Think Big on the Schools

In his first State of the State speech, Gov. Gray Davis called education his “first, second and third priority.” Now that he’s established his order of march, he must lead.

California’s dismal ranking on most education indicators and the constraints in many school districts such as strong union contracts and fractious school boards mean that a remedy will not come without a struggle. What the governor is proposing--increased accountability across the board and specific improvements in teacher training--will surely test the system. But he ought to be thinking even bigger.

The results he seeks--every pupil a competent reader by third grade, a good teacher in every classroom, strong principals on every campus, high-performing schools in every district--will require broader and much tougher reforms, along with serious consequences for failure.

Some of Davis’ proposals need a sharper focus. He plans an admirable pilot program to give special attention to 200 below-average schools statewide, requiring improvement in return. But schools will be allowed to volunteer, all but guaranteeing the participation of the schools most likely to improve. More thought needs to go into selecting campuses with a range of needs and problems.

Any school accountability measure should be a prelude to adopting the tactic used by Texas: rating all schools yearly according to how students perform on state tests and other measures. It works, and there’s no hiding failure.

In his speech, Davis said he will remove principals and teachers from schools that fail to improve from year to year after getting extra help and extra scrutiny from the state. The Legislature should support that promise with legislation that would allow California, like 10 other states, to take over a school that persistently performs poorly, in the same way the state already can take over a school district that’s in fiscal trouble.

And perhaps most important, principals and teachers need to be enlisted, because no remaking of California’s schools can succeed without their participation. On many campuses, principals are a cop and social worker more than anything else. Burdened with excessive paperwork, antagonistic unions, lawsuit-happy parents and disruptive students, principals can find it very difficult to focus on the students’ learning. The governor proposes training for aspiring principals, to help them meet these challenges and to create a generation of school leaders who will excel when they replace the many principals expected to retire soon.

Although a great principal can make a big difference in the life of a school, no one is more important to students than the classroom teacher. Teacher peer review, as proposed by Davis, represents an opportunity to improve bad teachers or rid the system of them. Union protections rarely allow dismissal of poorly performing teachers without a lengthy and expensive process. Done right, peer review gives unions the responsibility for the teacher corps and a bottom-up stake in reform.

Peer-review evaluations should measure the effectiveness of a teacher. The teachers should be evaluated on student achievement. Are their students performing on the statewide test that measures what a pupil is expected to learn? If not, are they making significant progress? Unless peer review results in better teaching and weeds out ineffective teachers, it will be a failure.

Peer review should also make it easier for principals to manage, to be the CEOs of their schools. In an article published Friday on The Times’ Commentary page, UCLA professor Wellford W. Wilms made key points well worth repeating: “Celebrated American companies like Hewlett-Packard and others that have reinvented themselves offer some useful insights. After all, public schools were originally created in the image of American industry, and they were endowed with its dubious inheritance--the system of mass production and its adversarial human relationships. . . . HP managers engaged their employees to analyze the core processes of how new products were designed and brought to market. Such analyses quickly revealed where the system was broken and the steps that were required to fix it. By bringing employees into the decision-making, they could truly begin to correct the root causes of the division’s problems. . . . [T]here is little doubt that a similar transformation of the public schools is now required. Ominous as it sounds, such transformations are almost always induced by an external threat. To all appearances, the stage has been set.”

Indeed. The threat of private school vouchers and the threat of job or money or student loss are the unfortunate engines driving reform.

Parents and students must have something at stake too. California’s students will be held accountable in grades two through 11 via the new statewide standardized test, and they will be held back if they don’t score at a certain level. Davis has also proposed a high school exit exam, starting in 2003.

No reform will be easy in California’s creaky, overburdened and rule-ridden education system. Davis needs to be out front, but he can’t succeed alone. The Legislature, businesses, the teachers union, parents and students will all have to pull their weight and know that something great awaits us if everyone succeeds--and that negative consequences will hurt everyone personally if we fail.