COLUMN ONE : Parents Get a Lesson in Equality : In a case study for other states, Texans are intently watching the courts try to share the wealth among public schools. They’re also watching the politicians do nothing.

Here in the capital of Texas, on the third floor of a lusterless state courthouse building, in the right-hand middle drawer of Evelyn Meador’s desk, is as telling a place as any to study what gets people agitated about politicians and the public school system.

Meador, clerk to State District Judge F. Scott McCown, keeps a worn, bulging brown file in her middle drawer marked “Edgewood Citizens File.” In it are hundreds of letters addressed to Judge McCown, some typed on formal letterhead, some scrawled across scraps of notebook paper, some angry, some exultant--but all full of passionate intensity.

“I sincerely thank you . . . . I pray that you stand firm,” wrote David Harrison of Huffman.

“You have (manure) for brains. You Mexican/Catholic loving socialist . . . .” advised a writer who identified himself only as “A WASP.”

“Please accept this expression of appreciation . . . . Schoolchildren should not be the sacrifice for the indiscretions demonstrated by party politics! God bless,” said Bill Johnless Jr.

“You’re only one step away from taking one person’s income of $30,000 and making him give $10,000 of it to his next-door neighbor. Have you considered this is the way Russia does it?” asked Richard See of Flower Mound.

“The politicians are so devious in their attempts to protect rich school districts . . . .For too long students have been pawns in a political game,” said Mr. and Mrs. Vaughn Bryan of Ingram.

“Parents across the state will look for your resignation from the bench . . . . Civil unrest will come squarely to your chambers,” promised Robert M. Key Jr. of Coppell.

The topic inspiring these fervently disparate messages involves none of the matters currently dominating political debate about schools--not national standards, school-based management, choice, vouchers, magnet schools or pilot programs. The topic that fills the Edgewood Citizens File is Judge McCown’s recent decision allowing the transfer of funds from richer to poorer school districts in order to equalize what Texas spends on its students.

Here is the most basic and pervasive public school issue facing citizens across the country these days. Almost half the states currently are being challenged over inequities in their public education systems. These disparities between districts deepen as the affluent increasingly flee to the suburbs and private schools, producing a class-based economic segregation. Ten state supreme courts have forced their legislatures to remedy disparities between rich and poor districts, and legal experts predict most states eventually will have their systems declared unconstitutional.

Here is not, however, a topic politicians are much interested in talking about. Although candidates eager to occupy the White House busily exchange position papers about national standards and pilot programs, it is the state courts that are forcing legislators to deal with the more costly and combustible issue of how much money to spend on the schools, and how to share it fairly.

The pile of letters inundating McCown’s chambers offers one obvious explanation for the politicians’ reluctance. These letters reveal genuine differences of opinion about the varying importance of money, educational reform and parental involvement in affecting school quality. The letters also reveal an intense divisiveness that pits old against young, the childless against families, the affluent against the disadvantaged. A politician studying these letters would probably feel inclined to backpedal.

But the politician could be mistaken. He could--because of the highly visible and verbal anecdotal evidence--be missing something closer to a consensus.

In the 1991 Gallup/Phi Delta Kappa Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools, “lack of proper financial support” for the first time was virtually tied with “drug use” and “lack of discipline” as the most frequently mentioned problem with public schools. No less than 80% said the amount of money allocated to public education should be the same for all students, whether they live in wealthy or poor school districts. Even in the present anti-tax atmosphere, 55% favored an increased state sales tax to finance schools and 50% favored an increased state income tax.

Polls Belie Politics

These results prompt Lowell C. Rose, executive director of Phi Delta Kappa, a professional fraternity for educators, to say: “The accepted wisdom among many politicians is that the public simply will not provide additional funds for the schools. The poll results belie that notion. . . . (The results) suggest that the problem is not so much a lack of public will as a failure of leadership on the part of our elected officials.”

Michelle Makvandi, a mother with five children in San Antonio’s struggling Hawthorne Elementary School, a haggard-looking place that lacks everything from a playground to art supplies, puts the matter in her own way.

“Yes, I still believe in the public schools,” she said one recent morning, while working as a volunteer in her daughter’s pre-kindergarten class. “I believe this is the way to get people out of poverty. But we need to have people do it right. Politicians are not those people. Tell them to leave us alone, to move out of the way. One thing this country has too much of is politicians.”

