Legislature to Get Davis’ Key Education Reforms

Gov. Gray Davis will ask lawmakers this week to pass a new intensive reading program for young students and a series of carrot-and-stick incentives to pressure teachers and school administrators to improve, senior aides said Tuesday.

The proposals represent the heart of Davis’ highly anticipated education reforms. Included are plans sure to be controversial, such as peer review of teacher performance and possible intervention by state authorities in the poorest performing schools.

Students would also get more scrutiny with a new test for high school graduation beginning in 2003.

“We are trying to place increased responsibility on all of the key players in this process,” a Davis aide said. “This [represents] the principal focus of the governor’s education initiative and the reform proposals for this upcoming [special legislative] session.”

Peer review of teachers is a proposal that has been particularly controversial, but the concept won early support from two key officials of the state’s teachers unions, who are major forces in state Democratic politics.

Senior administration officials said the governor will offer details this evening in his State of the State address.

The package of reforms includes:

* Spending $75 million to create Intensive Reading Instruction Academies for students from kindergarten through fourth grade.

Officials said the academies might include mentor programs or summer school, but they declined to describe the academies in more detail. Most significant, the program targets an area in which California students are doing poorly.

Last year, about three out of five third-graders in California public schools scored below the national average on the Stanford 9 achievement tests in reading, language mechanics and spelling. However, many of those students were not fluent in English, the testing language.

Newly available state data show that students who are native English speakers did far better, with 48% of such third-graders scoring at or above the 50th percentile in reading. Only 9% of limited-English third-graders did as well.

Taking that discrepancy into account, Davis’ reform proposals include an undisclosed amount of additional funding to accelerate the learning of students who are not proficient in English.

* Spending $100 million to create peer review panels made up of senior teachers at each school who would evaluate their colleagues.

The panel’s report would be provided to the school principal for consideration in staffing decisions such as promotions. Officials stopped short of saying whether the reviews could result in termination of poor teachers.

Davis is likely to create a stir among educators with a recommendation that state academic standards be used as a component in periodic teacher evaluations, a measure now precluded by state law.

Davis’ focus on teachers includes cash incentives for those who seek training to improve themselves and a new role for the University of California system in helping prepare teachers and administrators.

That caught some education experts off-guard because they point out that the California State University system is already geared up to train teachers.

“It would be a function of CSU, because they do the teacher training,” said Senate Education Committee Chairwoman Dede Alpert (D-Coronado). “We’ll have to see.”

Davis would like UC to offer a 15-month training program that would result in a teaching credential as well as a master’s degree. Another two-year program at UC would train school administrators to become principals.

Davis also wants UC to develop a series of California Reading Development Institutes to train up to 6,000 kindergarten through third-grade teachers in reading instruction.

And he would offer cash bonuses of $10,000 to any teacher who undergoes training to be certified by the National Board of Professional Teacher Standards.

The cash bonus is an idea proposed last year by former Gov. Pete Wilson, a Republican. The Legislature approved the program as part of the current budget, although the sum Wilson wanted was halved to $5 million.

* Spend $200 million on a package of assistance, incentives and penalties to improve schools whose performances are below the state average.

Davis would randomly select 200 schools from the state’s bottom 50% and provide them with special assistance for two years. If they still fail to perform, the schools would be subject to an intervention involving state authorities making decisions for the schools.

Wilson had a similar plan last year. He would have singled out the state’s 400 poorest-performing schools for assistance. Lawmakers scaled back the plan to 100 schools, but it was vetoed by Wilson when it was included in a package of other changes.

Among the key questions that were not answered Tuesday is whether Davis’ proposals indicate that he will spend more on education than the minimum amount he is legally required to provide. The minimum, which changes yearly, is $23.1 billion this year and was about $21 billion in fiscal 1997-98.

The funding will be a key test of Davis’ commitment to education because California’s spending per pupil is still well below the national average. At the same time, Davis has warned that forecasters predict a $1-billion state budget shortfall next year.

Davis administration officials, who asked not to be identified, said the policies outlined Tuesday will cost $444 million. But they did not say whether that is part of--or in addition to--the minimum funding level required.

Education activists suggested that Davis’ focus on schools during his campaign raised expectations for additional money. “It’s going to be hard for them not to go over the guarantee,” said Kevin Gordon, lobbyist for the California School Boards Assn.

Gordan said Davis’ proposals as described Tuesday are “very much in an outline form. But the subject areas are of significant [importance]. We’re excited about this.”

Tuesday’s announcement represents the culmination of a Davis education plan that served as a cornerstone of his election campaign. It also includes the work of a task force he formed shortly after his victory in November.

Still, the package as outlined left out some of Davis’ campaign promises on education.

One plan to require that parents sign a contract committing themselves to help with their child’s homework and attend school meetings was not mentioned. Neither was his proposal to place finance officers in each school to guard against waste.

He also had recommended hundreds of millions of dollars in additional spending on books, computers and mandatory summer school programs--a portion of which might be included in Tuesday’s plan.

Lawmakers, who must approve the Davis package, and lobbyists will also recognize some of the governor’s ideas because they are similar to bills previously debated in the Legislature.

“It’s not bad. It’s a list of stuff we’ve seen before,” said John Mockler, a lobbyist who represents the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Even as officials outlined Davis’ proposals, the idea of teacher peer review won support from a key source--leaders of the state’s two most politically active teacher union locals.

The union proposal, to be outlined publicly today by the leaders of the Los Angeles and San Francisco locals, would have experienced teachers intervene in the classrooms of poorly performing colleagues.

“This is something that has to be done carefully and gradually,” said Day Higuchi, president of United Teachers-Los Angeles, the state’s largest local. “You can’t impose it on people or you’ll end up with rebellion.”

The union proposal is based on similar efforts in Toledo, Ohio; Rochester, N.Y., and Poway, Calif. Under the plan, “peer coaches” would first try to help their colleagues improve through regular visits and demonstrations. If that didn’t work, Higuchi said, the panels could recommend the dismissal of the failing teacher to a joint union-district panel.

In Toledo, officials say, teachers have proved more likely than administrators to want to get rid of instructors who are failing.

Union support could be crucial for Davis’ proposals because the teachers unions are major backers of Democratic campaigns. But that support is not guaranteed. Indeed, the peer review proposal could open a rift within the state’s teachers unions.

Higuchi has been trying for more than a year to sell a similar program to his 40,000 members. So far they remain skeptical. There is also substantial opposition within the state teachers union, the California Teachers Assn.

“Peer review has always been controversial because it goes to the heart of something called collegial working together,” said Bob Cherry, associate executive director of the state union. “Can two people who work together have collegial relations if one of them is making employment decisions about the other? That’s a serious question.”

In another development, a Davis aide confirmed that the governor will move quickly to shake up the State Board of Education.

The official said Tim Draper and Gerti Thomas, two board members appointed by Wilson but not confirmed by the state Senate, “will not be invited to stay.” This month, Davis could name as many as five new board members.

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Times staff writers Nick Anderson and Richard L. Colvin contributed to this story.

Watch Gov. Gray Davis’ State of the State address live on The Times’ Web site today. Coverage is scheduled to begin at 4:45 p.m.:

https://www.latimes.com/davis