Presidential perspectives: CSBA’s elected leaders keep an eye on lawmakers and their focus on the kids
The defining moment of Maureen DiMarco’s CSBA presidency came on a stifling Sunday afternoon in August 1990, during what was supposed to be a routine meeting of the association’s Delegate Assembly in downtown Sacramento.
A stone’s throw away, members of the California Legislature—deadlocked in budget negotiations for months—were about to suspend Proposition 98 and dramatically cut school funding.
DiMarco looked at the Delegate Assembly agenda, took a deep breath and made a radical proposal: The real action was happening at the Capitol, and that was where CSBA ought to be.
“It seemed silly to have spent a year exhorting all school board members to speak politically to their representatives and then, when the moment was most important, to keep them in a meeting just across the street from ground zero,” DiMarco remembers.
The delegates didn’t need much convincing. “Right then and there, we junked the entire agenda and 200 school board members marched on the Capitol,” DiMarco says. “There were board members in every corner of the hall, hanging over the balcony and glaring at their representatives to make sure they did the right thing.”
The strategy worked. Lawmakers ultimately backed down, passing a budget without suspending Proposition 98 minimum school funding guarantees. Schools didn’t get everything they wanted, DiMarco says. “But we certainly did better than we would have if we hadn’t been there.”
In some ways this is a quintessential CSBA story, involving, as it does, a campaign to preserve school funding and a quick and effective response to a last-minute change in the agenda.
‘An awesome ride’
Even after half a century of active service to the association and his local school board, Del Cederquist, CSBA president in 1977, continues to be inspired by the association and its work. “I’ve seen a lot of changes in 50 years,” he says. “I hope to be around for another 25 years so I can see what we’re like at 100.”
Cederquist has seen a steady erosion of local school board autonomy, he says, but some of the changes he’s witnessed have been for the better. “The association is larger and better organized,” he says, “and when we speak in Washington or Sacramento, lawmakers listen.”
Juanita Haugen, 1997 CSBA president and former regional director of the National School Boards Association, says she stays involved in the association because she believes so fervently in its mission.
“I’ve been active in CSBA for 25 of those 75 years, and it has been an awesome ride,” she says. “Despite all that has happened, school boards remain alive and well. We continue to be there to protect the public’s right to be involved in public education.”
Every president’s tenure is unique, depending on the era, the economy, public sentiment, court decisions and—increasingly—the political agendas and ever-changing policy mandates imposed by state and federal lawmakers. In a state like California, where ballot initiatives play such a huge role in setting public policy, every election has the potential to bring sweeping changes to the political and educational landscape. In recent years, voters considered a host of issues that could impact schools and children, including measures to ban bilingual education (passed), create school vouchers (failed), deny education and health services to undocumented immigrants (passed but overturned by the courts), and set caps on administrative costs in schools (failed).
No wonder the association has had to spend so much time putting out fires.
Proposition 13, the property tax-cutting Jarvis-Gann initiative passed by California voters in 1978, is a case in point—although it took years before anyone realized the extent of the changes it would bring.
‘Reflect local values’
When Maxine Frost won election to her local school board in 1967, local agencies still had the authority to set their own tax rates and to decide how the money would be spent. Her first year on the board, her district discovered it had a million dollars more in its budget than expected. “I thought to myself, ‘This isn’t too bad,’ ” recalls Frost. “ We used the money to fully equip all our elementary school libraries.”
It’s difficult to imagine such a windfall occurring today.
By the time Frost took office as CSBA president in 1981, some observers were predicting that Proposition 13, enacted three years earlier, would mean the end of public education because the measure had so drastically undermined local school board authority.
“We had to fight to make sure local schools continued to reflect local values and that we could continue to deliver the quality education the community had come to expect,” she says. “This was very difficult because funding had become so perilous and the state had so much control over our budgets.”
Proposition 13 was only the beginning. The trend toward top-down school management has continued unabated. State and federal lawmakers—not local school boards—allocate funds and dictate spending priorities, set education policy and tell districts what to teach and what to test.
In the modern political climate, change seems to be the only constant.
“You can certainly set goals for yourself as president,” says DiMarco, “and some of these you will absolutely achieve. But you also have to be ready to respond to whatever comes your way.”
Rebecca Sargent, CSBA president in 1996, never expected that so much of her time would be devoted to helping districts cope with the impacts of a sweeping class-size reduction program that Gov. Pete Wilson pushed through the Legislature just weeks before the start of the new school year.
“Everyone wanted the program: the parents, teachers and school boards,” Sargent says. “But it was rushed through so quickly that there was little time to plan. Schools were scrambling to find classroom space and teachers.”
The association worked hard to alert state lawmakers to the program’s unintended impacts, and it advocated for additional funding and flexibility so that more schools could participate without hurting other classroom services.
“It was tremendously expensive, and the state did not allocate enough to cover the full cost,” she says. “It was up to local districts to find the money.”
Sargent says CSBA did “an incredible job” explaining the complex class-size reduction program to members and providing the guidance that helped districts implement the changes.
“It was a huge challenge,” she says, “but we were right there as we have always been.”
