Executive decisions: CSBA’s current and most recent executive directors look back
CSBA’s elected leadership sets the association’s course, but it’s up to the executive director to steer. Six men and one woman have taken the wheel since CSBA’s inception 75 years ago. Two are still connected to CSBA, one as its current executive director and the other as president of its Governance Institute.
“I teach the Foundations [of Governance] course, which I love,” says Davis W. Campbell, CSBA’s executive director from 1988 to 2001. “I’ll do some individual district interventions, but on a very limited basis.”
It’s not that Campbell is retired—far from it. In January he will become president of the board of directors for EdSource, the nonpartisan, nonprofit education think tank and data mine based in Mountain View. A consultant with an international dossier and education experience that spans four decades, Campbell is chief financial officer of the California Institute for School Improvement, a Sacramento nonprofit that advises local school administrators. He also serves as a senior fellow of the University of California, Davis, School of Education.
His education career began in the public sector, as a staff member in the state Senate in the 1960s. From there he went to the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office and then the state Department of Education. He was a deputy state superintendent of public instruction under Wilson Riles from 1976 to 1983, responsible for education programs.
And he’s about to begin his second year as a trustee on the Yolo County Board of Education, just west of Sacramento.
“I had lectured on it,” Davis noted of the role of board members governing local education. “I had to live it a little bit.”
Some of Campbell’s résumé nearly mirrors that of Scott P. Plotkin, the man who followed Campbell as CSBA’s executive director five years ago and who remains in that post today. Like Campbell, Plotkin worked in the state Senate, as staff director of the Education Committee; he also served on a local school board for 20 years.
And the two men know each other well — they consider each other friends as well as colleagues. They worked closely together when Plotkin was CSBA’s president in 1992 and its vice president and president-elect for the two years before that. Talk to either man, and fascinating lore pours out from the past three decades and more of public education in California.
Take Proposition 98. It’s a fitting place to start, since voters approved it in 1988—the first year of Campbell’s service as CSBA’s executive director. CSBA was neutral on the California Teachers Association-sponsored measure; some feared that what was intended to be a guaranteed “floor,” or minimum level of state funding for public education, would instead turn out to be a “ceiling.”
What Campbell remembers most vividly about Proposition 98 is the fight to preserve the measure during the state’s economic crisis, when then-Gov. Pete Wilson in the early 1990s proposed to suspend it.
“Proposition 98 was a huge political battle, and it really galvanized the Education Coalition,” Campbell recalled. “It demonstrated the importance of the education community working together.”
CSBA’s interests, influence grow …
It also demonstrated CSBA’s growing role as a watchdog promoting the interests of local education at higher levels of government. That role was always part of CSBA’s purpose, but it was under Campbell’s leadership that the association really became an influential player in Sacramento.
The term limits that voters imposed on legislators in 1990 played a part in that, creating “a need for the kind of expertise that we can provide,” Campbell said. The growing influence of 1978’s Proposition 13 was also a factor, as the state’s new prominence in the collection and distribution of property tax revenues eroded local control over school funding. The state’s role also grew during Bill Honig’s 1983-93 tenure as state superintendent of public instruction, as the Department of Education broadened its focus from students with special needs to more general questions of curriculum.
“It became clear that these are issues that affect every district,” Campbell noted. “We took it very seriously that we represented districts as well as school boards. I think the members wanted us to play that role.”
... and so do its programs
CSBA responded not just politically, but also with an increasingly sophisticated array of services to help school districts and county offices of education deal with the increasing complexities of their work. A vision statement for the association was adopted in 1988 to focus the efforts of CSBA’s leadership and staff on policy analysis, board member training and educating the public about schools.
The work to transform that vision into reality was already under way. As 1989 began, a policy research and analysis division was added to the staff organization. Today, the Policy Analysis and the Continuing Education divisions provide current research on critical education issues that affect California’s children. It’s a two-way street, extending from the state and federal governments down to each school district and county office of education. CSBA’s policy analysts work with state and federal administrative agencies and educational organizations, monitoring state and national educational policy-making activity, participating in task forces and other policy-making bodies and advising state and national leaders of the impact of such activity on local school governance. They also work with local boards, helping them understand and implement the directives of higher governments.
