Executive Director’s note

Does the governor have an education agenda?

A very curious thing happened as 2007 began that has a lot of Sacramento veterans wondering what our governor has in store for education during his second term.

We always pay careful attention to the rituals that launch a re-elected governor’s final four years, so we listened carefully as Arnold Schwarzenegger, fresh off his landslide win last November, delivered his inaugural address, assessed the State of the State before a joint session of the Legislature and presented his 2007-08 budget proposal. This year the governor added a major speech outlining his healthcare goals.

Not once did the governor say anything substantive about education. There was one throw-away line about somehow expanding “accountability” so that folks could “shop for schools just like you can shop for a car”—
a vaguely offensive reference that reinforces the notion held by many that the public schools are not much more than an assembly line producing widgets with a one-size-fits-all approach to making sure that everyone is the same …
but I digress.

We’d had a strange feeling that this sort of brush-off was coming. Shortly after the election, it was announced that Secretary of Education Alan Bersin was stepping down to take a position with the airport authority in San Diego. The airport authority? Are you kidding?

This was a shocking development for the education community. Mr. Bersin was controversial in some quarters, but there was no doubt about his intellect and commitment, nor about the depth and breadth of the experience he brought to the Schwarzenegger administration. Throughout the campaign season, Alan Bersin had spoken optimistically about the governor’s 2007 “agenda” for the public schools; there were high hopes that the research projects commissioned by the Democratic legislative leadership and State Superintendent Jack O’Connell were going to provide a roadmap leading the Governor’s Advisory Committee on Education Excellence to finally have a coherent conversation about the needs of the public schools. Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez, Senate President pro Tem Don Perata and Superintendent O’Connell were poised to work with the governor in the development of an agenda that addressed everything from statewide governance to adequate funding to meet the highest academic standards in the country. Mr. Bersin talked about the need to provide focus and sustainability to support the lowest-performing schools in the state and to reconcile the contradictions between the state’s accountability system and the superimposed requirements of No Child Left Behind, particularly since the federal law is up for reauthorization
in 2007.

Instead, Alan Bersin is running the airport authority in San Diego.

At least Mr. Bersin will continue as a member of the state Board of Education, where his knowledge and experience will be put to some useful measure.

Maybe we should be grateful for small favors. One longtime Sacramento education advocate tells me that some of the education folks in the governor’s office are “bored” and wondering if there will be anything interesting to do this year. Maybe we should be pleased that we aren’t in the governor’s sights for a change and may be left alone for awhile. The governor’s budget fully funds the Proposition 98 guarantee, albeit with some interesting manipulations that we’ll likely fight about in the budget process. But everyone knows that fully funding cost-of-living formulas and growth is OK only as long as you’re growing, and since half the kids in this state go to schools that are declining in enrollment, these will still be relatively tough times for a lot of districts that have to pay for all cost increases from the COLA alone. Everyone in education knows that Proposition 98 is a minimum funding guarantee; it is not a guarantee of adequacy. It does a fat lot of good to continue to be near the bottom of the country when it comes to per-pupil funding in California’s public schools.

And perhaps being left alone is a good thing. Perhaps we could use a break from all the bright ideas emanating from both Sacramento and Washington, and give school people a chance to catch their collective breaths and focus on the kids for a change instead of on the politicians. Maybe the governor thinks that he has been burned enough on education after being rebuffed by the voters in 2005.

However, we may not have the luxury of time. Reauthorization of NCLB will come, whether California provides any leadership for it or not. The research commissioned for the Governor’s Advisory Committee on Education Excellence will be out soon, and lots of folks will jump on bits and pieces of the findings to “reform” the schools again, whether the governor wants to lead with an agenda for the schools or not.

Conventional wisdom in this era of term limits holds that the first year of a governor’s second term is the best time to get things done. The governor’s ambitious agenda for infrastructure improvements, health care and reform of the prison system is certainly welcome and sure to set off some long-overdue debates, and we wish him well as he pursues these important matters.

But to emulate the late Gov. Edmund G. “Pat” Brown in these worthy objectives overlooks at least one important fact. Back in Gov. Brown’s day, California’s public schools were among the best funded in the country. It was not unusual for us to enjoy top 10 or even top five status in per-pupil funding among the states.

We had hoped that adequate funding for the public schools would be an agenda item that our leaders would embrace this year. Even a sensible conversation about how much it costs to educate a kid to the highest standards in the country would be worthwhile. But it looks like we’ll be on our own to promote this debate, and our challenge will be to try and keep the opportunity from slipping away in the face of inattention and ambivalence.