ORANGE COUNTY PERSPECTIVE : How to Improve Public Education

The Orange County Department of Education is a $66-million-a-year operation. It provides educational services for handicapped children and juvenile offenders and lends support to school districts.

Times have changed, and there has been a growing feeling throughout the educational community that this department could be doing much more as a facilitator and coordinator for the districts. The department is the logical place to look for planning and communication to meet Orange County’s educational challenges of the 1990.

Elizabeth Dorn Parker, president of the Orange County Board of Education, seems to understand that. Since first elected in 1982, she has sought to extend the reach of the department. She’s been a leader in child care, drug-abuse education and programs designed for troubled youngsters. She deserves to be reelected for another term.

But that kind of leadership hasn’t been coming from the office of the county education superintendent. For the past 23 years, Robert D. Peterson has presided over this bureaucracy. He is running for a seventh term against two challengers, John F. Dean, chairman of the department of education at Whittier College, and Ron Detrick, an educator and administrator.

The incumbent draws an annual salary of $98,663, an amount higher than his counterpart in Los Angeles County, who oversees a budget nearly four times the size. Yet for the priority that Orange County has assigned to this job, there’s not much to look forward to in another Peterson term than his expressed hope to stay on to promote a pet reading project.

Peterson has made competitive programs such as the one he is advancing, and the well-known Academic Decathlon that has previously brought national attention, a cornerstone of his approach.

But Orange County in 1990 needs more than games. Its educational bureaucracy must be innovative and responsive to a variety of problems.

Many local superintendents now find that they must deal with a powerful, entrenched county superintendent but are unhappy that he isn’t offering more vision, direction and coordination.

Today, instead of rising to the challenge of curriculum development, English as a second language programs, health concerns, transportation issues and the like, Peterson has largely been resistant to change. Peterson’s long tenure also has been marked by grand jury criticism of management, deficit spending and duplication of services.

The incumbent responds to critics by saying that he only can pick out a few areas to work on. But even his current pet project, a book-box reading program, seems unsophisticated and simplistic when measured against the credentials in this area of challenger Dean, who has been concerned with promoting literacy among both children and adults as the executive director of the nonprofit California Reading Assn. Inc.

The fact is, the job of county education superintendent today requires a collegial relationship with modern educators at the district level. He needs to get out and find out what’s on people’s minds. Dean is the person best qualified for that assignment.

He has broad educational experience at every level. He properly regards the office he seeks as a channel to serve local districts and teachers. Dean understands that in an increasingly complex county, the superintendent has to be coordinator and leader.

That’s why he is the best candidate to address Orange County’s educational needs in the 1990s.