LOCAL ELECTIONS SAN DIEGO SCHOOL BOARD : Views of District B Candidates Deeply Divided

Both Sue Braun and Lynette Williams bring years of experience with San Diego city schools to their increasingly heated race for the District B city school board seat--Braun as a longtime volunteer and community adviser and Williams as a substitute teacher.

Both have sent their children through the public schools here. Both find fault with more than a few elements of the present school system, ranging from principal-teacher relations to priorities for high school and elementary classroom reforms.

But that’s where the similarities end. Braun and Williams also bring to the campaign widely divergent proposals for solving what they see as shortcomings in the district, the nation’s eighth-largest urban system with an increasingly multiethnic mix of 121,200 students.

Braun supports schools Supt. Tom Payzant in his efforts to push a host of educational reforms in San Diego, including new ways of teaching reading, management changes to give teachers more responsibility for running their schools, and more attention to early childhood education. She reserves her main criticism for middle-level district administrators, who she believes do not fully share Payzant’s enthusiasm for being on the cutting edge of national educational reforms.

Williams would try to fire Payzant unless he changed philosophical direction to fall more into line with what Williams calls her “conservative” views, which include eliminating the new requirement that all secondary students take a college-prep schedule, putting academic tracking of students back into classes, and stressing “traditional” morals and values in sex- and drug-education programs.

Although their race has been overshadowed up until now by rhetorical fireworks from District C candidates John De Beck and Scott Harvey, Williams and Braun take no back seat to the District C combatants when it comes to ideological differences. While Braun says she could work with either De Beck or Harvey, Williams links herself tightly to De Beck’s promise to try to revamp the district’s educational agenda if elected.

Braun, making her second run for the District B seat, was the top vote-getter in the June primary, winning 43% of the vote in the district’s neighborhoods of San Carlos, Allied Gardens, Del Cerro, Linda Vista, Tierrasanta, Mira Mesa and Sripps Ranch. Williams ran a distant second in the six-person race, with 15 1/2% of the ballots.

Braun has garnered a long list of community and political supporters for the citywide runoff next month, including present school board members Kay Davis, Susan Davis and Ann Armstrong, county Supervisors Susan Golding, Leon Williams and Brian Bilbray, and San Diego Chamber of Commerce President Lee Grissom. She is considered the front-runner for the post, which she lost only narrowly to Jim Roache four years ago.

In her campaign, Braun has taken many positions based on talks with hundreds of teachers and parents solicited as she scours parent-teacher functions, coffee klatches and Little League games.

“You can’t just rely on reports from Payzant’s staff, they’re just not the whole picture,” Braun said, reflecting her view that Payzant is not on top of his key assistants in making certain that they tell him accurately what is going on in schools.

“He says one thing (about the district) on paper, in theory, but then you visit schools, listen and see that what is really going on can be another thing in reality,” Braun said. “I like Payzant and I want to see his programs succeed, but I have trouble with the people under him not telling him the straight facts.”

As one example, Braun found herself spending more than three hours taking complaints and concerns from parents at a Little League field, all talking about the same school. She declined to reveal the name of the school or the nature of the complaints.

“When I asked (a Payzant administrator) about what I heard, I was told, ‘No, no, no, that can’t be true.’ Well, I think it is true.”

Braun advocates trimming teacher-student ratios in classrooms by hiring an aide for every teacher. She believes that better ratios are critical in order to persuade enough district teachers to try different styles of instruction and other reforms to reach the 25% of students who are not succeeding in school.

“You can’t have the core curriculum succeed without that,” Braun said, referring to the district’s requirement that secondary students take college-preparatory academics. She especially wants the ratios reduced at the elementary level, where preparation in reading and mathematics can determine how successfully students tackle the common core at the high school level.

“But you do need a common core, because I know from my work with adult literacy that our kids who aren’t going to go to college nevertheless have to be very skilled, to be able to do math, to understand computers. In the past, we had (courses like) consumer math, etcetera. But those aren’t good enough for careers anymore.”

Braun also believes smaller class sizes would particularly help nonwhite students, and go a long way toward ending the present debate over whether district integration programs should be scrapped because black and Latino students have not shown substantial academic improvement.

In contrast, Williams, a Republican party activist, would scrap the common-core curriculum.

“If you have a boy in a gang, for example, he’s not going to want a course where you have to read and analyze ‘Great Expectations’ ” by Charles Dickens,” she said. “He’ll goof off if he even attends because it’s not relevant. He needs life skills English and life skills math, things to get him to function through life.

“That’s why I’m for much more vocational education. We don’t have enough of that. When I was in high school, we had technical and vocational high schools for kids who knew they weren’t going to college. My priority is for more relevant course work for life.”

Williams also wants to know why the district refuses to allow academic tracking for all but students who are tested as “gifted.” (District policy is based on research that according to educators shows tracking harms the learning of slow learners and does not improve the achievement of faster students.)

“The district speaks out of both sides of its mouth,” she said. “They say they don’t group by ability but they do it for the brightest--they just don’t do it for the kids in the middle and lower groups, who are the most neglected. Why shouldn’t they get the same benefits as the kids at the top? If grouping doesn’t work, then don’t do it for the gifted. Mix everyone. That’s partly why I’m running. Common sense tells us that grouping works, yet the district won’t consider our views.”

For Williams, however, district social concerns programs are as much a priority for change as curriculum concerns.

While Braun supports school-based health clinics that would distribute birth-control information and medicine with parent approval, Williams considers such ideas a major cause of such societal problems as gangs and teen-age pregnancy.

“If we would have sex education classes, for example, that stressed values and moral guidelines as when I was in school, the whole problem of teen pregnancy and promiscuity would be decreased.

“But today we have the whole Planned Parenthood concept of condoms being promoted as a safe sex cure . . . I don’t see any values associated with this education.”

Williams denies that she is trying to introduce overtly religious doctrine into the public schools.

“I’m saying just that each teacher should talk about fundamental moral values that formed the basis of American society, of our heritage that served us well until the mid-1960s when we started to get (people) putting value-free education into the schools.”

Williams says the district’s integration program is not working because it simply buses children around the city but fails to boost their achievement. She proposes centralized magnet education programs at certain schools that would be open to students of any ethnic group.

“Look, you see Afro-Americans starting private schools that are segregated because they want their kids to learn,” Williams said.

In the same vein, Williams opposes bilingual programs to help Latino students whose native language is not English.

“How many job applications do you see in Spanish?” Williams asked. “I want to de-emphasize the bilingual and emphasize English immersion more.”

Williams concedes she is viewed as a long shot in the race, but said she has grass-roots support among many people, “especially after they hear my views.”