COLUMN ONE : Making the Grade in Politics : California’s gubernatorial candidates agree that schools need help. Education officials say that’s progress--even if no one has set out any detailed plans.

Shortly after formally declaring himself a candidate for governor, Atty. Gen. John K. Van de Kamp, dressed in his green sweater, jeans and white sneakers, was standing at Lover’s Point in Monterey and touting his support for “Big Green,” the environmental initiative on the November ballot.

Then somebody asked what he believed was the state’s most pressing issue.

“I’ve always said that education would be my first priority as governor. California’s schools are not as good as they should be, and we must do everything we can to change that,” Van de Kamp replied.

Earlier, his rival for the Democratic nomination in the June 5 primary, former San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein, had told the California Assn. of School Administrators that she planned to use the governor’s office as a “bully pulpit” for education. She said education would be “a visible and active priority of my administration.”

And Sen. Pete Wilson, the expected Republican nominee, had devoted the first major policy statement of his campaign to a call for state-paid prenatal care, universal preschool and the linking of local social services with the public schools to ease the problems that hinder many students’ achievement.

None of the three major candidates has come up so far with a detailed, comprehensive approach to fixing the state’s struggling system of public schools. Nor has any of them added much to their initial offerings. Yet just their interest in the subject, along with the handful of proposals they’ve offered, has raised hopes among education advocates who say the state’s schools have suffered from a quarter-century of gubernatorial disinterest.

“They haven’t yet displayed for us a comprehensive plan that shows they know how big (the education problem) is, but at least they know it’s there. And we’re delighted that each of them is groping,” said James W. Guthrie, a UC Berkeley education professor and a co-director of Policy Analysis for California Education, a nonpartisan, privately funded educational research center.

Despite a major funding increase during his first term, Gov. George Deukmejian has “abandoned the field, absolved himself of setting education policy,” said Guthrie, in a common criticism that has been disputed by the Deukmejian Administration. Guthrie said he expects to see improved leadership in education no matter who is elected in November’s general election.

Would-be rescuers of the state’s school system have formidable dragons to tame: explosive growth in the school-age population; escalating diversity among students, including more minorities with a limited command of English and more poor children, and limits on taxing and spending.

Yet pressure to improve student achievement continues to mount, and ideas for fixing the system abound. Among those gathering steam are proposals to expand early childhood education by offering preschool programs to all 4-year-olds (a favorite of Feinstein’s); improving teacher recruitment and retention (including a proposal by Van de Kamp), and devising ways to help children overcome the poverty, medical or family problems that pose barriers to learning.

Other ideas likely to be part of the debate to revamp education include allowing parents to choose which public schools their children will attend, and reorganizing schools to allow greater independence and to give more say to teachers and parents. The search will continue for ways to further curb the state’s 20.4% dropout rate and to improve teaching, especially in the areas of science, math and technology. And there will be a push to improve results for a wider range of students, including those entering the work force after high school graduation.

Some of these ideas are already being tried in several of California’s schools.

The Richmond Unified School District in the Bay Area, for example, is converting all its schools into specialty campuses and allowing parents to decide which one to send their children to. But without district-paid transportation, many of the community’s parents find they must as a practical matter settle for the school closest to home.

State-paid anti-dropout programs, which include a special counselor to work with faltering students, are under way at about 200 schools around the state.

Six districts, including Alhambra City and High School District, are using $500,000 annual state grants and working with research and business partners to devise ways to better use technology in the classroom and prepare students to work in an increasingly sophisticated environment.

Alhambra’s Emery Park Elementary School, wanting to give its pupils every chance to use computers, installed them in the hallways as well as in classrooms. And a school in the Northern California community of Cupertino has abolished its traditional science lab in favor of a high-tech array of textbook supplements--videodisc player, computer, video camera--that encourage students to learn together in small groups.

The quest for improvements in California’s schools has been led primarily by state Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig and a handful of legislators, notably Sen. Gary K. Hart (D-Santa Barbara), Sen. Robert Presley (D-Riverside), Assemblywoman Teresa P. Hughes (D-Los Angeles) and, more recently, Sen. Becky Morgan (R-Los Altos).

