Senate leader has radical take on school policy

By Daniel Weintraub, Sacramento Bee, March 15, 2005

When it comes to education reform, the leader of the state Senate - a Democrat and former teacher - says Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is far too timid. While the governor tinkers with teacher tenure and merit pay, Don Perata wants to turn the entire system inside out. He says the state's ever-expanding authority over every facet of education policy is stifling local initiative and hurting the very people it's supposed to help: poor and disadvantaged students.

"I think things are so bad, and parents, and the public generally, are so upset with the way our schools are, that we have to be a little more radical than we have been in the past," Perata told me last week. "You can't wait around for slow, incremental change." Perata says he believes the state should set standards, assess progress and hold schools accountable for results. But the practical details of how schools choose to meet those statewide goals should be left up to teachers, administrators and parents, and be left as close to the school site as possible.

He wants to create a system in which tax dollars follow the student, and principals are free to manage their budgets and even to hire and fire teachers as they build a staff to their liking.

"If I had my way, principals - part of their tenure and performance and compensation should be based on how well their students are performing," Perata said. "In doing that, you have to allow principals to select members of their faculty team. If they ship them down from the central office like so many cans off the shelf, it's very difficult for the principal to get what he or she needs to achieve those goals."

I asked Perata how he could give principals that kind of freedom while living within a collective bargaining system that gives teachers the right to choose their assignments and limits dismissals and transfers.

"I was a shop steward," he said. "I believe in the collective bargaining process. But I don't think collective bargaining ought to be driving what we do in the classroom. We'll figure out a way."

The system Perata describes is almost identical to reforms advocated by Richard Riordan, the former Los Angeles mayor who is Schwarzenegger's education secretary. But Riordan's proposal has become a footnote in Schwarzenegger's education policy, relegated to a pilot project in the governor's proposed budget.

Still, it's astounding how much Perata and Schwarzenegger seem to agree on the future of California's schools, even if their emphasis at the moment is on different aspects of their shared belief. If somebody could get them in the same room for an hour or two to discuss education policy rather than taking partisan potshots at each other in the media, they might actually come up with a program that makes sense and could win bipartisan support.

One problem they'll face, though, is that the idea of empowering principals, while noble, would be the very kind of policy prescription ordered from Sacramento that both men have railed against. And even if you got past that contradiction, it would take a massive investment in training to give most principals the management skills required to pull it off.

A better solution would be to simply unwind as many state edicts as possible. Both men are trying this, too. Schwarzenegger has proposed cutting the strings from more and more of the state money that flows to schools, giving local districts the flexibility to spend the money as they wish. And Perata has proposed repealing state rules that dictate which textbooks local districts can buy.

These proposals face opposition from the left and the right. The left fears that disadvantaged students will be abandoned if the state doesn't tell local districts how to run their schools. And the right worries that schools will latch onto passing fads if the state doesn't keep tight control over their textbooks and training.

But Schwarzenegger and Perata, working together, would be a powerful combination that ought to be able to break through that opposition. One way for them to do it might be to embrace a "home-rule" proposal by Assemblywoman Lynn Daucher, an Orange County Republican. Daucher's bill would let local voters declare their districts independent of most state rules and regulations. As long as the students in the district's schools met state benchmarks, the districts would be pretty much free to do as they please.

That seems like an ideal combination: statewide goals, local flexibility and universal responsibility.

Perata says he's open to that approach, though he hasn't studied the details. The important thing, he said, is for legislators to stop focusing so much on school budgets - for the moment - and look more intensely at reforming education policy.

"People are saying, 'What about the money?'" Perata said. "I believe if we made these kinds of decisions, if parents and teachers and site administrators had a greater role to play, then people would be much more inclined to want to support stronger funding for education. We need to demonstrate that the money we are spending per child is being spent well. Right now, we're in a pitched battle over the wrong thing."

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Last modified: March 15, 2005

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