Honig Era Ends but Discord Remains : Education: Schools chief nominee faces a bruising confirmation fight as battle lines are drawn over powers of state board.

In picking a decorous kindergarten teacher turned savvy legislator to lead the state’s cash-starved public schools, Gov. Pete Wilson said last week that he expected to end “years of fruitless contention.”

The remark was a dig at recently deposed Bill Honig, whose high-profile, reform-bent decade as head of the state Department of Education was marked by frequent, loud clashes with two governors, a score of legislators and conservatives on the State Board of Education.

Democrat Honig’s sentencing last month for convictions on felony conflict-of-interest charges gave Wilson a chance to appoint a like-minded Republican--state Sen. Marian Bergeson of Newport Beach--to fill out the remaining two years in the former superintendent of public instruction’s term.

Bergeson faces a bruising confirmation fight in the Democrat-controlled Legislature. If she wins that battle, she may be stepping into a lesser job than the one Honig assumed in 1983. Budget cuts have shrunk the department staff by a third and a recent court ruling, if allowed to stand, will give substantially more power to the appointed state board.

“This was a knockout decision for the board,” Michael Kirst, a Stanford University education professor and a former board member, said of the decision handed down Feb. 18 by the 3rd District Court of Appeal in Sacramento. “This fundamentally changes the relationship” between a board appointed by the governor and the person elected by California voters, Kirst said.

The court ruled that the board has policy-making authority and granted it powers to review the superintendent’s choices for top Department of Education staff, help formulate education and department budgets and review directives before they are sent out to schools. It also ruled that the board is entitled to its own attorney and several other staff members.

On Friday, the department asked for a new hearing, and acting state schools chief William D. Dawson said the department will consider appealing to the state Supreme Court.

“There is an incredibly important principle at stake in this lawsuit,” Dawson said. “It has to do with having the people maintain control of California’s schools through an elected state superintendent rather than an appointed state board answerable to no one.”

The court battle, initiated in 1991 by a sharply divided board, grew out of battles between its conservatives and Honig that began with arguments over curriculum and policy but quickly segued into personality clashes. At the height of the power struggle, then-board President Joseph D. Carrabino persuaded a slim majority of his colleagues to file suit. He resigned last year when it became apparent that the Senate would reject his appointment for another term.

Board President Joseph Stein, also a conservative, hailed the court decision but, noting that it could be overturned by the courts or greatly altered by the Legislature, struck a conciliatory tone.

“I hope the board can prove that what we want to do is constructive and positive and beneficial for students. We really have to all pull together for the benefit of the students,” Stein said.

The makeup of the 11-member board, which has one vacancy for a four-year term, has been changing. Although members appointed by former Gov. George Deukmejian, a conservative Republican, still predominate, Wilson, a moderate Republican, has been able to name four appointees, including the one-year term set aside for a student.

Two of Wilson’s appointees must be confirmed by the Senate this month or lose their posts. The terms of two Deukmejian appointees, Stein and Kathryn Dronenburg, expired in January and Wilson’s office has not acted on reappointing or replacing them.

Bergeson, who has built a reputation as an astute politician who can get things done despite belonging to the Legislature’s minority party, said she has no problem with the court ruling.

“It may narrow the authority (of the state superintendent), but it does not narrow the leadership,” Bergeson said. “I think the superintendent, as the elected representative, still has a unique opportunity to have the far greater role in crafting the policies and building support for them. But I think the board and the (governor’s) Administration can be brought into that as well.”

Bergeson credited Honig with “an outstanding job of energizing and eliciting support” for education but faulted him for his spirit of confrontation.

“That’s where it all breaks down. We must get our educational leadership moving in the same direction,” Bergeson said.

But in advocating innovations that have been widely copied across the nation and in battling hard for school funding, Honig’s combative spirit drew many admirers and strong support from educators and parents. Some said that the schools, reeling from years of recession-induced budget cuts and facing problems of explosive growth and increasing poverty among students, deserve nothing less than a dedicated fighter.

Bergeson’s critics, noting that she has supported the governor’s efforts to reduce the state deficit by cutting school funding, doubt that she can fill the bill.

Sen Gary K. Hart (D-Santa Barbara), who heads the Senate Education Committee and is one of several legislators who plans to run for superintendent in 1994, said he will oppose Bergeson’s appointment because “she has just not been there on funding issues. . . . It’s very important to have someone in an advocacy position on that.”

Despite the court ruling, Hart said he views the superintendent’s post “as the most important job, with the exception of governor, in California now.” He said the greater powers that the court has given the board may result in more careful Senate scrutiny of the governor’s appointees, and he believes that other policy-makers will still give considerable weight to the views and positions of the state’s elected schools leader.

Kevin Gordon, chief lobbyist for the California School Boards Assn., agreed. “I have to think the Legislature is going to pay more attention to what this statewide-elected constitutional officer has to say than to some board that is there because of the governor.”

Historically, governance of the state’s schools has long been fragmented and the job of superintendent has been ambiguous. Technically nonpartisan, the post has been periodically buffeted by political and ideological clashes. Another clash seems certain as the Republican governor tries to win approval for his appointee to a post just vacated by a Democrat in the highly charged and politically divisive atmosphere in Sacramento.

Over the years, the job of schools chief has weathered changes in the Constitution, three attempts to get voters to abolish it, the addition of a state board and a Department of Education and, recently, the emergence of a Cabinet-level post in the governor’s office that deals with education policy.

Even before Honig, highly partisan battles sometimes marked the relationship between the superintendent and state board.

The fights between Max Rafferty, the ultraconservative schools chief in the 1960s, and the liberal board appointed by then-Gov. Edmund G. (Pat) Brown Sr. put California in a state of “policy gridlock” for a while, said Stanford’s Kirst. But that did not entirely prevent Rafferty from putting his ideological stamp on the state’s public education system.

Rafferty was defeated in 1970 by Wilson Riles, who ushered in a less partisan era marked by his advancement of special education and other programs for disadvantaged children. Then Honig defeated Riles in 1982, using the job to advance the cause of reform in tougher academic standards, better curriculum and textbooks and improved ways of assessing student progress.

“Here you’ve had three very different superintendents, each working within the varous limitations of the job, but each was able to bend it to their particular priorities,” Kirst said. “In that sense, they all did a good job.”