Clear Case of Backhanded Backing for School Bills

“Who is in support of this bill?” the legislative committee chairwoman asks, and one after another, lobbyists flock to the podium.

They are “pleased,” “impressed” and “enthusiastic” that Gov. Gray Davis has taken on the cause of reforming public schools by initiating a quartet of sweeping bills in a special legislative session.

But there’s a teensy bit of fine-tuning they’d like to propose.

“There are just a few items,” said Linda Guthrie, a Los Angeles Unified School District teacher representing the teachers union at these public hearings.

The “few items” Guthrie ticked off, however, would mean major changes in Davis’ plan. She wants to eliminate the ranking of schools by test scores and do away with the ultimate punishment of closing a failing school.

Similar scenarios are playing out over and over in Capitol hearing rooms these days.

That’s because, in the infancy of the Davis administration, the education lobby finds itself in an uncomfortable bind. Its members consider the governor’s four bills too strongly worded and seriously flawed--unpalatable to the interests they represent.

But to publicly oppose the bills risks estranging the very governor on whom many of them have staked their highest hopes, in whom many invested large campaign contributions.

“Eight years ago we also tried to give Pete Wilson a chance, but the difference is he didn’t call a special session right out of the box,” said Mary Bergan, president of the California Federation of Teachers. “By the time [Wilson] came out with any big education packages, the well had been poisoned.”

So for now, at least, everyone is on their best behavior, whittling away at the Davis plan in hopes of shaping something they can live with.

Davis spokesman Michael Bustamante saw nothing out of the ordinary in negative comments being consistently couched in the most positive of terms.

“I think it’s just a matter of people realizing this is a good idea,” he said. “How could you oppose school reform?”

Molding a bill through amendments is the way law is made in Sacramento and, so far, the Davis administration seems willing to bend on the smaller details of the education plan, less so on the larger ones.

But insiders say that more than ever the amendment waltz is being danced to the music of full support.

When Stephen Arditti, a University of California lobbyist, said “there are a couple of details that remain to be worked out” in the teacher and principal training programs, what he meant was that Davis’ plan to have UC raise $4 million a year to pay for them is all wet.

“We are not confident that we can” raise that kind of money, Arditti explained outside the hearing room. In fact, he added when pressed, he is quite confident they cannot.

The distinctly passive-aggressive approach had become something of a joke by last week--the third week of the special session.

When Assembly Education Committee Chairwoman Kerry Mazzoni (D-San Rafael) asked bill backers to go first, she got an earful of opposition.

“I thought we were going to hear support!” she said, laughing.

That levity encouraged Jeff Frost, a lobbyist representing the California Assn. of Suburban School Districts, to be a bit more direct. “It is nice for us to come up as supporters and raise nothing but concerns,” he said, smiling.

Frost had a doozy of a concern, too. Regarding the governor’s plan to withhold cost-of-living increases from districts that do not participate in the teacher peer review program, Frost said that’s “a stupid idea.”

Among the more outspoken critics of the Davis education plan is Bergan, president of the California Federation of Teachers, which gave the Davis campaign $71,000 last year.

Yet even Bergan stepped to the microphone with the supporters and began with what she likes, then segued into what she described as fundamental errors in the way the bills are written.

One of her targets was the school accountability bill’s definition of campuses as “stand-alone entities,” which Bergan said ignores the statutory jurisdiction of local school districts over individual schools.

She too considers the ranking system demoralizing, asking, “How would you like to be school 7,900?” And she frets that the governor’s awards for good schools draw money away from struggling schools that need it more.

Legislators are taking a similarly cautious stance--Democrats because they don’t want to be seen as obstructionist to their governor and Republicans because they are mindful that Davis’ landslide win means many of their backers backed him.

Fed up with the amount of time being wasted on superlatives, Sen. John Vasconcellos (D-Santa Clara) admonished his colleagues on the Senate Education Committee to “not repeat how glad we are the governor’s taken the initiative on this bill.”

Assemblyman Alan Lowenthal (D-Long Beach) said, “I strongly support the overall initiative . . . [but] I would like some additional clarification.”

The “clarification” Lowenthal was seeking went to the very heart of the teacher training program, which would be located at UC campuses in Berkeley and Los Angeles to attract some of the state’s top students into teaching.

Lowenthal said the California State University system should run some, if not most, of the program because CSU now educates the majority of teachers in this state.

Initial glimmers of Republican dissent began to appear in committees last week with two Republican no votes and many abstentions. And Assembly Republican Leader Rod Pacheco of Riverside has sent out a weekly news release attacking aspects of the governor’s plan.

But in the committee room, instances of overt criticism are few.

Before abstaining from voting on the high school graduation exam, Sen. Ray Haynes (R-Riverside) said he hated to hold back because “I support this concept.”