EDUCATION: Gov. Schwarzenegger's plan to wait five years before granting tenure to teachers is good, though the best idea might be to dump the system entirely.

The California Teachers Association (CTA) has announced it will spend $5 million to fight Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's ballot measure to lengthen the probationary period for teacher tenure in California public schools. CTA says reforming tenure policies won't improve education. The hard evidence on teachers and tenure says otherwise.

Data on improved performance at some charter schools strongly suggest that the improvement is due, in part, to these schools having dispensed with teacher tenure altogether.

Under the governor's initiative, the current two-year probation period for beginning teachers would be extended to five years. While CTA fulminates as though it actually believes the governor's proposal presages the end of the world, the reality — at the Fenton Avenue charter school in Los Angeles, for example — is that teachers (like most working Americans) are happy and perform well without tenure. As profiled in Pacific Research Institute's recent book, Free to Learn: Lessons from Model Charter Schools, Fenton is not part of the local teacher union's collective bargaining agreement. Teachers are retained on the basis of performance evaluations < with the number one consideration being the well- being of the children in their charge < and not on mere years of seniority.

When it was still a standard public school, Fenton's tenure system protected many incompetent teachers. Irene Sumida, Fenton's director of instruction, cites one veteran teacher who had her students spend most of their time doing crafts such as making Snoopy dogs out of styrofoam cups. Worse, this teacher was one of the school's resource specialists.

"I was appalled," says Sumida, "She was old and crabby and she had no skill whatsoever: no classroom management [skills, and] she had no idea how to teach anything except handwriting. She was a very strong union person and I'm sure that somewhere along the line someone realized that she was not a teacher. That was the caliber of a lot of the teaching for a lot of the teachers."

Things changed dramatically in 1993 when Fenton became a charter school, dumped tenure, and instituted a rigorous, comprehensive teacher evaluation system based on Charlotte Danielson's work on effective practices. It identifies four areas of good teaching:

• Planning and preparation

• Classroom environment

• Professional responsibilities

• Instruction

Sumida writes formal teacher evaluations based on these four areas. For a teacher to receive a satisfactory evaluation, he or she cannot receive an unsatisfactory rating in any one of them.

Failing teachers receive assistance for a year. A teacher who improves sufficiently to become satisfactory in all areas is retained. "If they don't improve at all," Sumida says, "they're terminated no matter how many years of experience they have."

Of Fenton's 79 teachers, only seven from the school's pre-charter days remain. The school's culture has seen a total change.

"The high standards and expectations weren't just words on paper," Sumida said, "they are things that are going to be put in place here." Fenton's students have benefited from this new culture of performance. Test scores regularly exceed the growth targets set for the school by the state. Fenton Avenue charter school demonstrates that properly applied tenure reform should be encouraged, not feared.