Honig, though not without critics, is widely credited with pushing education needs and issues higher up on the state’s agenda, bringing an improved, tougher curriculum to the schools and helping raise students’ standardized test scores. And his “summit” of 300 educators, legislators and business and community leaders in December resulted in a detailed consensus for further reforms.

Although the schools have improved measureably since better financing and a series of curriculum changes began in 1983, they still aren’t nearly good enough--and further improvement will be hard to come by, concluded a recent PACE report, “Conditions of Education in California.”

The report estimated the state will need to spend an additional $20 billion in this decade just to maintain current service levels. It will need at least another $1 billion per year over the next 10 years to build enough classrooms to accommodate the new students, and must hire 46,000 new teachers.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, California’s class sizes already are the highest in the nation. And in the amount of per-pupil spending, it now ranks 31st, well below other big industrial states.

Michael W. Kirst, a Stanford University education professor and another co-director of PACE, said the main challenge is figuring how to “finance, accommodate and adjust to the growth and rapid diversifying of the pupils and at the same time improve the quality of the system.

“It’s such a major job to provide space and teachers for all the students . . . just keeping the system at status quo is a big undertaking in and of itself. How to build quality on top of that is a difficult challenge.”

The state Department of Finance, citing a booming birthrate and the biggest wave of immigration to this state since 1964, recently predicted enrollment increases in kindergarten through 12th grade of at least 184,000 a year over the next five years.

That will push total enrollment, now about 4.6 million, well past the 5 million mark by mid-decade and require up to $13.7 billion for new schools and other facilities, the state Department of Education estimates.

Even if voters approve June and November school bond ballot measures totaling $1.6 billion, there won’t be nearly enough money to build all the needed classrooms. “There is just no way under the current (financing) system that we can meet the needs,” said Duwayne Brooks, the education department’s director of school facilities planning.

The shortage is almost sure to accelerate the switch to year-round operation of schools, despite many parents’ resistance to abandoning the traditional long summer vacation. By staggering the vacation periods of its students so that a portion of the student body is always “off track,” a school can make room for more pupils.

Both Honig and Deukmejian have advocated year-round operation as a way to maximize use of classroom space. And Charles Ballinger, executive director of the National Assn. for Year-Round Education, said he expects “most schools in California to be year-round . . . by the end of the decade.”

Even some of those districts that aren’t short on classroom space will make the change for other reasons--to reduce the loss of learning that occurs over a long vacation period or to align themselves with neighboring districts’ schedules, Ballinger predicted.

Already comprising more than 52% of the state’s kindergarten through 12th-grade enrollment, minority students in California will continue to outstrip Anglos, the education department projects. Because many of these new students will be recent immigrants--especially from Latin American and Asian countries--larger numbers of students will come to school with limited English skills.

By the year 2000, there will be nearly 1 million such students in what is already the nation’s most ethnically diverse state, a department task force reported earlier this month. Their numbers will exacerbate an already acute shortage of bilingual teachers. The state has little more than half the 20,000 it needs to help the current 750,000 such students (16% of all pupils) gain fluency in English, the task force found.

Other challenges include the continuing “professionalization” of teachers, in essence giving them more decision-making authority and providing ways to enhance their skills throughout their careers.

The sprawling Los Angeles Unified School District has already embarked on an ambitious, teacher-driven remaking of its schools. Seventy of its campuses, ranging from Jordan High in Watts to Marquez Elementary in Pacific Palisades, are redesigning curriculum, adding new programs or reorganizing teaching assignments or even the school day to better reach their own students.

Stanford’s Kirst said one of the greatest needs is to ready both new and continuing faculty members to teach the state’s new, well-regarded curriculum, especially in math and science.

Take science, for instance. “Here we have this excellent new framework,” Kirst said, “and we have teachers who are eager to teach it but just don’t know how to. Most will get just one or two days of in-service training. I had one teacher tell me, ‘All they did was tantalize me.’

