PERSPECTIVE ON EDUCATION : Lift the Burden of State Code : We bind our schools with rules by the pound but offer few incentives for good teaching or active learning.

This week’s education summit in San Francisco won’t seriously consider the one reform that could change California’s entire school system: a wholesale redrafting of the California Education Code.

While voucher initiatives and alternative-school proposals allow a few schools to escape the straitjacket of more than 5,000 statutes--a hefty 11 pounds of law books--only a re-examination of the basic legal structure itself will create the drive for systemic change that our schools need.

The present legalistic web was not spun by a single spider. It evolved by courts, legislatures and agencies writing regulations without regard to how schools would implement them. Piecemeal reforms try to make things better but often don’t. The major reform legislation of the 1980s, Senate Bill 813, contained many good ideas--mentor teachers, longer school days, grants for teacher innovation--but it re-examined none of the basic structures of schooling and added 213 pages to the statute books. The result of this layering of good intentions is a “rule mindedness” that diverts educators’ attention from teaching and learning. As one principal lamented, “My job is to enforce the rules; it has nothing to do with educating anyone.” The web of rules creates an overemphasis on mandates and compliance and a great underemphasis on incentives and investments needed to build the capacity of California’s schools.

For example, the state that virtually created the information technology industry makes practically no investment in spreading its use in schools. Classrooms with phone lines are rare, much less classrooms with computers connected to external data sources. However, without substantial restructuring of how schools operate, we will never be able to redirect sufficient resources to make long-term investments that change the way people learn.

The current emphasis on rules and mandates creates a fiscal structure whose major incentive is to warehouse children. Schools are paid for getting students to show up. There is no incentive for good teaching and very few incentives for active learning. Some categorical programs actually penalize schools when achievement increases. Increases in productivity--learning faster--are not rewarded either.

Rule-boundedness has also made California education highly litigious and costly to administer. A recent study estimates that there have been more appellate and Supreme Court decisions regarding public education in the last 20 years than in the previous 80. The work of school superintendents increasingly involves responding to lawsuits and trying to avoid them.

If the legislators and educators assembled at this week’s summit want real reform, let them look first at the statutes they and their forebears have enacted. Let them create a tough bipartisan commission of educators, legislators and civic leaders with a clear mandate to redesign schools with the child’s mind at the center and with as few rules as possible.

Let them inquire deeply into how money flows through the system and how much or little makes it into regular classrooms. Ask them to think about how schools and other social services can be integrated without creating crushing paperwork burdens. Require them to confront the possibility of substantial productivity gains by changing how precious human resources can be combined with new technologies. Demand that they examine the custody-based financial system and rethink the role of school boards, which have lost most of their traditional fiscal function.

Challenging all the existing rules at once has a better chance than changing them piecemeal. Every small change brings forward an interest group whose tiny specialty is protected by that statute. Putting the entire system of education up for reconsideration brings forward the best chance for a combination of mutual gain and civil virtue.