LOCAL ELECTIONS / SAN DIEGO UNIFIED SCHOOL BOARD : District C Candidates Polls Apart on Classroom Politics

The contest between John de Beck and Scott Harvey for the District C city school board seat offers perhaps the strongest contrast among candidates’ positions in the November election.

De Beck promises to revamp the educational agenda--or at least the debating agenda--at the school board if he can repeat his primary victory over Harvey for the Point Loma-Mission Hills trustee spot in the general election next month.

De Beck, just retired at age 60 after 36 years as a San Diego teacher, opposes the watershed common-core curriculum intended to give every secondary student in the city schools a college-preparatory schedule in math, English, science and social studies.

He opposes the district’s decade-old integration program of busing and special magnet programs. He argues against school-based health clinics and against holding teachers more responsible for the failure of almost one out of five city students, most of them Latino and black, to graduate.

In short, De Beck stands in opposition to almost every major initiative undertaken by city schools trustees and Supt. Tom Payzant during the past several years, especially those intended to cope with an increasingly multiethnic student population.

Yet De Beck, with the strong backing of the San Diego Teachers Assn.--and its political contributions of more than $15,000 in the primary alone--stands as the favorite against opponent Harvey, whom he trounced in the primary by a 61.1% to 26.5% margin.

Harvey, a lobbyist and former director of intergovernmental affairs for the city of San Diego, is banking on revulsion from voters, and in particular from teachers themselves, to put him into contention as they learn the details of De Beck’s platform.

Already Harvey has garnered the support of all five current trustees and has set up a Teachers for Harvey group to counteract the image that official labor union support will automatically translate into thousands of votes of individual teachers.

While not dismissing De Beck’s performance in the primary, open only to District C voters, Harvey believes that he has a realistic shot in the citywide general, particularly if voters pay more attention to what Harvey says are clearly defined differences between the two candidates.

Harvey strongly backs present educational reform policies which have put the San Diego district--the nation’s eighth-largest urban system with 121,200 students--on the leading edge of national reform although they have not yet resulted in significant improvements in student academic achievement.

Harvey also doubts that De Beck can fairly judge teacher-district issues given his many years as a supporter of, and contract bargainer with, the teachers’ association.

De Beck is banking on the hope that neither a majority of San Diego teachers nor the public-at-large buy the numerous reforms being spearheaded by Payzant, but instead want a return to traditional discipline and teaching, an acknowledgement that not all students can or will go to college.

“With all my years in education, I’m cynical about school change,” says De Beck, a self-described “practical iconoclast.” He added, “I’m not so eager to grab onto new ideas” as other educators, including leaders of the teachers’ association. He even wonders whether the union knows of the many positions he might take that run counter to its official support of district reforms.

“But I’d rather go down swinging than change my philosophy,” said De Beck, who ran against board President Kay Davis four years ago and was drubbed. Davis is not running for a third term, leaving a open seat.

De Beck has made opposition to the common-core curriculum program a major tenet of his campaign. Indeed, he spoke forcefully against the proposal to trustees when it was first floated in 1988, based on his experience as a business education teacher at Garfield High School, an alternative school for students close to dropping out or for those who already left school at least once.

“No one has proven that single-track education works because it doesn’t,” he said.

De Beck said the program, by requiring all students to study college-preparatory academics, will cause more dropouts among students who see no relevance in some or all of the subjects, or who lack the ability to tackle more advanced English or math.

“It’s patently false to say that all kids can succeed in a college-prep curriculum because not even the colleges believe that,” De Beck said. “We’re so eager to appear to be producing excellence that we’re just eliminating courses for those kids who are not college-bound and who want vocational courses or other choices.

“The key to a kid’s heart is relevance . . . not everyone needs to know algebra. They need to know symbols, to be able to manipulate numbers. And that can be taught a lot of different ways, not just the one prescribed way the district wants to force on us.”

In the same vein, De Beck scoffs at the district’s new elementary reading program, which eliminates rigid ability groupings and limited-word textbooks in favor of unaltered children’s literature, a greater emphasis on writing, and temporary groupings of students based on need for specific work.

“It’s not politically right to talk about this, but teachers will end up grouping (permanently) anyways, because you can’t teach reading any other way, given class sizes and differences between the level of kids,” De Beck said.

De Beck also criticized district emphasis on cooperative learning--as part of its ethnic equity policies--where children are often grouped without regard to ability in expectation that they can learn from each other.