There is no better place than Texas to explore people’s disenchantment with how politicians treat the public schools, for citizens here have watched their leaders grapple haplessly with the education issue for 24 particularly vivid and tortured years. What’s been going on in Texas provides a paradigm for this kind of struggle.

The story begins in 1968, just 80 miles south of the state Capitol, in a poor Hispanic section of west San Antonio called Edgewood. There, from the front porch of his plain white frame home on Sylvia Avenue, Demetrio Rodriguez, a 48-year-old sheet metal worker at Kelly Air Force Base, could look east and see, just a block away across a parched brown playing field, the three-story building where his two boys attended Edgewood Elementary School.

It was not a pleasing sight. Edgewood Elementary lacked basic supplies and books and air conditioning. The top two floors had been condemned, and the janitor from time to time found it necessary to rip bats off the eaves. The building was crumbling. Almost half the teachers were not certified.

The reason was obvious. Although Edgewood residents paid one of the highest tax rates in Texas, property values were so low in the area that the Edgewood Independent School District could raise only $37 per pupil. By contrast, the affluent Alamo Heights School District, 10 minutes away up a hill in northern San Antonio, could raise $412 per student with a far lower tax rate because it had much higher property values. Even after factoring in state supplements, Edgewood ended up with $231 per student and Alamo Heights $543.

Rage in Edgewood

To Rodriguez and his neighbors, it just did not seem fair that a child could receive a better public education if he lived in a neighborhood with higher property values.

At first, they voiced their complaints privately to school administrators and state legislators. Rebuffed there, they took their message to the streets: At 10:30 a.m. on Thursday, May 16, 1968, 400 chanting Edgewood High School students and parents walked off campus and marched five blocks to the district’s administrative offices. Then they turned to the courts.

In the early months, it looked as if the Edgewood parents would prevail in the landmark case called San Antonio Independent School District vs. Rodriguez. On Dec. 23, 1971, a three-judge federal panel agreed with them, ruling that the Texas school finance system indeed violated the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. Observers began speculating about “a new national standard” for public school finance.

But on March 21, 1973, in a bitterly disputed 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court decided against Edgewood. Education was not a “fundamental right” afforded explicit protection under the U.S. Constitution, wrote Justice Lewis Powell for the majority.

What has followed in Texas since the landmark Rodriguez decision is a tangled mix of courtroom maneuvers, statehouse jousting and comic opera.

Prodded by repeated pleas from Edgewood and other poor districts, legislators for years promised much, but only tinkered with the school funding system. In the mid-1980s, the 100 wealthiest Texas districts were still spending an average of $7,233 per student while the 100 poorest were spending $2,978; the range ran from $2,112 to $19,333. In San Antonio, this meant that Alamo Heights had up-to-date computers and a swimming pool, while some Edgewood pupils had neither typewriters nor a playground.

So in 1984, Demetrio Rodriguez and others again turned to the courts. This time it was the state courts, and this time they prevailed: On Oct. 2, 1989, the Texas Supreme Court, in the historic Edgewood vs. Kirby decision, unanimously declared the Texas school finance system unconstitutional.

Jubilant celebrations followed in the Edgewood district--but that was all. Just how to equalize school funding remained a matter for the politicians to decide, not the judges, and the politicians are still working on it.

There have been special legislative sessions, there have been bills passed, there have been judicial reviews. After the courts rejected one plan for not going far enough, the legislators finally adopted a so-called “Robin Hood” bill that shifted money from property-rich to property-poor districts. Saying, “They are all our children,” McCown upheld it--thereby drawing that flood of letters--but the Texas Supreme Court last January declared that plan an illegal statewide property tax. In other words, both disparity and equality are now unconstitutional in Texas.

The legislature has until mid-1993 to devise another plan; meanwhile, the Robin Hood law remains in place. Hand-wringing and head-scratching prevail in the state Capitol these days.

“Please give me your plans,” House Speaker Gib Lewis recently pleaded with reporters. “I will take it under serious consideration.”

It is hard to generalize about how Texans regard this spectacle. Much depends on where one lives, of course, but viewpoints are also often shaped by personal philosophy, and whether one’s child happens to have a good teacher or a special program.

