Gov. Roy Barnes (D-GA) devoted some of his extraordinary public approval this year to a major educational reform effort, which has now passed both chambers of the Georgia legislature. The Barnes package has many features, including more rigorous testing of student competency, but the two most prominent were a major class-size reduction initiative (lowering class sizes in grades K-3 to a maximum of 13, and 11 in schools serving at-risk kids), and an elimination of teacher tenure (procedural protections against firings) for new hires. In other words, Governor Barnes is pushing for more teachers and more accountability for their performance.

The initiative has split teachers' groups, with the state affiliate of the National Education Association (NEA) opposing it because of the tenure provisions, and a larger non-NEA group endorsing it. Even more interestingly, the package was voted through both houses of the legislature (and now awaits action in a conference committee) nearly on party lines. In the state Senate, only two Republicans voted for the package, and all but one supported an amendment that would have restored teacher tenure.

So: Some teachers are so adamant about tenure that they are opposing a package that would expand their ranks, and nearly every Republican is siding with them. The GOP alternative, of course, is private-school vouchers, their "answer" to every question about schools.

The Georgia debate casts a real spotlight on the politics of education reform. Governor Barnes has managed to convince much of the business community, nearly the entire Democratic Party, and many teachers that more "inputs" (funding and teachers) must be linked to better outcomes (accountability for students and teachers). He is being opposed by those in the educational establishment who value job security above everything, in alliance with a Republican Party that seems only interested in public school performance as a rationale for privatizing K-12 education.

No wonder Barnes is winning this fight. Among the public, there are varying levels of support for some form of vouchers as an "add-on" to existing public school funding, or as an emergency valve in the case of deeply dysfunctional school systems. But few share the growing GOP faith in vouchers as a cure for the fundamental problems of public education, much less its implicit abandonment of public education altogether. And even though teaching rightly remains one of the most admired occupations, fewer and fewer people have much sympathy for demands that teachers retain the kind of job security protections that are vanishing in the rest of the working world.

Without question, one of the hallmarks of the New Economy is that workers are trading security for more opportunity and flexibility. Very few Americans now expect to work in one job for a lifetime, or in rigid hierarchies, where compensation is determined by seniority rather than performance. Government should not be a Jurassic Park governed by the old rules. Indeed, in Georgia, tenure-style job protections and fixed pay scales were abolished for new state employees (other than teachers) several years ago.

Some defenders of teacher tenure cite the growing teacher shortage (which will be exacerbated by class size reductions) as a reason to stand pat, arguing that tenure will help attract people into teaching. We would respond that the kind of talented young people, and experienced mid-career switchers, that we need to attract to the teaching profession are not likely to be motivated by fear of being fired for incompetence. Better pay for teachers, not a degree of job security no one else enjoys, should be the goal of education advocates, but the public will not support higher teacher salaries unless they are linked to accountability and performance.

The bottom line is that improvements in public schools are equally threatened by those who are unwilling to change the system to focus on performance, and those who celebrate its failures as an argument for abandoning it. In Georgia, these forces are actually working together, and we're glad New Democrat Roy Barnes is taking them on and beating them.