Governor should reach higher in education reform

Daniel Weintraub, Sacramento Bee Columnist,February 1, 2005

It's difficult to find fault with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's proposal that excellent public school teachers be rewarded with higher pay. Or that the state should change laws limiting the ability of local school districts to effectively manage their personnel.

The problem with the governor's education reforms is that they only nibble at the edges of a much bigger problem, even as they needlessly provoke the teachers unions - a powerful political force with the ability to undermine Schwarzenegger's entire agenda.

But it's not too late for the governor to alter his piecemeal approach. Already in his files is a much bigger idea that goes to the heart of what ails education in California: the dysfunctional relationship between state policymakers and the people elected to run local districts.

The governor last year pushed to untangle this relationship by cutting some of the strings Sacramento has tied around much of the money distributed to the schools. He was only partially successful. Now he should dust off his original plan, add to it, and, if necessary, take it to the voters in a simple, dramatic call for a return to local control.

Few Californians realize that about 30 percent of all the money spent on public schools is controlled directly from the Capitol. Over the years, individual lawmakers have added program after program designed to solve some narrow problem or serve some narrow interest. Taken together, these 120 or so "categoricals" have become the tail that wags the education dog. They now consume $13 billion annually.

The state tells the schools how much to spend on counseling tenth-graders, on training new teachers, on deferred maintenance, on school security and many other things that could and should be the purview of local officials. There is one program for "dropout prevention" and another for "at-risk youth," which target the same students and focus on something that should be a primary goal of every district in the state.

Many of these programs pre-date a fundamental and positive shift in education policy that began in the mid-1990s under former Gov. Pete Wilson, was enhanced by former Gov. Gray Davis and has been embraced by Schwarzenegger. That idea, distilled to its core, is that California should have rigorous, statewide academic standards, credible testing, and a system to hold schools accountable for their students' progress. Beyond that, local schools and districts should be given as much leeway as possible in meeting those goals.

The notion is that it's fair and sensible for Californians, acting together, to determine the minimum we want all children to learn before leaving school. But it is also smart to let local communities decide how best to teach that material and manage their enterprises.

Even as this new accountability system was taking hold, however, state lawmakers and governors could not restrain their impulse to tell the schools what to do. Wilson committed what is now nearly $2 billion annually to the idea of reducing class size in the primary grades. Davis dedicated hundreds of millions of dollars to the purchase of textbooks and other instructional materials. Schwarzenegger, as a private citizen, sponsored a ballot measure to channel money into after-school programs.

Schwarzenegger does believe in local control. He and his education secretary, former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, have advocated an experiment that would empower principals to make budget and academic decisions at the school site. And the governor is an unabashed champion of charter schools, which are public schools formed by teachers and parents and set free from most state and local regulations.

"I love charter schools," Schwarzenegger said last week as he visited the Vaughn Next Century Learning Center in the San Fernando Valley. "They are the pathfinders in education - using new teaching methods, setting new guidelines, and then giving more choices to the parents."

The governor is right, and the way to give teachers and parents even more choices is to get the state out of the business of setting education priorities from Sacramento.

Schwarzenegger should put together a list of at least $4 billion in state mandates and programs that he wants to repeal, starting with those he proposed last year and adding others suggested by the Legislature's nonpartisan analyst. He should then propose giving that money directly to local school districts and letting them spend it as they wish.

In the same package, Schwarzenegger could also propose repealing other state laws that meddle in local policy, from those that set rules for hiring and firing teachers to others that all but ban school districts from contracting with private firms for the provision of bus, cafeteria or janitorial services.

The theme connecting the entire package is that schools should exist for the benefit of children, not the adults who run them, and that local voters, and the trustees they elect, should be given the responsibility to manage their own affairs. The state should step in only in those cases where school officials mismanage public funds or where the students in their schools are not making adequate progress.

That would be a reform worthy of the name, and one that would be not only good policy, but good politics.

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Last modified: February 1, 2005

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