In addition, Policy Analysis develops written advisories, policy briefs and handbooks for governance teams. At CSBA’s West Sacramento headquarters and in trips around the state—and, increasingly, taking advantage of Internet connections—staff members conduct interactive workshops and organize task forces and committees to make timely policy recommendations.
In contrast, CSBA’s Education Legal Alliance was something of an overnight sensation. Formed in 1992 to challenge the constitutionality of property tax collection fees imposed on school districts, the ELA not only prevailed on that issue but endured, with a mandate from its members to respond to legal issues that may potentially affect all local education agencies. Today, more than 800 school districts and COEs belong to the voluntary alliance run by CSBA.
Campbell is justifiably proud of the ELA, but his stamp on CSBA is probably most indelibly marked by the growth of CSBA’s programs and the strengthening of school board governance. The Governance Institute, and its highly respected and successful Masters in Governance training program, can trace their origins to a National School Boards Association committee that Campbell chaired. More than 1,500 local board members and superintendents have participated in the institute’s two-year Masters in Governance Program, consisting of 60 hours of instruction in education governance issues.
The Governance Institute also runs Single District Governance Services, offering a process for evaluating and addressing governance team strengths and needs through individually tailored workshops. More than 400 local boards have adopted another institute program, Professional Governance Standards, or formal sets of criteria tailored to local school boards, county boards of education and district superintendents.
“We embrace the concept of standards,” Campbell said—although he’ll happily educate anyone who will listen on the shortcomings of some of the formulaic benchmarks coming out of the state and federal education bureaucracies.
The Plotkin era
Scott P. Plotkin is an education policy wonk of the first order, going back at least to his days as student body president at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.
He also has a long history with school boards. He ran for a seat on the San Juan Unified School District board in 1977. He was soundly defeated, an incident he chalks up now as a learning experience. He went on to win a seat on the Rio Linda Union ESD board in 1981 (and to hold it for two decades, until he resigned to head CSBA) and served as president of the Sacramento County School Boards Association from 1985 to 1988.
Plotkin traces his introduction to CSBA back to his first Annual Education Conference in 1981.
“I had my horizons widened in ways I never expected,” Plotkin said, adding that he was “blown away” by all the useful workshops, inspiring speakers, networking opportunities and other aspects of CSBA’s signature event. (Recollections are hazy now, but the conference may even have been where he first met his wife, Patty Thiel, who was then a board member of the Elverta Joint ESD.)
By 1985 Plotkin was a member of CSBA’s Delegate Assembly; “I loved every minute of it,” said Plotkin, who would go on to become the body’s parliamentarian. By 1990 he had joined CSBA’s Executive Committee as the association’s vice president.
While he devoted his “spare” time to school governance, Plotkin earned his daily bread in state-level education policy. He’d initially gone to work in Sacramento as a paid lobbyist for an organization of CSU students before landing what he thought of as a plum career position with the Governmental Affairs Office of the California State University system in 1978. He rose to the position of director of the office, but he took a leave of absence in January 1997 to serve as chief consultant and staff director for the Senate Education Committee. That temporary post took on more and more permanence as one committee chairman after another asked him to stay on.
“I was just in the middle of a lot of things and having the time of my life,” Plotkin remembers of his days in “the Building,” as the state Capitol is known by those in the know. “And then Davis Campbell announces that he wants to retire” as CSBA’s chief executive.
Plotkin applied and prevailed in the selection process. He was hired, going to work in October 2001. Just weeks later, as the saying goes, Everything Changed.
“I came into this office with everybody reeling” after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Plotkin said.
The “new normal” that people talk about now turned out to closely resemble the old. Just as Campbell had found much of his time taken up in the defense of Proposition 98, so did Plotkin.
