Bringing California’s Schools Into the 21st Century : The Times invited gubernatorial candidates Pete Wilson, the Republican incumbent, and Democrat Kathleen Brown to discuss key issues in the 1994 election. Today the focus is on education.

Improving our schools will take fundamental change. Our schools must again become safe havens where we can teach our children the skills they’ll need to compete in the workplace of the 21st Century. I’ve launched significant reforms to achieve this goal, but for these or any education reforms to work, they must include immigration reform.

The outrage in education today is that, despite already overcrowded classrooms and too tight budgets, there are 400,000 illegal immigrants enrolled in California’s public schools. That’s enough people to fill more than 650 elementary schools.

But President Clinton refuses to secure California’s borders. And Kathleen Brown says that taxpayers should continue footing the bill for illegal immigrants in our schools. In fact, in a major speech on the subject, Brown said that “illegal immigration is wrongly seen as a cause” of problems in California. The truth is, we’ll never completely fix our schools until we reform this absurd system of illegal immigration.

With the $1.5 billion California will spend on education for illegal immigrants this year, we could put a computer on the desk of every fifth-grader in the state, enroll 225,000 4-year-olds in preschool, expand by 1,500 sites our Healthy Start program for counseling troubled kids and pay for 20 million hours of training and mentoring for at-risk youths.

Money is already tight enough; even Treasurer Brown recognizes that. In fact, despite her partisan sniping, she didn’t propose a single dollar more than I did for education this year. And while she doesn’t recognize it, the key to freeing up more money for the education of legal residents is reducing the cost we’re forced to bear for illegal immigration. That will allow our other reforms to make a real difference in schools.

These are some of the reforms I’m working on:

* Drug-free, violence-free schools. Students can’t learn and teachers can’t teach in schools infested by drugs, gangs or guns. We just won a change in the law to try the worst juvenile criminals as adults, because vicious thugs deserve stiff sentences no matter how old they are. I also borrowed a successful idea from Long Beach to bring school uniforms to more public schools. Long Beach found that uniforms help limit gang violence and improve discipline.

When it comes to violence in the classroom, we need a policy of zero tolerance. Someone who brings a gun to school should face just one thing--mandatory expulsion. On the other hand, when Brown served on the Los Angeles school board, she joined the American Civil Liberties Union in trying to block police from using undercover officers to combat drug dealing in the schools.

* Computers in the classroom. In the age of computer chips, too many of our students are stuck in schools from the age of Mr. Chips. To fix that, the Public Utilities Commission, at my request, just allocated more than $40 million as a down payment to start connecting every classroom in California to the information superhighway, beginning this year.

* Freeing schools from red tape. I created charter schools two years ago to return greater control to parents and teachers, freeing them from stifling bureaucratic red tape. But I want to make it easier for communities to launch these break-the-mold schools by giving parents a bigger role in their creation.

* Bringing parents back to school. For schools to succeed, parents must take an active role in their children’s education. That’s one reason I signed the nation’s most ambitious school-choice plan last year. Thousands of Los Angeles parents are now choosing the public school they think is best for their child.

We also need a Parents Bill of Rights giving parents greater oversight over schools and the opportunity to monitor their children’s classes. Education can’t be left to teachers alone. Parents have an obligation to take an active role.

Our schools and our kids will have a greater future if we have the courage to make fundamental change--including illegal immigration reform. Powerful special interests who back Brown oppose many of these reforms, but we can’t afford to let our kids fall victim to partisan politics. I’ve reached across partisan lines to enact job reforms and tougher criminal laws. We must do the same to save California schools. It’s the very least our children deserve.