Last year, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was making...

Last year, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was making pacts with his new friends, the teachers unions: Let me, for one year, suspend Proposition 98, which guarantees a set share of state revenues for education, and next year I’ll make it up to you. Now the governor is reneging on the deal, shifting $2.2 billion away from schools in his proposed budget and asking to end mandatory funding levels. Schwarzenegger implied in his State of the State address that educators had poorly spent the billions they had already been given.

Schwarzenegger also was brave enough to say what many parents whisper: Teachers’ pay should be linked more to performance than seniority. And firing teachers who don’t measure up shouldn’t be such an impossible task. Some of the most ineffective teachers are burnout cases, doing minimal work but pulling in the top-scale salaries. They’re a tiny minority, but a couple of them during a school career is enough to bring a child’s academic progress to a crawl.

Screams of imminent disaster are baseless. The governor is still proposing a 7% hike in the education budget, enough to keep schools on the same mediocre track. The billions for schools, however, are less generous than Schwarzenegger thinks. A Rand report released this week showed the state’s classes were more crowded than in comparable states, its teachers less well paid and its per-pupil spending lower.

Schwarzenegger would be in a better position to propose smart spending had he done his job a year ago and appointed his share of members to the Quality Education Commission. Instead, he proposes to kill it altogether.

Authorized two years ago, the commission was supposed to start meeting last January. Its mission: Examine schools top to bottom to determine the real cost of a good public school education. That means taking a fresh look at what makes a good education. Which methods work, and which don’t? Where are schools spending with little result, and what might be better ways of using that money?

The 13-member commission would be unpaid, and private foundations have granted $500,000 for its work. But facing what a decent education costs could put Schwarzenegger in a quandary -- he might be forced to admit that state budget restraints, not most teachers, are what’s shortchanging students.