Davis Facing Obstacles in Vow for Education Reform

As a candidate for governor, Lt. Gov. Gray Davis stumped for education reform with a platform long on rhetoric and short on specific proposals.

Now, as the governor-elect leading a Democratic transition to power, Davis faces the formidable job of assembling a legislative program that not only builds on the state’s many education reform measures of recent years, but also satisfies the public’s thirst for bold action and speedy results.

On Tuesday, a task force Davis named to brainstorm ideas will meet for the first time in Los Angeles. Time is running quickly; Davis has said he will call a special session of the Legislature to pass urgent education measures as soon as he takes office in January.

The governor-elect has not publicly spelled out his thinking in detail. His choices may well be constrained if the amount of discretionary money in the next state budget dwindles. But the task force itself offers clues to where Davis is heading.

With 13 members ranging from teacher union presidents to academics to business leaders--and pointedly omitting many members of the state’s education establishment--the panel is an amalgam of insiders and outsiders.

Members of the task force, like key lawmakers in the Democratic-controlled Legislature, talk most about the need to hold schools accountable for lagging performance. But how exactly to do that is a tricky question.

Gary K. Hart, a former state senator who is said to be a candidate to become Davis’ chief education advisor, said he favors a system that includes punishment for consistently poor schools so long as it is done in “a thoughtful manner.” But the 285,000-member California Teachers Assn., the state’s largest teacher union, contends that it would be unfair to require schools to perform at a particular level before teachers receive training in the state’s new academic standards in reading, math, history and science.

Debate on Need for Change

Underlying the task force’s work is an emerging debate over how much of an overhaul the schools really need. Some, like the CTA, stress continuity. Others, like Los Angeles businessman Eli Broad, want to reexamine the school system from top to bottom.

“Look, we’ve talked about reform for more than a decade,” said Broad, a task force member who favors merit pay for teachers. “We’ve seen lots of money thrown at this. But it’s hard to say that there’s been real progress. I think you start with a clean piece of paper and a premise that we’re going to have to do better than we have in the past.”

To be sure, others will weigh in besides the task force. There are Democratic legislators whose bills have been scuttled or reworked in the past 16 years by Republican governors. The Democratic state superintendent of public instruction, reelected this month, is pushing to raise her profile. Some Republicans will argue for bipartisan compromise while others fight every new spending initiative.

Ethnic politics, always a factor in a state with more immigrant students than any other, may play a significant role. Some Latino leaders in Los Angeles, noting that Latino children account for 40% of the state’s public school enrollment, are working behind the scenes to develop their own education agenda.

But the state’s leading politicians and education interest groups are watching the task force closely. Some top Democrats are helping to shepherd it along. Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa (D-Los Angeles) dispatched his chief education aide, Rick Simpson, to coordinate the task force.

“I think Gray wants to focus on the education piece,” Villaraigosa said. “He wants to move in the direction of some reforms that we can see quickly, especially [in] reading.”

Davis has staked a great deal on improving schools, repeatedly calling it his top priority. “He said to me the other day he’d be comfortable if 85% of the entire State of the State address were devoted to education,” said Barry Munitz, former chancellor of the California State University system and head of the Davis transition.

Such attention to education may have contributed to Davis’ sweeping victory on Nov. 3 over Republican Dan Lungren. Voters told pollsters the issue was more important than any other. But Davis’ strategy is not without risk. The governor-elect has now raised public expectations considerably. As many politicians before him have learned, student test scores rarely rise as fast as public sentiment for improvement.

During the campaign, Davis sketched out a platform in many ways similar to what the state has already enacted.

He called for a major investment in textbooks; the Legislature and Gov. Pete Wilson approved spending $1 billion on textbooks over four years. Davis promised to end “social promotion,” the practice of advancing students from grade to grade despite academic deficits; Wilson and the Legislature agreed this year on a law to do just that. Davis competed with Lungren over who could sound more disciplinarian about drugs on campus; the state already has a zero-tolerance law. And Davis promised to use “world-class” standards to help boost student achievement; the state in the past two years has adopted standards in all key academic subjects.

In an interview with The Times in September, Davis said the state needs a “Manhattan Project,” akin to the effort to build a nuclear bomb during World War II, to help more children learn to read by the end of third grade. Last spring, more than 60% of third-graders scored below the national average in a test of reading skills given in English. But Davis has not yet fleshed out that idea beyond placing reading on his to-do list for the special session and insisting that the state university and college systems should somehow pitch in.

Late in the campaign, a few more specifics emerged. Davis was quoted, for example, as saying that public schools whose graduates need help in math or English when they enter college should have to pay for those remedial classes.

But Davis spokesman Michael Bustamante sought last week to hedge the tough talk. “The goal here isn’t to be punitive,” Bustamante said. “The goal is to make high schools understand that we cannot allow students to be graduated who still require remedial English and math.”

Davis is counting on the task force, Munitz and Simpson said, to help him develop more specific direction for his first steps with the Legislature and draft the education portion of his proposed 1999-2000 budget.

The announcement of the task force on Nov. 12 drew as much notice for who was not on the list as for who was on it.

There was only one Latino--Marlene L. Garcia, education director for the state Senate Research Office. That rankled some Latino educators who say that schools with high Latino population need special attention in the aftermath of Proposition 227, the anti-bilingual education initiative. Others were hoping to persuade Davis to revisit the state’s requirement that virtually all students from grade 2 to 11 be tested in English.

“We were there for you, Gray Davis. We expect you to be there for us,” said Victoria Castro, president of the Los Angeles Unified Board of Education.

Representatives from the state’s leading education groups were also scarce. There was nobody from the state school boards, nobody from the state PTA and nobody from the state association of superintendents and principals, which had endorsed Davis in the campaign.

The one principal on the group, Nancy Ichinaga of Inglewood, and the one superintendent, Alan Bersin of San Diego, do not belong to the school administrators’ association and are known as outsiders in what is often a clannish public school community.

The makeup of the task force reflected the rising influence of business leaders in public education. Reed Hastings, one member, is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who led the effort this year to expand California’s charter school movement.

Higher education may also play a key role. Six out of the 13 members are or have been connected with the California State University or University of California systems. Davis has encountered many of them during his four-year stint as lieutenant governor, sitting on the UC Board of Regents and Cal State Board of Trustees.

Cecil Lytle, a provost at UC San Diego and another charter school activist, told task force coordinator Simpson that the state should consider linking its academic standards for public schools to the benchmarks for UC admission.

In a separate interview with The Times, Lytle said Davis was “looking for people who think outside of the box.” Lytle said merit pay for teachers should be considered. (State law now allows local school districts to negotiate merit pay in collective bargaining, but the practice is not widespread.) And he said the school system needs a “comprehensive” review.

Some task force members caution that the state’s schools have plenty on their plate already: new tests, new textbooks, new standards, new teacher recruiting programs, reduced class size in elementary schools and ninth grade, to mention only some. In this view, perhaps the boldest move the next governor could take would be to let those measures take root.

“We need to be mindful that schools are trying to adapt to dramatic change in California,” Garcia, the Senate research director, said. “We need to create some stability and predictability in the direction that we set--and not just start on another fad and change our minds in three years.”

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Times staff writers Amy Pyle and Louis Sahagun contributed to this report.