You are likely to hear strong opposition to the Robin Hood plan if you talk to citizens in the affluent Alamo Heights district of San Antonio or the tony Westlake Hills and Lost Creek regions of Austin, and you are likely to hear ringing endorsements in unprosperous school districts such as Edgewood or Austin’s Del Valle. But you can also easily hear opposition to the Robin Hood plan from people who live in more mixed, urban areas such as San Antonio’s Northeast school district, and you can hear passionate support for equalization from people who live in Austin’s upscale Eanes school district.

What unites almost everyone, despite their disparate neighborhoods and viewpoints, is a disgust with the politicians--either for passing the Robin Hood plan or for not going further after two decades of foot-dragging.

No wonder. Forced by the Robin Hood plan to give up $5 million of its $19 million annual budget, affluent Alamo Heights raised its tax rate by 36% but still ended up $1 million short, requiring salary freezes and a host of cutbacks. Edgewood, meanwhile, saw revenue increase by just $68 a student, partly because the politicians could not bring themselves to impose a state income tax or significantly add more money to the general statewide education pot.

As in most places--including California--where leaders “reform” and “equalize” without spending more money, the result has been a pulling down to mediocrity rather than an elevation to quality.

In Texas, the complaints and arguments about school financing take a variety of forms.

Some just don’t think the Robin Hood plan is fair.

Raphael Martinez is a father of four and an IBM customer service manager who chose the Lost Creek region of Austin for its widely admired Eanes school district when moving from New York five years ago. “I agree that poorer districts should have the same educational opportunity as richer districts,” he said. “But we’ve found that we have to pay more and still lose money from our own district. We’ve had to reduce programs. The reason I moved here was to get this schooling. I pay taxes for it. I can’t afford to support other districts.”

David Longoria, a financial consultant and single parent with one son at San Antonio’s Robert E. Lee High School, slapped the table in anger while talking on this topic: “By God, if we decide we want a gym, hey, I live here, I paid for it. . . . It’s my kid. . . . If you like it, move into this district. If you don’t, stay away. Don’t take from me. Don’t deny my child and give elsewhere. I’m willing to pay more. That’s why I moved here. That’s why I chose this district.”

A Parent’s Job

Over and over in these conversations, the same basic thought is offered: It’s parental involvement, not money and politicians, that ensures a quality education.

“If parents do at home what they’re supposed to, teachers could just do their job,” said Myrt Duffin, who with her husband runs an automotive machine shop in San Antonio and has two children in San Antonio’s Northeast school district. “If the politicians want to do something, fund a parental learning center.”

“It will take grass-roots action from parents, not politicians,” said Sharon Hogan, a divorced single mother of three who lives in student housing near downtown Austin while attending law school. “It will take parents saying, ‘All right, our kids don’t have nice uniforms, but we’ll have the best band in the state.’ No matter what the politicians do, they are not the answer. I don’t think national candidates have the power to do anything.”

Ginger Harrison and her husband, who is in the freight truck business, moved to Alamo Heights with their young son specifically for the schools, after living in the Dallas suburb of Plano and in Corpus Christi. “I believe in equal education, but I don’t think money achieves it,” she said. “Teachers and parents--what we expect from education--are the key. I have no faith in the politicians. What they say goes in one ear and out the other. They can stand there and debate the whole nine yards, but no one will remember what they said.”

Harrison stopped and pointed to another Alamo Heights parent, Cappy Lawton, who works as a mentor in a special program for disadvantaged children.

“Here we have a man doing something,” she said. “That’s the only way. Roots and accountability. People like Cappy are the way schools can be helped, not politicians.”

Visit a school such as Hawthorne Elementary School in the impoverished San Antonio School District, however, or Hillcrest Elementary in the struggling Del Valle School District southeast of downtown Austin, and it is possible to hear quite different sentiments.

Hawthorne is a school housed in a plain, timeworn building. There are no computers, no playground. The one art teacher for 500 pupils cages supplies where she can.

Money Matters

“All we have here is scorched earth,” said John Larcade, an architect with a 13-year-old multiply disabled child at the school. “My younger child is in a private Montessori school because this district is not known as the best, but no private school would take my handicapped child. He’s been here five years, and this last year was the first time he learned anything. They always put him in with the emotionally disturbed kids.”

“There’s lots of social promotion,” said Michelle Makvandi, whose husband, once in the oil business, now does maintenance work. “Children without learning are promoted.” She stops, pounds the table. “This makes me angry. They’re all held at the same level. They have nothing and do nothing.”

