TUSTIN : Educator Says Focus on Kids, Not Politics

Gloria Matta Tuchman admits that she does not possess political savvy. But this candidate for state Superintendent of Public Instruction is not afraid of being candid when it comes to educational issues.

Her solution to the state’s ailing education system is simple: “Get politics and politicians’ hands off of education.”

“I’m scared of what might happen in the future if California is stuck with four more years of the same,” Tuchman said, adding that politicians have “ruined education and shifted the focus from the kids to politics.”

Tuchman, 50, who says she wants to change all that, has registered with the state’s Fair Political Practices office to run in the 1994 race. She would be the first Latina to vie for the state office.

Tuchman’s campaign is in the “exploratory stage,” according to her San Francisco-based political consultant Duane M. Baughman.

Tuchman, who would run as an independent, hopes to get a jump on the competition with a fund-raising mailer that went out earlier this year. She is planning a second mailing for mid-July.

Tuchman, whose family owns a restaurant in Arizona, has been a teacher for 26 years and a member of the Tustin Unified School District Board of Education for seven years.

“Being a schoolteacher, being a school board member, being a Hispanic . . . these are the things that drive me with such force,” said Tuchman, a first-grade teacher for students with limited English-language proficiency. “I have always stuck with teaching because that is where I think the answers to education are, in the classroom with the kids.”

As state superintendent, her commitment to the classroom would be unwavering, she said. “Being in charge of the state’s schools is not an office job. If you lose that touch with children, with the classroom, with teachers, nothing is going to be right.”

Tuchman has been in the education spotlight since the mid-1960s when she took part in a Head Start program for minority children just getting started in Phoenix. Two decades later, she graced the cover of USA Today with her push for bilingual education, which led her to a virtual showdown with state Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco).

“I am not afraid to take on anyone or anything,” said Tuchman. “I just say exactly what I think.”

That candor has gained Tuchman three appointments to national committees. In 1987, she was appointed to the National Advisory and Coordinating Council for Bilingual Education. A year later, she served on the committees for Improvement and Reform for Schools and Teaching and the National Council for Child Nutrition.

On the local level, Tuchman has been outspoken on racism in the schools. She recently voted for a controversial boundary change in Tustin that will even out minority attendance at the district’s two high schools in addition to spending reforms that would divert more money to school renovations.

Tuchman, who was the top vote-getter in the 1990 school board election, hopes that her success locally will help catapult her into state office.

“If ’92 is in fact the year of the woman, then 1994 will be the year of the local minority woman,” she said.

Even with her long list of accomplishments and awards, Tuchman said she still eats humble pie. “I listen to everybody and I don’t profess to know all there is to know.

“I still feel very strongly about doing my homework,” she said. “Maybe that is just the teacher in me.”