indeed, few districts try to fire bad teachers. According to the state Office of Administrative Hearings, in the Los Angeles Unified School District from 1990 to 1999, only 13 dismissal panels were convened and just one tenured teacher's case went through the dismissal process from beginning to end.

Schwarzenegger's call to action coincides with the views of several influential bodies in the state. The Teaching Commission, a private group chaired by former IBM head Louis Gerstner, recently recommended that teacher pay be based on performance as measured by frequent individual teacher evaluations that include assessments of student achievement and other teacher skills.

Further, the commission recommended a value-added assessment system that would look at annual improvements in student performance as measured by state tests. This system would then estimate how much a teacher has contributed to a student's gains, factoring projections based on past performance. A teacher who raised students' scores significantly would be deemed effective.

The state's powerful teacher unions will fight the governor's proposals. When the Los Angeles Unified School District proposed merit pay for teachers a few years ago, the then-president of the district teachers union warned that it would be "a cold day in hell" before the union accepted a plan to tie teachers' pay to student performance.

Schwarzenegger knows what's at stake in this war of ideas. Addressing legislators, the governor put this fight into perspective: "This is a battle of the special interests versus the children's interests. Which will you choose?"

I hope policy-makers in Sacramento will make the right choice.