Wilson Calls for Schools to Set Own Rules : Education: State regulations hinder flexibility, he contends. Program for districts would be patterned after new ‘charter schools’ law.

Gov. Pete Wilson on Thursday proposed freeing the public schools from most state regulatory control, saying local educators should be allowed to declare themselves “charter school districts,” then write their own rules and live by them.

Wilson, outlining his goals for education policy, said California’s schools need more money, but they also need greater flexibility to use their funds in ways they believe will best benefit students.

“To fix our schools, we must also free our schools,” Wilson said in a speech to education administrators. “We must free them from the tangle of state rules and regulations that distract teachers, principals and superintendents from their central mission--educating our children.

“I’m sure, given the freedom to focus solely on what’s best for our kids,” Wilson told the administrators gathered in Monterey, “each of you could construct a better school than the one created piecemeal through thousands of rules and regulations written by politicians in Sacramento.”

Wilson also proposed making it easier for professionals, such as unemployed aerospace engineers or retired military personnel, to become classroom teachers without returning to college and entering a teacher training program.

The Republican governor said he soon will ask the Legislature to expand programs to fight child abuse and improve foster care so that every child comes to school “ready to learn.”

But the proposal for charter school districts was the centerpiece of his speech. It comes at a time when a statewide group has qualified for the ballot an initiative that would allow parents to use taxpayers’ money to send their children to private schools. Wilson has not yet staked out a position on the voucher proposal, but public school advocates consider it a threat to the existence of public education.

Wilson provided few details of how his proposal would work and did not offer any examples of the state rules he believes are onerous, but the governor and his aides said the charter districts would be patterned after the recently enacted charter schools program, which allows teachers and parents to petition a district for the right to establish their own school using public funds but independent of most state and local regulations.

Wilson spokeswoman Kassy Perry said the governor would flesh out the details when he offers legislation on the issue. It was not clear Thursday what chances the proposal would have in the Legislature, where the charter schools issue was almost killed last year but made it to the governor’s desk on the strength of a skillful parliamentary maneuver by the bill’s author, state Sen. Gary K. Hart (D-Santa Barbara).

Although many Democratic lawmakers and the public schools lobby ordinarily would be expected to vigorously oppose Wilson’s measure, those same forces fear the private school voucher initiative even more and might be willing to consider alternatives in order to undercut support for the voucher idea.

Hart’s bill, which Wilson signed last fall, already allows entire districts, in theory, to participate in the experimental program. But the law limits the program to 100 schools statewide and specifies that no more than 10 schools in any one district can participate.

The Republican governor’s proposal drew criticism from the California Teachers Assn., the state’s largest teachers union, which opposed the charter school concept in the Legislature last year. There are not yet any charter schools operating in the state.

Teachers association President Del Weber said he was “bemused” that the governor would propose expanding a fledgling program that has not even gotten off the ground.

“What he is proposing is that the state just give the money out and there be no rules for anybody,” Weber said.

But in Los Angeles, where school officials Thursday held public hearings on two charter school applications, Board of Education member Mark Slavkin called Wilson’s proposal encouraging.

“His instincts are right in understanding that if we’re going to get at the kind of education reform that we want in our schools, we’ve got to dramatically deregulate the 7,600-page state Ed Code,” said Slavkin, who favors far-reaching decentralization in the vast Los Angeles school district.

Slavkin said he would support a move to charter status by the Los Angeles Unified School District if Wilson’s proposal becomes law. But longtime board member Roberta Weintraub said the sheer size of the nation’s second-largest school system--which covers 650 schools and serves 640,000 students--would hamper any charter attempt.

“For a small district, it’s a great idea,” she said. “But for L.A. Unified, it’s just too big to move that fast.”

In his speech, Wilson noted that last year he kept per-pupil funding constant for California’s schools even as other programs suffered deep cuts, an accommodation to which he agreed only under intense pressure from Democratic lawmakers and the education community. But Wilson said it would take “more than money” to create better schools.

“So while there are severe limits this year to funding for our schools, there should be no limit on the innovation and creativity we bring to reforming them, especially in tough times,” he said.

Maureen DiMarco, Wilson’s secretary for child development and education, said in an interview that the governor wanted to free the schools from “having to follow the morass of minutia and regulations” imposed by the state.

“We believe school districts can construct themselves to meet their kids’ needs in an effective way far better than the bureaucrats,” DiMarco said. “They should have that opportunity and then be held accountable for the product.”

If the program is enacted, DiMarco said, districts will be able to use state money for special programs--such as those for the gifted or the handicapped--without having to follow all the rules that govern how the money is spent. The important thing, she said, would be whether the district produced the desired results.

But Weber, of the teachers’ union, said his association fears that the program would allow districts to ignore statewide standards for teacher credentialing, set aside curriculum guidelines and sidestep rules that protect the right of teachers to assign grades free of intervention from their supervisors.

The real problem in the schools, Weber said, is not so much the state rules and regulations, but administrators who carry them out at the local level. He said those supervisors--Wilson’s audience Thursday--would most likely remain in place and continue to thwart the creativity of classroom teachers, even without the restrictions imposed by the state.

“There’s not a very close relationship between the problem he’s addressing and the solution he’s offering,” Weber said.

Times staff writer Henry Chu in Los Angeles contributed to this story.