“I have a daughter in the fifth grade who can’t spell pickle when I send her to the store, but she’s been on the honor roll since second grade,” said Anita Rodriguez, a mother of two and PTA president whose husband is a chemical technician at Kelly Air Force Base. “Can’t spell dinosaur or pickle or mystery. Give me a break--the honor roll!”

People with children in schools such as these readily acknowledge the importance of “bottom up” individual effort and parental involvement, but they have come also to appreciate the value of money. “If money is not necessary, why is it people have been fighting us over it for 22 years?” Demetrio Rodriguez asks. He and his neighbors are particularly aware of the difference that a specially funded program can make.

On the site of the former Edgewood Elementary School in San Antonio (now rebuilt and renamed the Pareles Elementary School), where the plight of his sons once drove him to the streets and the courts, Rodriguez these days watches his grandson, 6-year-old Matthew, attend a pilot program for pre-kindergarten through first-grade pupils that offers spacious, well-supplied and comfortably furnished quarters full of books, art materials, three Mac II computers, three Yamaha keyboards, and an average of one teacher for every six students.

Politicians had little to do with this project. The keyboards come from a local Hispanic association, the furniture from surplus stores and the driving impetus from a teacher named Linda Bononcini, herself a graduate of the Edgewood school system. She thought up the idea, wrote the proposal and coaxed the core grant of $56,000 from the Edgewood School Board--whose president, Juan Castillo, was one of the Edgewood High students marching in protest in the spring of 1968.

Parents are delighted. But this Non-Graded A+ Program, as it’s called, is limited to only 54 fortunate children, picked by lottery from more than 300 who applied. Those not selected face a considerably different experience at Pareles Elementary School.

Janie Martinez is particularly well qualified to talk about this disparity, for she and her husband, a quality inspector at Kelly Air Force Base, have twin 6-year-olds, one in the special program and one not.

“Because the A+ program accepts only one child per family, we had to keep one out,” Martinez said. “My daughter who is in the program is already writing and reading. The other one is not writing or reading at all.”

Even for the lucky ones, the program reaches only through the first grade. “What happens when you hit second grade?” asked Sylvia Jalindo, a mother of three whose husband does auto body work. “You can’t continue with this. If you can’t afford to put your child in private school, you have nowhere to go.”

Questions about “choice,” “America 2000,” “magnet schools” and other favorite options of the politicians draw mainly blank stares and shrugs in this environment. Those few with a firm opinion offer a litany of objections: The best schools would fill up right away. Lots of parents wouldn’t know or care enough to pick the right school. Many couldn’t get their children to far-off schools because they don’t have cars. “Choice” is just a way to write off the majority of public schools to create elite schools for the few, to segregate by race and money.

It comes as no surprise to hear parents at these schools argue passionately for fundamental school finance reform. Having watched Texas legislators fail them for so long, they now call for national collection and distribution of school funds. Few politicians are inclined to champion their cause; the U.S. government, unlike the governments in many other countries, currently picks up just 6% of the nation’s public school bill.

“What I think is, there’s not enough money in the whole pool,” said John Larcade. “We probably should eliminate the property tax and go with another system entirely. After all, they are all God’s children.”

“We need equal education,” said Maria Rodriguez, a retired widow whose granddaughter attends Pareles. “I think education should be made national. Our kids have shown they can do better with enriched programs. Let’s make it equal.”

Voices for Equality

But not only in the poorer districts do you hear these sentiments. The Gallup/PDK Poll says that the 80% support for equitable funding comes in equal proportions from all demographic groups and regions of the country. Visits with a range of people in Texas bear this out.

Sitting in the living room of her spacious, comfortably furnished two-story home in the secluded reach of suburban Austin called Lost Creek, Lynn Gambrill offers comments that echo Demetrio Rodriguez’s. The Eanes school district is a big reason she and her husband, a private investor, moved with their two young daughters from the Washington, D.C., area. Here their two daughters’ classes are small, art and music are taught regularly and a physical education class is offered daily. But looking beyond her own world, Gambrill is far from satisfied.

“Property taxes are not an equitable way to fund the schools,” she said. “I would like to see twice as much money spent on education. You’ve got to decide what’s important in the future. Politicians fail with education because it costs money, and they are unwilling to ask people to pay more money. I don’t know where politicians get their impetus from. Parents I know want the things I want. We feel like we’re not being listened to. Politicians lack guts.”

