Senate OKs Bill to Aid State’s Worst Schools

A potentially far-reaching bill designed to help low-achieving children by pumping an extra $120 million into the worst schools won narrow approval Thursday in the state Senate.

In an emotional debate, Senate President Pro Tem Bill Lockyer (D-Hayward) warned that the California “lifeboat” is sinking for “kids who are not making it,” chiefly those in inner-city schools.

“We are all in this lifeboat together,” he told the Senate. “I want to save all the passengers, all the crew.”

But Republicans charged that pouring an additional $120 million a year into bad performing schools would merely reward them for failure.

“Only in government is it that if you do a bad job, you get more money,” said Sen. Ray Haynes (R-Riverside). “You will get more money to continue doing the same bad job.”

The bill (SB 1894), authored by Lockyer, was approved 23 to 12 over nearly solid GOP opposition and went on to the Assembly, which earlier passed a competing bill by Speaker Curt Pringle (R-Garden Grove).

The Pringle plan would allow parents of low-achieving students to enroll them in private schools with taxpayer-financed “opportunity scholarships.”

The two bills are expected to be candidates for an education conference committee that will seek to draft a compromise.

Under Lockyer’s bill, schools in the bottom 5% of average pupil achievement would be targeted for a series of remedial actions, ranging from intensified academic work to assistance from businesses, local government, churches and neighborhood organizations.

The participation of private organizations would be coordinated by nonprofit “neighborhood development corporations” in what Lockyer described as an attempt to “revitalize” neighborhoods and return to the notion that the school is the “center of community life.”

The schools would receive an additional $350 a year per student for four years to help improve education. Students who failed to progress could transfer to another public campus.

Sen. Hilda Solis (D-El Monte), who represents students in some of the most crime-ridden and economically stressed communities of Los Angeles County, pleaded for approval of the bill.

“We don’t even have a fighting chance,” she said. “How do you expect them to compete? . . . If you don’t put in an ounce of medicine now, you are going to be responsible for what happens later on when those students decide that nobody cares about them.”

Sen. Ross Johnson (R-Irvine) said the real issue was how money for improving education is to be spent.

Citing the Los Angeles Unified School District, Johnson said education funds “clearly are not reaching kids in the classroom when they spend $98,000 for a bodyguard-chauffeur for the superintendent and when they have these huge edifices to house the bureaucracy.”

But aiming his response at Republicans, Lockyer described their alternatives as: “balkanize, retribalize, ‘Let me get into my gated community, my private road, my private school [and] use public taxpayer money to support my effort to withdraw.’ ”

He said California political leaders should “recapture that spirit of confidence and optimism that characterized the great builders of the ‘50s and ‘60s. We have lost it. We are lost in the wilderness.”