Statewide Control of School Contracts Urged : Education: District-level negotiations give too much power to teachers’ unions, commission says.

The state’s Little Hoover Commission on Wednesday proposed a statewide system of bargaining for public school employee contracts as a way to stem rising costs.

In one of its periodic reports on the state’s education system, the watchdog advisory group--known officially as the Commission on California State Government Organization and Economy--called for more state control over the public schools.

It recommended that school salaries, medical benefits and other issues be negotiated on a statewide basis. The current system of district-by-district negotiations puts too much power into the hands of local teachers’ unions, which are often able to dominate school board elections and bring about boards of education perceived as too willing to accede to their salary demands, the report said. It called for a study to see which bargaining issues should be left to local boards and which should be assumed by the state.

A spokesman for the California Teachers Assn. said the proposal is full of flaws, including the inevitable erosion of local control over school matters. The spokesman, Ned Hopkins, said the plan also ignores the complexity of the negotiating process, one in which working conditions--say, class size or playground supervision duties--are balanced against salary and benefits considerations.

It also would invite a statewide teacher strike if negotiations bogged down, Hopkins added.

But the commission report claimed that the current system of bargaining is too costly.

“The collective bargaining process and related agreements are the major factors driving educational costs,” the report said. “They not only regulate school employees’ salaries and benefits but also affect a variety of other costs in categories other than instruction. Ultimately, these costs reduce the flexibility in a district’s management procedures.”

The report also recommended giving the state more authority to step in when districts run into financial trouble and redoubling efforts to count school dropouts and put more resources into dropout prevention programs.

The state Department of Education recently refined and expanded its methods of counting dropouts and has a number of successful projects in place, but many of those efforts are threatened by budget cuts.

The Little Hoover Commission was created to review the operations of state government. It reports to the Legislature and the governor.

Its chairman, real estate developer Nathan Shapell, has been accused by some of using the commission to forward his views. Last year Bill Honig, superintendent of public instruction, blasted a commission report as “misleading and inflammatory,” charging the research was “sloppy . . . and the facts dead wrong.”

But Honig said Wednesday the current report is “more reasonable and judicious” and “has some interesting ideas in it.”

He said he believes that statewide bargaining should at least be explored, and he agreed with such recommendations as greater state authority to intervene with fiscally irresponsible districts and better dropout prevention. Plans to implement them already are in the works, he added.