O.C. School Chiefs Lay Down the Law

In an unprecedented show of frustration with state education reforms, Orange County’s 29 superintendents of schools unanimously called Friday for a moratorium on all education legislation until a thoughtful master plan for children from kindergarten through high school is completed.

Standing shoulder to shoulder at the county Board of Education building, the top education officials demanded that the state Legislature stop what they called the “willy-nilly” promulgation of well-meant but poorly thought-out regulations.

“Educators are prepared to meet the challenges of providing quality education to a very demanding and diverse student population, but we need to have a workable plan from the state instead of a hodgepodge of regulations, statutes, programs and policies,” said Duane Dishno, superintendent of the Huntington Beach City School District.

“Our teachers and our principals are shellshocked with this barrage of reform movements,” said Irvine Supt. Patricia Clark White.

The Orange County superintendents join other school groups and organizations that are seeking a long-range plan for education from the Legislature, including the California School Boards Assn. and the Assn. of California School Administrators.

Although Gov. Gray Davis proclaimed education to be his top priority and immediately upon taking office called for school reforms--such as teacher peer review and the ranking of schools according to certain standards of performance--the superintendents said that like other governors before him, Davis has introduced his ideas and legislation without a cohesive educational direction.

An administration spokeswoman said Friday that support for a moratorium is unclear at this time; Davis is now embroiled in budget negotiations, said Ann Bancroft, spokeswoman for Secretary of Education Gary Hart.

“That’s not to say there’s not support, but it’s not at the top of the agenda right now,” she said.

The state Senate, however, last month voted unanimously to create a committee to develop a K-12 plan by November 2000. The Assembly has not voted yet but Orange County superintendents say they need a master plan that can be implemented for the 2001-02 school year.

This is the first public stand in memory taken by all the county’s superintendents as a group.

While they have met regularly for at least 10 years, their increasing frustration with Sacramento’s edicts finally led them to openly call for a halt to reforms.

The superintendents lead school districts that are as diverse as California itself. Some have a couple thousand students, others more than 30,000; some are in affluent areas, others in poor ones. Some are mostly white while others are mostly Latino or Asian. Abhorrence of legislative interference in their schools, however, united them all Friday.

A particular sore point has been the lack of educational expertise involved in deciding what is best for the state’s children.

For example, many superintendents said they support the idea of holding students to high standards and approve of rigorous testing. But the state decided on a test before determining a curriculum that all children should be taught. And the test and the curriculum are not always in sync.

As a result, some students are tested on material they have not yet been taught. On the Stanford 9, for example, second-graders face questions on complex long division, but they are not taught such math until third grade.

The so-called STAR tests have been only one of a series of major reforms to affect schools in the last couple of years: class size reduction, first in primary grades, then this year in ninth grade. The end of so-called social promotion, the passing on from one grade to another of unqualified students.

Teachers and principals beefed up bilingual education to meet state requirements, then were ordered by voters to dismantle it. Soon they will have new standards and exit exams for students and will be held accountable for their students’ performance on standardized tests.

But not all state regulations are sweeping in nature. Just as many tinker with details of the curriculum, textbooks or recreational activities at schools, without a larger framework to give them meaning.

For example, one bill that passed the Legislature ruled that the Irish potato famine of the mid-19th century must be taught. Not that anything is wrong with that, educators say, but it was a single bill addressing one subject in the curriculum instead of taking an overall look at what should be taught in world history classes.

Another law specifies that footballs must be sterilized.

Rather than confine its role to funding education, the Legislature has taken the powers of the State Board of Education, said Capistrano Unified Supt. James A. Fleming.

A master plan would outline the roles of state government, the almost 1,000 local school boards and the 8,000 schools in California.

And the superintendents hope it will return to local school boards significant control of programs and how money is spent.

For example, White said that Irvine had sought and received a waiver to reduce its ninth-grade English, social science and science classes to 27 students. Most districts have been required to use class-reduction money for that grade on English or math classes and pare all the way down to a 20-to-1 student-to-teacher ratio.

The test scores of ninth-graders in those classes went up noticeably, White said, and the program had excellent results.

The state, however, has recently announced it will not grant Irvine another waiver.

“Now we have to disband the program because our local school board, which should be making these kinds of decisions, does not have the authority to do so,” she said.

However well-meaning legislators may be, most have no education expertise and do more harm that good, the superintendents said.

Santa Ana Supt. Al Mijares likened the damage done to students by Sacramento to that caused by unlicensed clinics dispensing medicine to children. The intentions are good, but such an approach only “demoralizes and ravages” education programs, Mijares said.

Even when the schools chiefs agreed with certain reforms, such as reducing class sizes, they said the state made it difficult for them to get the programs started.

For example, the Legislature approved class size reduction in July, and school districts that wanted to receive state funds for the reform had to begin in September, Fleming said.

Administrators scrambled to find space, buy portable rooms, recruit and train teachers.

“It might have been nice had the state adopted class size reduction and said we’ll give you a year to implement it,” Fleming said.

Also, school districts should have the flexibility to decide which grades should have their class sizes reduced without state interference, he said. Some districts would like to see fourth-grade classes shrink, while his district would target grade six.

“But there was such euphoria over the success of class size reductions” that the Legislature made a swipe at reducing class sizes in another grade and, for reasons that are obscure to the superintendents, chose ninth grade, Fleming said.

In addition, they said, new state rules should come with the money to carry them out, and the state should eliminate mandates that come without money attached. Most of all they want to be included in the master-planning process.

The superintendents say the county Department of Education will lobby the Legislature and the governor for a master plan. They hope, however, that the singular example of unity they displayed Friday will give lawmakers pause.

“We are passionate about this,” said Jan Billings, Anaheim Union High School District superintendent. “We are at the end of our rope.”

Educators often are told that they should run the schools like a business, White said, but businesses do not have the state micromanaging their affairs.

“I recently went to the Irvine Chamber of Commerce and I asked who thought their business would pick up if they had more state regulation,” White said. “I said ‘Whoever thinks so, please raise your hand.’

“You know, nobody did.”