The few good teachers promptly use their seniority to escape to better schools -- or leave the profession in disgust. Bad teachers, not being wanted elsewhere, are more likely to stay -- and firing them often takes an effort comparable to the Manhattan Project. Meantime, teachers who have had problems at other schools get sent to the “bad” school as punishment.

Compare this to what happened at the only school rated “exemplary,” by federal standards, in Las Vegas this year.

The managers of the Andre Agassi charter school -- which additionally disproves the notion that a “good” school can’t possibly be located in a traditionally black neighborhood, with high percentages of black and Hispanic students -- were so pleased by this high honor, that they decided not to renew the contracts of two thirds of their teachers. As they are able to do, since one thing that allows the Agassi school to excel is the fact that managers there are not trapped by the hidebound union rules of the aforementioned “government-run” schools.

In the private sector, such behavior isn’t so rare, actually. Many are the championship baseball teams whose managers make wholesale changes after a winning season.

Yes, some of that is “profit-taking” -- selling off veteran players to weaker franchises willing to pay big bucks for some talent and star power. But there’s usually more to it than that. Free-market outfits are always thinking about building a championship “team” three and four years down the road, by creating a competitive environment, sweeping aside the old, and constantly cycling in new talent.

In the union straightjacket of California, on the other hand, “Principal Faye Banton can walk through the classrooms of Edison Middle School in south Los Angeles and quickly identify her weakest teachers. But Banton knows she can’t dismiss them without a drawn-out fight,” the Los Angeles Times reported last week.

“It takes much too long to get rid of them,” she said.

Under California law, school districts can dismiss teachers during their first two years on the job without providing any reason. But after two years in the classroom, teachers earn the more protective “permanent status.” Before dismissing a permanent-status teacher, district officials must meticulously document poor performance over time, formally declare the intention to dismiss the teacher, and then give the instructor 90 days to improve.

So, rather than hassle with dismissing a teacher, “which can consume hundreds of hours,” the Times reports, some administrators shuffle problem instructors from school to school in a practice known to school officials as the “dance of the lemons.”

The Los Angeles Unified School District has attempted to dismiss only 112 permanent teachers -- about one-quarter of 1 percent of the district’s 43,000 instructors -- over the past decade.

“It takes two to three years to effectively remove someone who is not helpful to children in the classroom,” Los Angeles Schools Supt. Roy Romer told the Times. “That’s too long.”

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger believes he has the solution: a voter initiative that would authorize school districts to dismiss teachers summarily during the first five years, and also change the rules for firing veterans who perform poorly.

A Field Poll in June found broad support for the teacher reform among California voters, with 59 percent supporting it and only 35 percent opposed.

Would this Schwarzenegger reform solve all of the problems with California’s public schools? Of course not. It would do little in the vital matter of giving back to teachers and principals the ability to restore order by disciplining kids. It would do little to restore true free-market competition, in which parents control where their education dollars go and can choose the schools they prefer regardless of geography. It would do little to remedy the failure of the federal government to prevent the schools from being swamped with the children of illegal immigrants, nor to break the “certification” stranglehold of the boondoggle “education colleges” that effectively block lateral transfers into teaching from other professions.

But it would be a good start. And so, of course, the teachers unions vow to defeat it.

It will be interesting to watch and see just how fed up California taxpayers -- and parents -- prove to be.