DiMarco Departs the Good Fight

Maureen DiMarco’s resignation Tuesday as California’s secretary of Child Development and Education means that our state will be deprived of one of its most nimble education crusaders.

Since taking office in 1990, DiMarco has had to maneuver between a rock and a hard place. The rock was made up of mostly Democratic teachers’ unions, to which DiMarco had to explain school funding cuts during the state’s recession. The hard place was Gov. Pete Wilson’s Republican administration, which often distrusted the lifelong Democrat.

Nevertheless, DiMarco managed to move the state’s schools resolutely forward. She helped draft Wilson’s Healthy Start program, which brought social service agencies into the schools. She played an important role in the current program to reduce primary class sizes. And she was among the first to warn that the state’s math and reading programs needed to be refocused on basic skills.

One issue on which Wilson and DiMarco could not agree, however, was school vouchers, which would give parents public dollars they could use to send their children to the schools of their choice. Sacramento insiders say DiMarco was pressured to resign largely because of this difference. In contrast, DiMarco’s successor, Marian Bergeson, has strongly supported voucher programs.

As DiMarco did, Bergeson will enter a politically heated office, for she will have to work closely with Supt. of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin, the state’s top elected education official. In 1993, Wilson tried to name Bergeson interim superintendent of Public Instruction. But a campaign largely led by Eastin blocked that appointment in the Legislature. Can these two work together? Bergeson’s pragmatic background gives reason to be optimistic. As an Orange County supervisor since 1994, she helped shape the county’s recovery from bankruptcy. And as a former teacher and school board member, she has respect in the education community.

Now, in order to help Wilson, work with Eastin and, most important, advance primary and secondary education in California, Bergeson must tread the same careful but productive path as her predecessor.