Gov. Needs to Tackle the School Issue Now

The real estate ad said the house needed “love and attention,” which is code for:

Buyer beware. This house is in such abominable condition, you’ll sink every last cent into it as your blood pressure shoots through the roof and your marriage slowly unravels.

But the $649,000 bungalow fixer-upper was in South Pasadena. In California, where public schools are in critical condition and no one has the political courage to do anything about it, South Pasadena is a rare exception.

“It doesn’t look too bad from the outside,” I told my wife by phone Saturday morning.

But the competition was already stalking the dilapidated bungalow. Rubber-neckers were driving by to eyeball the place more than two hours before the open house, some with their poorly educated children in tow.

The following day, we took our baby daughter to see the place, and we also toured another South Pasadena house in the same price range. In both locations, they needed traffic cops.

“I can’t believe how many people are here,” Sotheby’s real estate agent Tom Trimberger told me in the living room of the $649,000 house, which has a cracked foundation, among other problems.

The teeming crowd was no surprise, really, given the latest evidence that California’s public schools -- like those in many other states -- are dropout factories. You can count Southern California’s first-rate public school districts on one hand, so if a big enough cardboard box had been for sale in South Pas, there would have been a stampede.

According to a Harvard University report, fewer than three-fourths of California’s high school students graduated with their class in 2002.

In the Los Angeles Unified School District, the numbers were an even greater indictment. Less than half the population graduated on time, with Latino and African American students dropping out in droves.

It’s a scandal, and there’s plenty of blame to go around. The line forms on the left, beginning with students and parents and teachers and administrators, and it stretches to Sacramento and Washington.

“Isn’t it unbelievable?” asked UCLA education professor Jeannie Oakes, who attended a Cal State Los Angeles conference on the dropout rate Thursday. “Well, it’s believable, but it’s just horrible.”

What’s unbelievable is that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who launched his political career by preaching about the needs of schoolchildren, claims to be reforming California while running away from the state’s biggest problem.

Yeah, redistricting would be great, and so would some of Big Boy’s other initiatives. But on the issue of the day, the tough guy punts.

We’ve now had withering assessments from the Rand Corp. and Harvard, and Oakes says 90% of California’s public school students are in districts that spend less than the national average per pupil.

Arnold, meanwhile, has given us little more than a half-baked call to base teacher salaries on merit rather than seniority. Talk about rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

While he resorts to name-calling and schoolyard fights with Democrats, the state’s dropout rate promises a higher crime rate, a bigger prison population, more deadbeats, and fewer grads prepared for the fantastic jobs Arnold promised.

“One reason kids are streaming out of schools is that they’re so woefully inadequate,” says Oakes. “In Los Angeles, they’re relieved at the dropouts, because they don’t have seats for them if they decide to stay.

“As governor, [Schwarzenegger] could lead a moral crusade.... It just takes some imagination, and in doing it, he could talk about how the business climate is negatively affected by having woefully inadequate schools.”

We could tinker with the parcel tax, she suggests, and rework Proposition 13 without removing protections for homeowners. Like I said in January, 31 states are on their way to school funding reforms while Schwarzenegger, a shill for the Chamber of Commerce, fine-tunes his program to Leave No Car Dealer Behind.

But it’s not just about money, even though California has become one of the stingiest states in the country when it comes to school funding. Nothing makes a bigger difference in a student’s life than an engaged parent, and I can’t think of a better way for Schwarzenegger to use his box-office appeal.

I’m not asking for a lot. Maybe if he spent even half as much time rallying parents and students as he spends schmoozing campaign donors, we might improve from a D to a C.

I need somebody to do something, because the move to South Pasadena fell through.

We got cold feet the day of the open house, partly because of the insane clamor, partly because we didn’t want to be knee-deep in sawdust for two years, and partly because we don’t have enough bank-robbing experience to pay for the rehab.

When we checked back, the agent had already received 38 offers.

“The majority were over the asking price,” he said.

Maybe we could pitch a tent in the Arroyo.

Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at steve.lopez@latimes.com and read previous columns at latimes.com/lopez