At the Center of the Storm : Education: Marian Bergeson, once a teacher, wants to become state schools chief, but the opposition is as vocal as she is.

State Sen. Marian Bergeson often wonders what has become of the young black and Latino students she taught at a segregated grade school in Santa Monica.

In the four decades since she passed through that impoverished school as a neophyte teacher, Bergeson has watched her own four children use California’s public education system as a springboard to degrees from Stanford, the University of Utah, UCLA and UC Irvine.

Now, as the 67-year-old lawmaker braces for a bruising confirmation fight as Gov. Pete Wilson’s nominee for the $102,000-a-year state superintendent of public instruction post, she’ll be challenged to refocus her attention on the system’s less successful components.

Her opponents, she knows, are more likely to press for her remedies for the state’s over-crowded, drug-addled and, in some cases, bullet-pocked campuses than for memories of her own children’s education in an Orange County district where some students enjoy recess on the white sands of Newport Beach.

Leading the resistance to her confirmation--and backed by officials of the 40,000-member California Federation of Teachers--is the formidable Democratic Speaker of the Assembly, Willie Brown.

Brown argues that the Republican senator’s nomination is an effort by Wilson “to appease the right wing of his own party” and that Bergeson’s support of the governor’s efforts to cut school funding by $2.3 billion last year is sufficient reason to disqualify her.

But the senator’s friends and colleagues say that if anyone can survive an interrogation by Willie Brown & Co., it’s Bergeson.

When Bergeson entered politics, her genteel demeanor and penchant for high-collared blouses prompted some to dub her “Marian the Librarian.”

That name fell into disuse, however, as the skiing, sky-diving, para-sailing lawmaker demonstrated her scrappier side.

Don’t be deceived, admirers warn, by her immaculately coiffed hair, the designer eyeglasses or the sunny skirts and dresses.

“That lady can outlast people half her age and twice her size without ever having a hair out of place,” says John W. Nicoll, who was hired in 1971 as superintendent of the Newport-Mesa Unified School District by a board that included Bergeson. “I don’t know how she does it.”

For the last 35 years, Bergeson has lived with her husband, Garth, in Newport Beach, raising four children who, in turn, have produced four grandchildren. She was born in Salt Lake City and raised in West Los Angeles, attending UCLA before receiving a bachelor’s degree in elementary education from Brigham Young University in 1949.

Bergeson first ran for the state Assembly in 1978 and moved up to the Senate in 1984. Along the way, she marked her tenure with plenty of legislative successes on behalf of her conservative Orange County constituents.

She is anti-abortion, has opposed efforts to ban discrimination against homosexuals and has spoken out against divesting the state’s pension funds of stock in companies that do business with South Africa.

Modest and polite, Bergeson has earned a reputation among her colleagues in Sacramento as a tenacious fighter and persistent negotiator more intent on problem-solving than on bipartisan bickering.

In a 1992 survey, California Journal named her the top Republican senator in terms of integrity and energy, and readers of Orange County’s Metropolitan Journal cited Bergeson as the county’s Most Effective Politician in 1990.

She also wins praise from many educators.

“She listens, she gathers information, she’s very knowledgeable,” says Jack W. Peltason, president of the University of California system and former chancellor of UC Irvine. “She’s got good judgment and good humor, but she’s not afraid to make tough decisions.”

A member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Bergeson has stressed that religion shouldn’t be taught in the schools but should be “taught about.” She has also expressed support for the concept of allowing children a moment of silence during the school day but is not an advocate of prayer in the classroom.

Come confirmation time, her opponents’ most forceful criticism probably will be leveled against her support of Wilson’s budget cuts.

Bergeson responds with a verbal shrug:

“The state is fiscally broke. We’re in a crisis situation as far as the economy is concerned. . . . No, we’re not getting enough money into classrooms and yes, we need more money. But we have to make up for that until a time when the economy starts moving again.”

Would she support further cuts?

“No,” she says. “I think we’re at rock bottom with education.”

