Davis’ Education Bills Head for Full Vote

The four bills that Gov. Gray Davis considers a salve for public education’s wounds cleared more legislative hurdles Tuesday afternoon and headed for the first full votes by lawmakers.

But in the fast-moving world that Davis’ special education session created, changes continued to be made in the legislation and lobbyists and legislators pushed for more.

The only bills approved without opposition were the governor’s reading improvement bill and the first of several dozen Republican bills, which orders that the test given to all entry-level teachers be evaluated.

Both passed the Assembly Appropriations Committee on unanimous votes and are expected to be voted on Thursday by the full Assembly. If approved, they will be taken up in state Senate committees.

Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa, who is shepherding a bill for the governor that recommends peer review for teachers, praised recent improvements to his legislation but suggested that there is a limit to how much further he will go.

“I’ve worked . . . to make this bill as . . . palatable as possible,” he said. “At the end of the day, people don’t always agree, and I reserve the right to do that as well.”

Last-minute adjustments to Villaraigosa’s bill brought a partisan 12-2 vote, with Republicans voting no or abstaining.

In the last week, Villaraigosa had agreed to alter the provision for punishment of school districts reluctant to impose peer review, withholding teacher improvement money instead of tying it to annual cost-of-living increases.

Faced Tuesday with a new wave of opposition from teachers unions, who want the peer review program to be purely voluntary, Villaraigosa said he had made the changes at their behest.

Villaraigosa’s bill will go to the full Assembly on Thursday.

In the state Senate, the two bills that were approved by the Appropriations Committee on Tuesday are expected to land on the Senate floor Monday. If they pass there, they will move to the Assembly.

A system for ranking schools according to student performance passed the committee 9 to 1, but only after it was altered to split more than $190 million equally between schools that are improving and those that need help. Previously the better schools were getting more than three times as much.

At Tuesday’s hearing, the bill’s supporter--Sen. Dede Alpert (D-Coronado)--announced that she had added a third column to the rankings the state will report, responding to persistent concerns among liberal legislators and education advocates that schools in lower-income areas start the race already behind.

As now written, the best-to-worst list will begin with a combination of academic performance and attendance, a second column will show improvement from the previous year, and a third will display the school’s socioeconomic status, student transience rates and percentage of English learners.

Sen. Ross Johnson (R-Irvine), who cast the only no vote, said the Alpert bill did not alert parents early on that their children were attending a bad school.

“The parents should have a right to know,” Johnson said. Alpert agreed to consider amendments later that would give parents an early heads-up and the opportunity to make their own recommendations for improvement to school authorities.

A bill to institute the state’s first high school exit exam in language arts and math, which passed 8 to 0, was changed so that the test will first be administered in 2001 to ninth-graders--rather than 10th-graders--who will take it until they pass it.

Other amendments also offer, for students who are bright but unable to pass the test, alternative ways to graduate, including credit for good grades and high scores on other tests.

The bill has been attacked by civil rights groups that say it could lead to high dropout rates among minorities. On Tuesday, an Oakland public policy group took a full-page advertisement in the New York Times saying that Davis’ exit exam “for many students . . . will mean no exit.”

The policy group, called the Applied Research Center, timed the ad with release of a report detailing how such high-stakes tests have affected minorities in other states.

In particular, it found that in Texas white students were almost twice as likely as Latinos and African Americans to pass.

“Advocating a policy that has been shown to enhance patterns of institutional racism is, in itself, a racist act,” said center director Gary Delgado.