“We need to go back to summer-long (teaching training) programs like we did in the late ‘50s and ‘60s, after Sputnik went up.”

Sen. Hart, a former teacher, has shepherded much of the major schools legislation in his role as chairman of the Senate Education Committee. While encouraged by some signs of progress, including rising test scores, Hart said the system still “is not working . . . for the vast majority of children.”

“We’ve been in a kind of reform mode for a number of years now,” said Hart, citing the infusion of money and tougher standards that came in 1983 and again in 1988, when voters, through Proposition 98, agreed to give schools a bigger slice of the state tax pie in exchange for better accountability.

“Those reforms did some very good things, especially for the middle-class, college-bound kids. That is all to the good,” Hart said, “but our problem is that for those kids who are not part of that, we’re not succeeding. All of this money and all of these reforms have not made much of a dent for many of our kids, largely minority students in urban areas.”

That phenomenon can only aggravate a trend social scientists have been warning about--that California is increasingly becoming a two-tiered society peopled with smaller numbers of affluent, well-educated homeowners and growing legions of unskilled poor who are barely squeaking by.

Besides handling student growth and diversity and finding ways to effectively teach the new curriculum, educators and others will be looking for ways to reorganize schools to make them more effective for a greater proportion of students.

Hart is pushing for legislation that would enable selected schools to dramatically revise their educational programs in hopes of becoming models for others. Included would be ways to begin Head Start-like programs for preschoolers, improve technological education, expand teacher and parent participation and authority in making decisions about their schools, and formulate a wider range of post-high school alternatives for 11th- and 12th-graders.

The California Business Roundtable, which helped design the legislation out of a growing concern that the schools are not producing an able, competitive work force, is pushing hard for the bill, which enjoys widespread support. But its price tag--$7.5 million in the first year and $50 million a year for five years after that--has proved to be a formidable hurdle.

Hart acknowledges the bill will be a hard sell this year, given the state’s flat economy and the keen competition for tight tax dollars. Yet, he argues, it must be done.

“We invest $22 billion a year in education in California. Spending $50 million a year to try to set up a way of changing a system that isn’t working seems to be such a minuscule investment in reform that we’re crazy not to do it.”

The state’s complicated system of financing its public schools hampers further efforts at change. Like cities and counties, boards of education are limited by the local tax constraints imposed by the Proposition 13 in 1978 and by the so-called Gann Initiative of 1979, which set spending limits on state and local governments. A lengthy and complicated suit over local school finances, Serrano vs. Priest, ultimately resulted in the state collecting school tax dollars and redistributing them to equalize spending among richer and poorer districts.

The California Lottery, pushed by supporters as a way to funnel more money to the schools, has barely made a dent--it generates only about 3% of total revenues. And because the amount, 34% of all lottery proceeds, fluctuates widely from year to year, school districts and colleges are warned not to count on it and to spend it only for “extras” instead of such fixed costs as salaries. Since voters approved the Lottery in 1984, its annual, per-student payoff to schools has ranged from $89 to $178.64, according to EdSource, a Menlo Park-based organization that provides information on the state’s school finance system.

Other recent infusions of funds have come without significant changes in the finance system and have been closely related to the health of the state’s economy. Proposition 108 on the June ballot would maintain Proposition 98’s guarantee of a minimum set portion of the state’s budget for schools and community colleges. And Proposition 111 would ease the state government’s spending limit--but it would not do away with it altogether.

Schools chief Honig believes the ticket to further improvement lies mainly in expanding on the reforms begun in the ‘80s, along with well-chosen “investments” of tax dollars in proven programs.

“Our game plan is pretty much in place,” Honig said. “Of all the areas of government, K-12 education has put more thought and worked harder on getting agreement as to where we are going in the next 10 years. We have agreement on the fundamentals--building on the gains we’re making in test scores, getting kids to take tougher courses, the new frameworks. . . .

“I think we’ve proven this stuff works. . . . The future is to build on what we’ve done.”

But there are many who feel that is simply not enough.

