Crusades Illustrate How Perot Gets Things Done : Politics: Billionaire Texan is a master communicator. But he also displays a fondness for personal attacks.

He called the state education system “a sham,” some teachers “incompetent” and the state Board of Education “the pet rock crowd.”

It was education reform, Ross Perot style, an unforgettable episode in Texas history when furious teachers and parents picketed the capitol, and bumper stickers from Pecos to Port Arthur warned: “I don’t brake for Ross Perot.” In the course of the crusade, Perot spent about $8 million of his own money, pulled every political string within grasp and, in 1984, rolled over the opposition with a sweeping package of reform proposals.

It seemed a perfect project for Perot. The 1980s were a time, in fact, when Texas governors had a habit of calling in the billionaire businessman the same way oilmen called in firefighter Red Adair to snuff wellhead blazes too dangerous for lesser humans.

Working for Republican Gov. William P. Clements Jr. in 1981, Perot led a successful drive to give Texas some of the stiffest drug laws in the country. Two years later, Democratic Gov. Mark White asked Perot to lead the education-reform fight.

Both campaigns offer a telling insight into Perot’s qualifications to become President, for they are the closest thing to a government record the undeclared candidate has compiled. In fact, aides tout his education work as proof of what he could accomplish in Washington.

In each case, Perot proved himself a master communicator and used his wealth and network of contacts to apply enormous political pressure. But he showed a fondness for scalding personal attacks that even some allies say hurt his cause in the end. And in the view of some critics, he demonstrated an affinity for simplistic solutions to complex problems.

The Perot organization did not respond to written questions about his efforts from The Times.

The two crusades certainly show that Perot can get things done. But they leave unanswered questions about how effective he would be in the bigger pond of Washington, where his hometown ties would have little value, where alienating powerful opponents in one effort could hobble a President in the next and where even King Solomon’s treasure might not be enough to underwrite solutions to a host of national problems.

The episodes also suggest that Perot’s political philosophy, at least on some issues, defies traditional classification.

In the anti-drug crusade, Perot took a staunchly law-and-order position, alienating civil libertarians and some minority leaders. On education, he stood with the liberals, championing the interests of minority kids and infuriating a powerful coalition of rural Texans, fiscal conservatives, the education Establishment and taxpayers from affluent suburban schools.

Today the $2.8-billion reform package of 1984 is generally viewed as an important first step--if an imperfect one--toward better education. The 1981 drug program is praised for its effort to change public attitudes but is seen as having proved largely ineffective in stopping drug traffic.

Perot attacked drugs and education just as he says he will attack Washington’s problems: He convened the experts, spent months listening and developing a plan and campaigned to win grass-roots support. Once he had set his objectives, he fought to drive through the program with no compromise and no quarter.

In the “Texans’ war on drugs,” Perot’s team believed the state needed to shut down drug-paraphernalia shops, set mandatory 15-year prison terms for dealers--including those who sell marijuana--and require doctors to notify a state databank each time they prescribed certain drugs.

The education remedy was even more sweeping. Texas schools were among the worst in the country: Test scores were falling, the dropout rate was rising and Texas was last among states in spending on education as a share of per capita income.

Despite this, the state spent generously on extracurricular activities, in particular on the high school football teams that were the focal point of community spirit in many remote towns.

In March, 1984, Perot’s panel issued its recommendations: fat pay hikes for teachers, preschool programs for disadvantaged 4-year-olds, tests to measure the performance of teachers and students and a system to award raises for merit, not seniority. The panel also called for a redistribution of state aid from rich to poor districts and a six-week ban on extracurricular activities for students who failed any course--the “no pass, no play” rule.

To ensure that the measures were fully and quickly implemented, the committee proposed to replace the highly conservative Texas Board of Education with a panel whose members would be appointed by the governor.

Perot’s 18-member Select Committee on Public Education included such luminaries as Gov. White, Lt. Gov. William Hobby and Comptroller Bob Bullock. But Perot, cracker-barrel philosopher and salesman extraordinaire, set the agenda with an unerring knack for reducing complex issues to symbols that would arouse average Texans.

