Riley Reforms Won Applause of Experts : Schools: His campaign to upgrade South Carolina education was viewed as the most effective in the region.

In the early 1980s, a group of Southern governors sought to reshape their region by dramatically changing their public schools.

They stumped their states to win broad support for smaller classes, better-paid teachers, higher graduation standards and--most important of all--the extra tax money to pay for these improvements. This group included Bill Winter of Mississippi, Jim Hunt of North Carolina, Bob Graham of Florida, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Richard W. Riley of South Carolina and Bill Clinton of Arkansas.

Among these “education governors,” Riley probably gained the least national recognition. He is short, soft-spoken and somewhat stooped because of a spinal affliction. Unlike several of his counterparts, he also appeared to have no wide political ambitions.

But education experts have applauded Riley’s school-reform plan as the broadest and most effective of them all.

“In his own quiet way, he made South Carolina No. 1 in education reform,” said Ernest Boyer, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

On Monday, President-elect Clinton tapped Riley as his secretary of education and charged him with leading a similarly broad-based campaign to energize American schools and colleges.

The education secretary “can set benchmarks, national standards for excellence,” Clinton said at a press conference in Little Rock, Ark. “He can be a spur for creativity and for change and he can do it in a way that makes education everywhere in America the exciting venture it ought to be.”

Riley, who will turn 60 on Jan. 2, is rarely described as exciting.

“If you were casting a movie for a successful politician, you would not pick him,” said Mark Musick, president of the Southern Regional Education Board, who worked with both Clinton and Riley on their education reform plans.

Unlike many Southern politicians, Riley is neither a glad-hander nor a flamboyant orator. Nonetheless, through polite and persistent effort, he was able to push a tax increase through his conservative state to fund the school improvements he sought.

“Once you meet him, you know you’re dealing with an earnest man of real ability, a special kind of person,” said Musick.

In many states, including Arkansas, teachers initially were skeptical of the reform plans--but not in South Carolina.

“I remember him coming to talk to us one day and mostly he listened and took notes,” said Jim Gilstrap, president of the South Carolina Education Assn. “He’s somewhat like Bill Clinton in that he wants to hear all the information. Then, he goes out and builds a consensus for change.”

In 1983, the South Carolina Legislature rejected his school reform plan, including a one-cent state sales tax needed to pay for it. But Riley toured the state and took his case to business groups, teachers and university crowds and soon created a groundswell of support that swept the program through the Legislature a year later.

That feat impressed the Arkansas governor.

“I don’t know that I’ve ever known anybody with whom I’ve worked closely who, over the course of a lifetime, had occasion to show greater determination and more years of personal courage than Dick Riley,” Clinton said Monday.

After graduating from Furman University in 1954, Riley entered the Navy. But there, he contracted a spinal inflammation that left him in great pain and confined him to a wheelchair. After the inflammation and pain subsided, he was left with a spinal curvature, although he was able to leave the wheelchair.

He enrolled in law school at the University of South Carolina, graduated in 1959 and served as counsel to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee before returning to Greenville, S.C., to win a seat in the state Senate.

In 1978, he won election as governor on the same date Bill Clinton was first elected in Arkansas. Four years later, he won reelection with 70% of the vote. Since leaving office in 1987, he has returned to law practice in Columbia, while remaining active on several national education boards.

His nomination appeared to win unanimous praise from education leaders Monday. Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, called Riley a “visionary education reformer (who) recognized that real changes require transforming the whole system, not just depending on a single magic bullet.”

Those who know Riley say that he will not use the job of education secretary as a bully pulpit to preach about changing the schools.

Unlike President Ronald Reagan or Bush, Bill and Hillary Clinton have taken a long interest in schools and children, and they do not need anyone to devise an education program for them. But Riley can pull the pieces together and put a plan to work, experts say.

“He’s the guy who can get everyone into the same boat and get them rowing together,” said Musick.

For 12 of the 13 years since it was formed, the now $30-billion-a-year department has been controlled by Republicans, many of whom believed that it should be abolished. Bennett and Alexander, the former Tennessee governor who now holds the job, pressed for new programs to give parents the choice to send their children to private or parochial schools.

During the campaign, Clinton called for an ambitious education agenda, but one focused only on the public schools. He advocated more funding for programs such as Head Start to prepare young children for school, extra aid to make classes smaller in the early grades, national standards and tests to measure achievement in the high schools.