Now Deukmejian Is on the Spot to Do Something About Schools

Although state Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig is obviously a big boy who can take care of himself, it still seems unfair for Gov. George Deukmejian to be picking on him so. By any measure, the governor is much more responsible than Honig for whatever mismanagement and poor performance afflict the public schools.

In other words, Deukmejian has no justification for creating, as he did last Wednesday, a new state commission and setting it off in pursuit of Honig. One can only hope that his pack of investigators, the California Commission on Educational Quality, has enough integrity to turn around later and take a few nips at the governor himself.

The plain fact is that Honig’s position gives him no power to impose his ideas concerning quality or anything else on the schools. Although he is elected statewide, he is really no more than an administrator.

Below him are 1,100 locally elected school boards, each fully capable of telling the superintendent to bug off. Above him is the state Board of Education, a panel of gubernatorial appointees who enact the regulations that tell him how to do his job.

Even within his own agency, the 1,500-member state Department of Education, the superintendent’s power to place his own people where he wants them is limited by more than routine Civil Service rules. By law, department personnel who administer education programs must be credentialed teachers or hold masters’ degrees.

Nevertheless, the superintendent can articulate the wishes and desires of California’s public-education Establishment. This is what Honig has done, and done rather well. Furthermore, his position--as the leader and spokesperson for a large and well-organized group--can produce real political power. When a ballot measure is placed before California voters next year to modify the Gann limit on state spending so as to produce more money for schools, it will be largely Honig’s doing.

But, again, he is not exercising some directly defined power of his office. If he begins saying things that the education Establishment doesn’t want to hear, if he begins talking about mismanagement and poor performance, his troops will desert and he will be left with nothing.

All of which may help explain why Honig is sometimes bedeviled by quotes from his 1982 election campaign, when he was an outsider running against the Establishment. Back then he used to say that money wasn’t all that important: “Even without extra money, school officials can demand that students take more rigorous academic courses and can insist on better discipline and more homework.”

In any case, and to get back to the point of all this, it’s the governor and not the superintendent of public instruction who has the real power to improve quality in the public schools. And for Deukmejian to say otherwise, as he in effect has been doing lately, is just plain wrong.

But now the situation has changed. The governor has directly involved himself in the issue of school quality by appointing the commission. Although he may not buy all its proposals, he has--by simply appointing the panel--promised to push its acceptable ideas toward becoming law.

However, this is not your garden-variety, impartial-looking panel. The first eight appointees include seven Republicans (Honig, whose job is officially nonpartisan, was a Democrat but now lists himself as an independent) and Wilson C. Riles, the former superintendent whom Honig defeated after a bitter contest in 1982.

And it seems clear that Deukmejian intends for his group to do a little Honig-bashing. At his news conference, for instance, the governor was asked if he had deliberately excluded Honig from the commission. “Oh, yes, absolutely,” he replied, “because of the fact that many of the problems that this commission is going to be exploring, unfortunately, have not been adequately addressed by Mr. Honig.”

Nevertheless, it’s impossible to say how this whole thing will turn out. Just because seven of the group’s appointees are Republicans doesn’t mean that they’re puppets. And though Riles was embittered by his 1982 defeat, he is still an honest and decent man. Furthermore, the new commission is to have 15 members, meaning that there are seven appointments yet to be made. Conceivably, the whole character of the group could change.

Indeed, come Dec. 1, when the commission recommendations are due, we may want to thank Bill Honig for all his complaining this year. If he hadn’t outraged Deukmejian by requesting more money for schools, the governor might never have become involved with the question of how that money is spent.