Peterson Leaves the Office but Not the Arena : Education: After serving 24 tempestuous years as county schools superintendent, he has no intention of retiring from the fray just because of a defeat.

Before his election as county superintendent of schools, John F. Dean urged voters to oust longtime schools chief Robert Peterson and “let him enjoy his retirement.” After nearly a quarter of a century in office, Dean contended, Peterson was burned out and entitled to rest on his laurels.

Peterson, however, has no such intentions.

“I don’t believe in that,” Peterson said Friday when asked if he would slow down and enjoy his golden years. “I think you ought to wear out rather than rust out.”

At noon Monday, Dean--who swept Peterson out of office with a landslide win in November--will be sworn in as Orange County superintendent of schools, ending Peterson’s 24-year tenure.

But not ending his career, Peterson said.

Although he will no longer have the title of schools superintendent--not to mention its $100,000-plus annual salary--Peterson said that he will continue to work on a host of pet projects that he has developed over the years, most notably the Academic Decathlon, which he invented 20 years ago and has seen grow from a small local competition to an international event.

“Fortunately, a long time ago I realized the fickleness of elections,” Peterson said. “Anything I thought worth continuing I set up as a nonprofit organization.”

Among those organizations: the United States Academic Decathlon and the International Decathlon of Academics (IDA), which now includes six nations and will hold a satellite-beamed competition of the world’s brightest students this fall from London, Singapore and the United States, most likely from Miami, Peterson said.

There is also the Academic Pentathlon, a smaller competition for sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade students from counties in 10 states. And there’s the All-Star Games Assn., a nonprofit group that promotes competitive intellectual contests among students. And there’s Computerized Instant Talks, a series of taped messages for educators from experts on gangs, drugs and other problems confronting young people.

Peterson serves on the boards of all those nonprofit organizations, and, at age 70, he said, he has no intention of slowing down. “I’ll continue to do many of the things I have been doing, except I won’t get paid for it,” he said.

But money won’t be a problem. After a 40-year career as an educator, Peterson stands to collect a hefty pension. And that’s not counting a military stipend he will receive. He was an Air Force bomber pilot in World War II and spent 18 months in a German prisoner-of-war camp after he was shot down over Austria.

Sitting for an interview in the conference room at the county Department of Education headquarters--his office was being painted for its new occupant--Peterson made it clear that his forced retirement does not sit well with him. Despite 24 years of snipes by critics who charged that he ended up as little more than a ceremonial figurehead atop an empire of 1,100 employees and a $74.5-million budget, Peterson remains enthusiastic when speaking of his education goals.

But while he will miss his office, he said, he won’t miss the political pitfalls of being county schools superintendent. Peterson still bristles at mention of the conclusions of half a dozen Orange County grand juries, all of which called for Peterson’s office to be made appointive rather than elective. In one of the harshest reports, the 1975 grand jury denounced him as having “a policy and practice of educational isolationism,” and called his beloved Academic Decathlon “largely a public relations instrument and without educational merit.”

“People came onto the grand jury for the deliberate purpose of smearing the county superintendent of schools,” Peterson said. “ . . . The grand jury in the eyes of the general public is an indisputable agency, but it’s often common citizens who sometimes misuse it.”

Their conclusions--some of which are supported by Dean, including the notion of an appointed position--were politically motivated by “tiny little cliques of two or three people on a subcommittee” who delivered reports to the grand jury as a whole and “convinced the other jurors that what (they said) is valid,” Peterson charged.

Throughout his career, Peterson was criticized as a proponent of old-fashioned policies unsuited to contemporary schools. In 1969, he raised eyebrows when he instituted a conservative dress code for county Department of Education staffers. Before his election in 1966, he led assaults on school texts that he found too liberal, and on sex education, which he found offensive. His views caused decades of disagreement with the California Teachers Assn.

Peterson raised hackles again in 1987 when he fired Vincent Chalk from his teaching post in a county education program for the hearing-impaired after Chalk’s illness was diagnosed as AIDS. The subsequent court battle that Chalk launched in an effort to regain his job became a cause celebre in the gay community. After Chalk’s death last October, Peterson said he fired Chalk--who he said was a good teacher--because “the danger posed by AIDS (at that time) was still an uncertainty.”

But Peterson always dismissed charges that he was out of touch with a changing world. On Friday, he reeled off a list of challenges that he said Dean will face as county superintendent, challenges that he asserted he would have been prepared to meet had he been reelected for a seventh term. Among them, he said, are “providing enough teachers in the classroom (and) curriculum improvements that are an ongoing responsibility of (this) department.”

But the main problem that Orange County and the rest of the nation will face in educating its children is motivation, he said.

“Orange County, in fact, has the toughest problem,” Peterson said. “We’re plagued with so many attractive distractions--the beach and the snow and the freeway, and then there’s drugs and entertainment of all kinds; maybe the worst of all is TV. These all take students away from educational challenges.”

Competitions such as the Academic Decathlon--criticized by Dean as an indication of Peterson’s “games-and-contests mentality”--are necessary to shift students’ motivation away from those distractions, Peterson contends.

“If we didn’t have football, you wouldn’t be able to get the average athletic type to go out on a field at noon and put in an hour of calisthenics,” Peterson said. “Football motivates those calisthenics.” The same theory, he added, can be applied to intellectual competitions.

Over the years, many critics have disagreed with that view, and others advanced by Peterson. But despite the fact that his tenure has been stormy at best, Peterson said he has no regrets about his service as county schools chief.

“I’ve been very blessed to have wonderful opportunities to accelerate some things that will help, longer-term-wise, in education.”