Report Urges Local Control of School Reform

The state legislative analyst’s office stuck its toe into the education reform waterfall Monday, calling for California to establish a more logical chain of command and transfer greater power to local school districts.

The recommendations appear to contradict many of the early indications of increased top-down control from the new Gray Davis administration.

Still, Davis spokesman Michael Bustamante said the report will be considered by the administration as part of the upcoming special legislative session, as long as its temperate approach does not lead to further delays.

“The bottom line is, the governor is intent on seeing these reforms enacted now,” Bustamante said. “We’ve spent the last 16 years in this state going from first to worst in education. I don’t think we have another year to waste.”

As outlined in various forums over the past week, the Davis administration plan would pair higher state expectations for students and teachers with a system of state-controlled rewards and punishments.

Davis even went so far as to say that the state will hold principals personally responsible for schools’ performance, as the schools’ “CEOs.”

By contrast, Legislative Analyst Elizabeth Hill said that overseeing principals is the responsibility of local school districts, which in turn should report to the state on their overall progress. For the past 25 years, she said, the state has erred in becoming increasingly dictatorial over the state’s 1,000 districts.

“If we expect teachers, principals, elected officials at the local level to deliver results, we can’t have their hands tied behind them,” she said.

Statewide prescriptions ignore the variance from district to district, she said. “We don’t have the same situation in Sacramento as we have in Los Angeles or in Merced or in Modesto.”

The California School Boards Assn. agreed with Hill’s assessment that local control is the key to making the new wave of education reform work.

But Doug Stone, spokesman for the state Department of Education, objected to Hill’s characterization of state government as taking more and more control, though he acknowledged that there has been rising political pressure to do so.

“California still gives a tremendous degree of local control to our schools,” Stone said. “The state is taking steps to set the pattern, to set the agenda and the roles, and then to allow the local districts to use their resources.”

The legislative analyst also called for:

* Promoting competition between public and private teacher training programs. (Davis wants to beef up the public sector by tuning up the California State University programs and getting University of California campuses more involved in teacher training.)

* Grouping state funding into general “block grants” to increase local spending flexibility. (Davis wants funding reform, but also has earmarked several funds for pet projects such as classroom library books and summer tutorial programs.)

Even if Davis heeds Hill’s advice, persuading the Legislature to relinquish some control would depend on a high level of trust on the part of the public and between state politicians and local school officials.

In fact, such mutual trust has plummeted to all-time lows as the gap between public expectations and school performance has widened, said Mark Baldassare, statewide survey director of the Public Policy Institute of California.

“Voters are frustrated, they want change, they don’t have a lot of confidence in the track record of any of the players,” he said.

The institute’s latest telephone survey of 2,000 adults found that the public agrees that improving education should be the state’s top priority, but opinions about how to solve the problems vary greatly.

For instance, slightly more than half said they believe that the state should intervene when a school is not performing, an approach the Davis administration strongly advocates.

Yet even if student performance test scores do improve in the next few years, Baldassare said, Davis will have trouble taking credit because of voters’ low regard for state officials. In the survey, 58% of those questioned said they have “only some confidence” in their leaders’ capacity to solve the state’s most significant problems.

“Even if he clears the bar he has set for himself on education, the governor will have a hard time persuading the public that he and the state Legislature are responsible for the progress,” Baldassare said.

Hill also recommended that the governor and the Legislature launch a long-term master plan for education that would guide more immediate changes.

“You have to have some idea where you are headed,” she said, citing the overlapping and sometimes conflicting education policies that have been signed into law in the past few years.

That proposal also ignores political reality, Baldassare said, which has sent impatient voters fleeing to the initiative process--on measures such as Proposition 227, the anti-bilingual education law.

For the full text of the state legislative analyst’s report on education, go to The Times’ Web site: https://www.latimes.com/laoplan