“It just doesn’t work the way the district says it does because it takes real close monitoring by teachers to see that it is working, and it is much harder to oversee than groups based on ability.”

In fact, De Beck calls the entire district emphasis on integration wrongheaded.

“The whole concept of racial pride has been defeated by integration,” he said, referring to the longstanding district plan for voluntary busing of nonwhite students to predominantly white schools and establishment of special magnet curriculums in nonwhite schools to attract white students to those Latino and black majority sites.

“Strong neighborhood schools (in minority areas) have been defeated by allowing kids to be bused across town,” he said. De Beck prefers to put less money into integration and more into trying to improve achievement at nonwhite schools. “For me, achievement is much more important than integration . . . integration is a social aspect, a function of society, not schools.”

While De Beck backs the district concept for giving individual schools more say over their budgets and curriculum--the so-called “restructuring” process--he recoils at efforts to strengthen accountability of teachers by tightening evaluation procedures.

“It’s faulty reasoning to focus evaluation on teachers, and not on learners,” De Beck said. “The learner is responsible for his or her learning. The school is responsible to provide the environment for learning. But even a mediocre teacher can work with a student who is motivated . . . the belief that a school can make a person successful is not true.”

De Beck favors choice for students to attend any school within the public system and would provide transportation for those who could not afford it otherwise. He favors a woman’s right to choose an abortion, but opposes health clinics in schools to distribute information about birth control, saying that school-based clinics “would interfere with family values.”

“Why not just locate them right across the street from schools, and refer students there after considering religion, family, and other values first?” he proposes.

Harvey is taking every opportunity to stress his differences from De Beck. His campaign has prepared thousands of index-size cards to distribute to households delineating their contrasting views on health centers and the core curriculum, among other issues.

“I believe that the most pressing issue in this campaign is to continue working for multicultural diversity,” said Harvey, 45, whose wife teaches at Grant Elementary in Mission Hills and whose father is principal of Glendale High School near Los Angeles. (The San Diego district is now 62% nonwhite and 38% white.)

“It follows then that we need more social services for our students, that we need a more ethnically sensitive curriculum, that we need to give elementary children more self-confidence and self-esteem so they will read by the third grade--all of these programs are vitally important to the future,” Harvey said.

“And when my opponent criticizes the common core, he’s really asking us to go back to the old approach, the system we used to have that has failed so many of our students. The common core demands high expectations for students and says that all students can learn, and I truly believe that such beliefs are correct.”

Harvey said that the experiences of his wife and father have taught him that “tracking can hurt kids” and that “there are intangible benefits to blending students who don’t have the same backgrounds.”

As a lobbyist, Harvey has fought with the school district for easier rules to permit nonprofit child-care operators to have facilities at schools in order to make access easier for harried parents.

If elected, he would also push for more funds for preschool education, including the expansion of programs such as Head Start, he said. While not promising to find extra funds, Harvey believes his background as a city lobbyist in Sacramento and Washington could prove useful in identifying additional money for the district.

Harvey supports school-based clinics, such as one proposed for Hoover High School, as long as parents are involved in the planning and financing comes from non-school sources such as health foundations.

He would leave the controversial issue of birth-control information up to individual schools as part of restructuring to give parents and teachers more decision-making authority.

And Harvey continues to hit hard at De Beck’s past work as a member of the teachers’ union bargaining committee, arguing that De Beck would be hard-pressed to be an independent voice when salary and benefit issues are debated during contract negotiations.

“I’m not saying I would work to undo anything in the present (labor) laws,” Harvey said. “But I would be able to be a neutral party and retain independent judgment.”

Harvey also is irritated that there has not been more focus on his campaign and that voters in the primary showed little or no hesitation in voting for a teacher as a trustee. To counter the large number of volunteers that De Beck has tapped through the teachers’ union, Harvey has amassed an eclectic group of supporters.

Developers Tom Carter and Pat Kruer, present school board trustee Susan Davis, City Councilman Wes Pratt, Latino activist Rachel Ortiz and Democratic Party activist and Community College District trustee Evonne Schulze have distributed a joint letter to thousands of San Diego Democrats asking them to vote for Harvey.

“I think that I’ve got a good chance still,” Harvey said. “I ask people to vote for me as a progressive.”

“Win or lose,” De Beck said, “at least I’ve gotten people to pay attention to my views this time.”