“He wasn’t just the catalyst; he was the stick and the fuse,” said Eddie Joseph, who was point man for the Texas High School Coaches Assn.

Showing the flair he demonstrates in decrying the gummed gears of Washington, Perot lampooned extracurricular time-wasting with the tale of a boy who missed 15 days of school taking his prize chicken to agriculture shows. He mocked high school locker rooms equipped with towel warmers (“I thought I was living pretty good”), tiny school districts that were top-heavy with coaches and high school courses in motorcycle riding.

“We’ve turned our schools from places dedicated to learning to places dedicated to play,” he said.

Everybody deserved blame for the schools’ sorry state, Perot said, but some deserved more blame than others.

Perot hammered “Mickey Mouse” teachers colleges, which he said taught the state’s “dumbest” students. He went after the high school coaches, whom he described as “a bunch of good old boys in a clique” who often were made principals when they washed out on the gridiron.

He waged a very public feud with school board chairman Joe Kelly Butler, a gruff Houston oilman who Perot said had failed the state’s schoolchildren and “had been around since the ark docked.”

Perot’s freewheeling commentary often set off sparks. He ignited a brush fire when he tossed out the ideas of fining parents who didn’t help schools discipline their children and of making parents cover the cost of having a child repeat a grade.

Perot’s denunciation of bilingual education programs as “an unqualified flop” upset some Latino leaders, prompting White to promise that he would speak to Perot. Perot explained that it was the execution, not the idea, of the programs that he deplored.

At another point, Perot provoked criticism from lawmakers who said he had threatened to sabotage the reform program if he couldn’t win support for the appointed board.

Govs. Clements and White chose Perot to lead their crusades because of his reputation as a man of action, and because of a favorable public image he had burnished in 1979 by organizing a commando-style rescue of two employees of his company, Electronic Data Systems, who were being held captive by the Iranian government.

In his lobbying campaigns, Perot and his allies showed their stuff.

For the anti-drug effort, Perot’s team held hundreds of anti-drug seminars and mobilized middle-class parents in the PTA and the Junior League. Perot spent generously, once putting up the wives of state legislators at Austin’s elegant Driskell Hotel so they could attend an anti-drug seminar.

The anti-drug bill was denounced as both Draconian and silly. Outlawing head shops, said John Duncan of the Texas Civil Liberties Union, was like “banning bikinis to stop promiscuity.”

But in the end, opposing the drug reforms appeared to be such bad public relations that the drug companies, physicians and dentists who first expressed concerns stopped fighting the measure.

With education reform, in contrast, opposition was so fervent and widespread that even today advocates marvel that the bill passed.

Instead of entrusting the lobbying campaign to a company lawyer, as he had done in the drug war, Perot hired four of the best lobbyists in Austin and put others on retainer so they couldn’t be hired by the other side. He hired “anybody who was warm to the touch,” said Hobby, the former lieutenant governor.

Texas’ 170,000 teachers and coaches were well-organized, but Perot tramped through petroleum clubs, yacht clubs and chambers of commerce convincing Texas business people that only with a better-educated work force could the state’s economy thrive.

In turn, corporate contributors called legislators, sometimes even meeting surprised lawmakers at their hometown airports to urge support for the bill.

State Sen. O. H. (Ike) Harris, a Dallas Republican who opposed the bill, got a call from the banker who had helped finance his business. The banker suggested that “I ought to vote for it because of Ross,” Harris recalls.

Some accused Perot of lobbying too hard. School board President Butler and two other board members claimed Perot and his lawyer had hinted in private conversations that the three would win seats on the new board if they backed the appointed-board proposal--a charge Perot denied.

Opposition was fierce from fiscal conservatives, from the teachers opposed to competency exams and merit evaluations and from parents, coaches and high school sports fans who feared the “no pass, no play” rule would ruin their teams.