Minutes away, down a winding country road in the heart of rustic Westlake, Jim and Pat Otis voice similar views. He directs leadership-training programs for business groups; she is a psychotherapist. They live in a stunning wood-and-glass home on a large, private, heavily wooded plot of land, and their two children enjoy the benefits of the Eanes school district, but the Otises nonetheless are deeply concerned.

“On both the state and federal level, there is this fantasy that it’s going to be all solved by parental involvement, correcting priorities, efficiency, self-esteem, choice,” said Pat Otis. “Which in fact don’t cost money. ‘Parental involvement’ is the equivalent of ‘points of light.’ The issue gets obscured. We need well-paid teachers, good student-teacher ratios and books in the library. There are two ways to go: Either it’s us versus them, or we get a different funding basis. It made sense to have your own school district when we lived in isolated communities, but now if kids in San Antonio are not educated, it affects us in Austin and in Los Angeles. Thus far there’s only been rhetoric from the politicians on all levels. A lot of people have given up on politics as a solution to education problems.”

Whatever the poll results, people surely do differ. And many are genuinely torn between what’s good for their own children and what’s best for all children and the nation. But it’s fair to say that the unspoken subtext running through all these comments in Texas, from all sides, is a passionate belief in education. A profound lack of faith in the politicians does not necessarily translate into despair about the public schools--at least not one’s own public school.

Asked by the Gallup/PDK poll to grade public schools nationally, only 22% gave A or B grades, but asked to grade public school in their local community, 42% gave A or B grades. And asked to grade the school their oldest child attends, a full 73% gave A or B grades. Perhaps most important, 68% said they’d choose their children’s present schools if they could select among the many in their community.

Clearly, rich and poor alike still nurture the enduring vision of the public schools as the great equalizer, the balancing wheel, the means to a better life. No less than 89% in the Gallup/PDK Poll see education as “very important” to the nation’s future--far above such things as industrial and military development.

This sentiment is easy to witness while visiting people in Texas.

Dozens of novels and a set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica line shelves in Mark and Theresa King’s home, a ramshackle trailer in Austin’s strapped Del Valle school district. She carries mail for the U.S. Postal Service; he works in the field for oil companies. On the day they sat talking with a visitor, the Kings had participated in two teacher conferences--one about math scores and one about a Valentine’s Day party--and had sent extra supplies to school for students more needy than their own.

‘A Dear Expense’

“Oh, yes, I still have faith in the school system, even though I don’t have faith in elected politicians,” said Theresa King. “The educators--principals and assistant principals, counselors, teachers--put in so much that it keeps your faith. It’s hard not to have faith after watching them.”

In her bare-bones student apartment in central Austin, divorced single parent Sharon Hogan juggles schedules, appointments and projects for three children while attending law school on a scholarship, a student loan and child-support payments. For seven years, she and her developer husband lived in a big Victorian house with a porch and fine old columns on five acres north of Austin. After they lost everything in the 1986 Texas real estate crash and her husband decided he no longer wanted to be married, Hogan lived for three years with her children in a battered trailer, driving a station wagon that wouldn’t start unless her son pushed it.

Still, she paid $1,500 annually to send her oldest boy to a school in the next district over, rather than let him attend a mediocre local school.

“It was a dear expense, but I always thought education was worth it,” she explained. “Maybe I’m being old-fashioned, but I still think education is the most important thing. One reason I’m going to law school is to increase my earning power. This will impact not just me, but my children and grandchildren. If I’m in a position to send my kids to Harvard, that could be the turning point for generations of my family in the future.”

It is precisely this abiding faith in the role of education that many people wish they could see mirrored in politicians’ actions.

“Politicians feed us only rhetoric,” Demetrio Rodriguez said one morning as he proudly watched his grandson punch a computer at Pareles’ A+ program. “We are doing harm to this country by not having equal education. That’s the only thing you can give poor people. Give them an education and they’ll be better citizens. The politicians must address this. Politicians are trying to skirt the issue. They are not going to address the issue unless they are forced to, unless they are pressured. We could do it with armed revolution. But instead we’re doing it through the court system.”

Times researcher Nina Green contributed to this story.