High Marks for Payzant

Ever since the civil rights movement began in the 1950s, local school boards have often been given the unwelcome task of refereeing between factions pushing for and resisting social change.

The trustees of the San Diego city schools have faced a steady series of difficult social problems in recent years, perhaps not entirely coincidentally during the tenure of Supt. Thomas W. Payzant.

Looking at the social issues Payzant has brought to the board--as Times staff writer Leonard Bernstein recently did for the current year--one finds topics that have only a symbolic relationship with education, such as condemning South African apartheid, and those that go to the heart of educational opportunity, such as eliminating the unfair practice of “tracking” students.

Also represented are controversies over attempts to address the societal problems students bring with them to class, such as Payzant’s decision to allow undercover narcotics officers to infiltrate campuses and his unsuccessful proposal to create a school health clinic.

Critics of Payzant have accused him of having a liberal social agenda that he seeks to impose on the school board. But he argues that most of the issues have come to the surface in a natural way, and he has simply brought them to the board’s attention. He plans to continue doing that, without knowing what the next prickly topic to confront them will be.

It is unfair to paint a one-dimensional portrait of Payzant as a superintendent more interested in social change than education. He got high marks from the school board in his recent job performance review.

Although he was admonished to improve communications with principals and teachers, he was praised for improving student discipline and reducing absenteeism, implementing several new education programs and conducting a study of the district’s future enrollment.

It is inevitable that social issues will continue to burden the schools as long as society’s conflicts are propelled by people wanting more out of life for their children--and as long as the public school represents the fulcrum of American aspiration.

Although we have not always agreed with the ultimate decisions, we think the superintendent and the current school board generally have dealt with these issues in a responsible way and to their credit.

Tom Payzant has showed that he’s both sensitive and realistic about these problems, and in his four years here he’s handled them well.