Two weeks into the special session convened to consider the bill, all seemed lost when the House Public Education Committee gutted the reform proposal. But in a last-minute counterattack, Perot’s allies reintroduced the bill on the House floor, called key lawmakers in the early morning hours for intensive lobbying and won passage of the bill by an overwhelming margin. “He whipped us like a tied-up billy goat,” said Joseph of the coaches’ association.

But even though Perot persuaded the Legislature to go along on education and drugs, the long-term results of the two reform efforts have been mixed.

After enactment of the drug law, the state databank on drug prescriptions lived up to its billing: Within a year, authorities claimed that prescriptions of widely abused drugs were down by nearly half. A few head shops went out of business, although most found a way to work around the statute.

But the drug explosion of the 1980s belied Perot’s claim that stiff sentences alone could scare away drug dealers. Nor, according to one study, did the law accomplish its goals of lengthening drug sentences and enabling police to shift focus from what Perot called the drug trade’s “sparrows” to its “bull elephants.”

The study showed that in the 1980s, the length of drug sentences “stayed fairly stable,” said James Marquart, criminal justice professor at Sam Houston State University. The study also showed that Texas police are still convicting about the same proportion of petty drug criminals as before.

Critics say the reformers should have foreseen that along with stiffer sentences, they needed to provide money to expand the state’s overflowing prisons and to invest in drug treatment--a remedy that Perot then rejected.

Today, even many former supporters of the bill, in the words of Sen. Harris, believe the anti-drug campaign ended as “not much at all--a lot of conversation.”

The benefits were more evident with education.

The effort yielded three key accomplishments: It focused public attention on schools, reduced class sizes in kindergarten through second grade and brought preschool programs--similar to the federal government’s much-praised Head Start program--to many disadvantaged children.

Despite repeated attempts to water down the “no pass, no play” rule, Texas pupils still must pass all courses in order to take part in sports and other extracurricular activities.

Some of the reforms, however, began to unravel as soon as they were passed.

Protests mounted as students were forced out of sports, teachers were required to submit to what they considered the humiliation of a competency exam and school districts shouldered the cost of administering the program.

In the first year, 30 suits were filed by parents unhappy about the “no pass, no play” rule. The changes went into effect just as the recession walloped Texas, and as the program raised costs and shifted aid from richer to poorer districts, some districts suffered severe financial distress.

Teachers were tested only once, in 1986; fewer than 1% washed out. Perot’s goal of basing teacher pay on merit rather than seniority was never fully implemented.

Perot had correctly predicted that officials of the elected school board would try to dismantle his reforms, and he campaigned hard when the appointed school board was put to a referendum in 1987. But he failed to convince voters that he wasn’t simply trying to supplant their choices with his, and the board remained elected.

In its diagnosis of the Texas schools’ problems, Perot’s education package was farsighted. It incorporated many of the ideas that he heard from education experts--supporting his claim today that as President he would be a “good listener.”

But in terms of implementation, in some ways the program was clumsy, critics say.

Perot and his allies couldn’t have anticipated the recession, but it was clear that his measures were going to place a huge burden on the state and school districts even if good times had continued, they say.

Rep. Jack Vowell, an El Paso Republican, said that reformers “weren’t focusing on the financial impact, they were thinking about the ideal teaching environment.”

Despite Perot’s campaign for an appointed board, some critics fault him for not working harder to follow through on reforms when they began to unravel. “There was a failure in leadership,” asserted Mike Morrow, former executive director of the Assn. of Texas Professional Educators.

Others, such as Texas Federation of Teachers President John Cole, are less critical: “Perot did so much--how much can you ask one man to do?”

Clearly, one obstacle to implementing the reforms was Perot’s poor relations with teachers. The attacks on the education Establishment built popular support in the beginning, but they became a decided handicap when it came time to put the initiatives into effect.

“Even today,” said Cole, “some people curse and spit when they hear his name.”

Gov. White and Lt. Gov. Hobby urged Perot to cool his rhetoric and be more compromising. Perot, in turn, “accused us of not being sufficiently dedicated,” said White, whose 1986 reelection defeat has been attributed to the reforms, and who has recently had a falling out with Perot over a business deal.

“In several ways, the process could have been handled more artfully,” White said.