PACE, for example, recently proposed a 10-point “Marshall Plan” for schools that includes many of the reform proposals currently being touted as well as a call for the return of local funding authority. It also called for a task force of legislators, business representatives, educators and others to find comprehensive solutions and to build broad-based, highly visible support for improving the schools.

“We need money, a plan, stability, but most of all we need leadership,” said UC Berkeley’s Guthrie. And he and others look to the governor’s office for that.

“We’ve not had people working on bits and pieces (of the schools’ problems), but we’ve had no overarching leadership at this point . . . and that has to come from a governor,” said Stanford’s Kirst.

“In other states with a significant reform movement, it has been led by the governor,” agreed state Sen. Hart. “The irony is that during the Deukmejian years there has been a significant increase in funding (for schools), but there has not been any kind of hands-on involvement in trying to see that those dollars are maximized, no bringing together (by the governor) of key leaders to try to fashion some agenda for California.”

Yet Hart is quick to point out that the two previous governors did not show much interest in the schools, either.

Ever since the government-bashing tenure of then-Gov Ronald Reagan began in the late 1960s, California has lacked a chief executive who made the state’s system of public education a top priority for his administration.

As a result, many educators and even some politicians complain that no one has provided the strong, consistent leadership needed during a time of enormous growth, rapidly changing students and vast changes in the means of paying for schools.

“Our efforts have been too fragmented,” Hart said. “Remaking the system so that it is workable is an enormous challenge. It needs something quite different from a new program here, or a little more money there.”

CANDIDATES’ PLANS FOR CALIFORNIA SCHOOLS

Here are the education programs proposed so far by the three major candidates for governor: DIANNE FEINSTEIN (D)

Proposal: California Jumpstart

Building on the success of Head Start and the state’s own preschool program for disadvantaged youngsters, Jumpstart would make early childhood education available to any 4-year-old “who needs and wants it.” Advocates of such programs say they can lower delinquency rates and improve a youngster’s chances to succeed in school and grow up to be a productive member of society.

Cost: Between $600 million and $900 million a year, including the federal and state money currently going to Head Start and existing state preschool programs. Feinstein proposes using California Lottery funds, which fluctuate and cannot be counted on to provide a constant amount of money. Unless voters agreed to an increase in the percentage of lottery proceeds funneled to education purposes, the preschool program would cut deeply into money now funneled to schools and colleges throughout the state. JOHN K. VAN DE KAMP (D)

Proposal: California Teacher Corps

Designed to help meet the demand for more and better teachers, the Teacher Corps program would provide full fellowships for the last two years of college and for a year of teacher-certification graduate work for those who promise to teach in the state’s public schools for a minimum of two to five years. The program would accommodate 4,000 new students per year for five years; recipients of the $7,000 to $8,000 annual fellowships would have to be in the top half of their classes in a California college or university. Those who quit early would be required to pay back the fellowship, plus interest. A companion “work study” program would offer part-time jobs in the schools to encourage younger students interested in teaching.

Cost: About $80 million a year. Van de Kamp proposes dropping the state’s longtime sales tax exemption for candy. To do so would require permission from the Legislature, which has been reluctant to add taxes. PETE WILSON (R)

Proposal: Early, comprehensive intervention

Calling for help with all types of problems that can affect a child’s school performance, Wilson proposes providing government-paid prenatal care; integrating local social services with the area school system and its health program to help combat poverty, medical problems and family troubles; creating a cabinet-level advisory post on child development and services; encouraging community leaders to become mentors for troubled students, and expanding preschool programs.

Cost: Wilson has not yet put a price tag on his proposals (other than to estimate that the prenatal care would cost $1,200 per mother), nor has he offered many specifics on how to pay for them. He recently said he favored paying for prenatal care by using funds generated by the voter-approved tobacco tax. Because some of the proposals would involve policy changes rather than new programs, costs would be relatively small, his aides have said, adding that intervention programs could end up saving tax dollars down the road. Part of the funds for additional programs could come from money already earmarked for education programs or from cutting the state budget in other, as yet unspecified, areas, he has said.