Setting the agenda—and then improvising
It’s not unusual for a CSBA president to take office hoping to help the association make progress on a list of specific goals, only to find the agenda has changed without warning.
“I have come to believe that about half of what you do as president is based on circumstances over which you have no control, and half is based on the direction you set,” says David Pollock, who was elected president just months after voters recalled Gov. Gray Davis in 2003.
Pollock came into office with the goal of beefing up the association’s advocacy at the state—and especially the national—level. Since the federal No Child Left Behind Act passed in 2001, schools across the country had been struggling to comply with sweeping NCLB mandates, many of which educators found unrealistic and even damaging to local school programs. Pollock felt that CSBA needed a stronger presence in Washington, D.C., to lobby for changes.
After taking office, he quickly discovered that CSBA needed to deal with changes in Sacramento first. His presidential year, 2004, he recalls, “was the year of Arnold Schwarzenegger.”
“Suddenly,” he says, “we had a brand new governor and a new administration, and it was up to us to figure it all out.” Pollock says he’s gratified that CSBA did establish a new network of federal Governmental Relations chairs during his term. But much of his focus as CSBA president was on helping the Education Coalition negotiate a budget agreement with the new governor—an agreement the governor renounced the following year. “We operated that entire year based on that promise, which was supposed to temporarily suspend Proposition 98. We agreed to forgo $2 billion for one year,” he says. “In return, schools would be held harmless in future years. It wasn’t until after I left office that the governor decided he wouldn’t keep that promise.”
The broken promise
The battle over the governor’s broken promise dominated Dr. Kerry Clegg’s presidency in 2005 and disrupted his agenda for the year. A scientist and a fervent supporter of career and technical education, Clegg wanted to get to work immediately strengthening those curricular areas and devising strategies for high school reform.
His expectations were dashed almost immediately. “We thought Governor Schwarzenegger was our friend,” Clegg says. “But right off the bat, he announced during his State of the State address that he planned to implement a number of onerous cuts to balance the budget, and it was clear that education was going to be the fall guy.” To make matters worse, the governor scheduled a special election in hopes of passing a ballot initiative that would permanently undermine minimum school funding guarantees.
Clegg, CSBA and other members of the Education Coalition spent most of the year on a successful campaign to defeat the governor’s special election agenda. The California Teachers Association, state Superintendent Jack O’Connell, CSBA and other parties successfully sued the governor the following year, forcing him to restore much of the promised funding to schools.
Clegg did manage to find time to lead task forces on science and high school reform.
“I was very happy with what we were able to accomplish in science, career education and high school reform,” he says. “But I spent most of my time on a Sacramento-driven agenda that wasn’t the one I had planned.”
But it’s not all politics all the time. Perhaps because they are adept at multitasking, CSBA presidents also find time to address the internal needs of the association and to ensure that CSBA policies and services are meeting the needs of member school districts and county offices of education.
Strategic planning
Under Sally Stewart’s leadership in 1983, CSBA developed its first strategic plan, setting forth goals that continue to guide the association’s mission, services and advocacy. Stewart also pushed to install an official parliamentarian to oversee Delegate Assembly meetings, a strategy that made it easier for presidents to focus on the substance rather than the mechanics of these important gatherings.
Sherry Loofbourrow, president in 1994, helped lay the groundwork for CSBA’s Masters in Governance program, designed to help school board members work effectively as a team that keeps the focus on children and learning at all times. During that period the association also changed its “Legislative Platform” to a “Policy Platform” because, Loofbourrow says, “it’s about much more than legislation.” The platform, which CSBA members revise every two years, supports the association’s mission and guides its policy and political leadership.
Leslie Demersseman, president in 1999, is especially proud that the association began developing its groundbreaking Professional Governance Standards during her tenure to help boards evaluate and improve their performance to provide greater accountability. (Gov. Davis also put school accountability at the top of his legislative agenda that year, convening a special session of the Legislature to address the issue. It would fall to later presidents to deal with the school accountability benchmarks that Congress would enact as part of NCLB in 2001.)
By taking the lead, Demersseman says, CSBA gave school boards critical tools for measuring and improving their performance and ensured that school board members—rather than politicians—would set the governance agenda.
Marilyn Buchi says the highlight of her presidential year, 2001, was the search for the ideal candidate to replace outgoing Executive Director Davis W. Campbell. The Search Committee, which Buchi chaired, offered the job to Scott P. Plotkin—himself a former CSBA president. “I was very happy with the fact that we found an executive director who could continue the association’s forward progress,” she says.
‘Do the best for kids’
Although their experiences vary widely, all the past presidents interviewed for this story agreed on one point: CSBA’s guiding mission remains focused on children—just as it was in 1931, when Florence Porter convened an informal meeting of school trustees at Donner School in Sacramento.
When she was discouraged and “the hill seemed too steep to climb,” during her year as president in 1990, DiMarco says, she drew inspiration from the collective commitment of her school board colleagues.
“I’d get up in front of a group of school board members and see once again the diversity of our membership,” she says. “I’d see board members of every color, background [and] political or religious affiliation. Yet every one of them had the same eager commitment to do good. The point that we all could agree on was that somehow, some way, we would do the best for kids.”