Still, given California’s continuing recession, the time may be right, she says, to recognize that “we can restructure, we can deregulate schools and unleash creative thinking at the local level.”

And she sees the superintendent’s position as a a place to spur those changes, even though some of the authority “has been diluted” by recent political shufflings: “We have to recognize we can’t just wring our hands. We have to look at communities to make it better.

“It takes a commitment and a caring. A business will say, ‘We have a particular need in our company for these kinds of skills,’ and then they work with the teachers (to develop) vocational training.”

Beyond that, Bergeson focuses on community involvement in education.

“Schools don’t serve in isolation,” she says. “You have to deal with support services: law enforcement, the court system . . . if we’re ever going to move away from the crime and the drugs and the kind of battlegrounds that exist around our schoolyards.

“It doesn’t stop at the gate. What happens in the community eventually gets into the classroom. . . . In order to have a “safe learning environment, you’re going to have to bring in law enforcement. We can’t tolerate the gang warfare and the gang graffiti when it’s costing the community resources. I mean, that money could go into positive efforts at setting up parks and playgrounds and things for kids.”

The infusion of funds into the cities that President Clinton has supported, says Bergeson, could be “a major breakthrough for schools. . . . If you have a city that simply can’t deal with the external factors--crime, violence--you’re going to find a community that can’t deal with its classroom problems.”

As she has toured schools with the governor lately, Bergeson says she has seen a number of successful school programs:

“I think the problem isn’t so much in dollars we spend, it’s the educational experience within those classrooms that makes the difference. If you have good teacher teaching, say, 35 students, that’s a far better experience than a poor teacher teaching 15 students.”

Culling the bad may not be as difficult as people suspect, she says.

“I think we build mediocrity into the system,” she says, pointing to uniform salary schedules for teachers as an example.

Rather, she would change credential procedures “to assure we are attracting the best and the brightest and giving them the incentive to be successful in the profession. The more we can build teaching onto a profession, a desirable profession that is respected and given its true merit in the community, (the more) we’re going to see better things happening in our schools.”

Raising teachers’ self-esteem may be difficult when their pay is going down, though, critics might say.

“We need to pay them on a productivity basis,” she says. “We need to build a reward system or a performance system for excellence, and that’s why I think competition or choice becomes a very important element within the public schools.”

Bergeson says she supports exploring the possible breakup of the L.A. Unified School District: “The system is monolithic. It’s incredibly difficult to get any kind of sensitivity to individual needs when you have a district that large.”

Bergeson opposes the June, 1994, “voucher initiative” that would give students the option of using taxpayer-supplied funds to attend the schools of their choice--public, private or parochial.

But she has, in the past, introduced a variant voucher bill herself.

Her proposal, she says, would have offered children who are “trapped” in low-performing schools the option of transferring to a nearby public school. If none was available, they could have taken their funding to a non-religious private school.

The bill never got out of committee.

Still, opponents like Willie Brown are already slamming her for even letting the dangerous V-word cross her lips.

But Eileen Padberg, an Orange County political consultant, says Bergeson is perhaps one of the few Republicans who can win the support of state Democrats for the schools chief post, largely because she is not an ideologue.

“Marian’s true belief is that ‘I can get things done.’ And ideology has very little to do with getting things done,” Padberg said.

Bergeson is hopeful but not confident she will be confirmed. But she believes that the fourth-grade classroom early in her career helped prepare her.

She got the job, she says, after the former teacher had a nervous breakdown. She soon saw why: At night, vagrants littered the playground with broken bottles and razor blades, which students often carried into the classroom. Teachers then also had lunch duty, and the children demonstrated “some pretty aggressive behavior--at a pretty early age. . . .

“It was almost an impossible situation. (But) I took it as a challenge, because I thought that kids shouldn’t be throwaways, that there’s always a way to get to them if you want to put the time and concern and caring into them.

“It turned out to be probably the most satisfying experience I’ve ever had. I sort of view this new job in the same way.”

Times staff writers Stacy Wong and Kristina Lindgren contributed to this story.