“My first full year on the job was [spent] trying to preserve and protect Proposition 98” in 2002, in the face of yet another assault on the education funding guarantee, Plotkin recalled. No sooner was that fight won than Assembly Bill 2160 came along, and the Education Coalition seemed ready to rip apart at the seams.
Composed of CSBA plus the Association of California School Administrators, California Association of School Business Officials, California County Superintendents Educational Services Association, state PTA and several education-related labor groups including the California Teachers Association, the Education Coalition sometimes seemed to be built on shifting sands. As Campbell said, “You never know from year to year whether the coalition is going to be effective.”
That became apparent once again soon after Plotkin took office. Just as the coalition was prevailing on yet another fight to preserve Proposition 98 in early 2002, Assembly Member Jackie Goldberg introduced AB 2160, a CTA-backed push to apply collective bargaining to curriculum, textbooks and education standards.
“It became a war. Aside from the budget, this is what we spent all our time on,” Plotkin said. “We ended up killing the bill, [but] it really split the Education Coalition,” especially the different labor organizations. Tempers only flared further, in Sacramento and throughout the state, when the state’s energy crisis hit.
“We were fighting all these battles,” Plotkin recalled, when “suddenly, there’s this recall.”
A simmering effort to recall Gov. Gray Davis boiled over in 2003 when U.S. Rep. Darrel Issa poured cash into the campaign. An action movie star named Arnold Schwarzenegger, who’d made some friends in the education community by sponsoring Proposition 49’s after-school initiative in 2002, jumped into the race to replace Davis—joined by nearly 200 other candidates.
The issues behind the recall were real. The state was saddled with a structural deficit and faced with some stark choices. Voters reacted, removing Davis from the governor’s office and installing Schwarzenegger.
Plotkin remembers meeting with Schwarzenegger in late 2003.
“He laid out for us in a very knowledgeable and well-studied way” the need to suspend Proposition 98, and persuaded the Education Coalition to support him, Plotkin said. “Then we had to sell our members on the idea.” A formal agreement was drawn up, providing for restoration of the lost funding when conditions improved.
“I went up and down the state backing him up,” along with the rest of the state’s education leadership, Plotkin continued. “We were all with him on this.” With the Education Coalition’s blessing, the Legislature passed a lean budget with reduced education funding. The state’s fiscal picture improved as the year went by, and educators looked forward to restoration of the lost funds when the governor unveiled his budget for the following year.
Instead, “In January 2005 [Schwarzenegger] absolutely reneged on the agreement,” Plotkin said. “The good news is that everybody was so shocked by what he did … they seemed to know intuitively that we had been hornswoggled,” as Plotkin put it. “Our members stood by us and didn’t blame us for what happened.”
The Education Coalition was fully vindicated the following November, when all five of the measures that the governor put on the ballot in a special election were roundly defeated.
CSBA will continue to advocate for local education in Sacramento, where the association will continue to fight incursions on local boards’ authority expected to follow from the fight over the Los Angeles Unified School District, and in Washington, D.C., where the new Congress will take up the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act. Plotkin stressed that success in that debate, as in all state and federal actions, will depend on pressure from the grassroots.
“The farther away you get from the classroom, the more abstract the thinking gets,” Plotkin observed. “We need back-bench members of Congress that are getting hammered at home to go to the leadership and say, ‘We’ve got to fix this.’ ”
Looking forward
“I think there are a lot of questions about what the next year is going to bring,” Plotkin said, speaking before the outcome of the 2006 race for governor was known. “There are huge issues on our plate.”
CSBA’s executive director was upbeat as he took stock.
“We are very strong in terms of our membership and our revenue base,” Plotkin said. “Our dues, on a proportional basis, are still lower that most other states’” school board associations, as are CSBA’s conference fees.
“We’re trying to be smart and responsive when it comes to the service needs of our members,” and to equip local school districts and county offices with the information, training and resources they need, Plotkin continued. “We won’t tell you what decisions to make, but we’ll give you all the tools you need to make the decisions that are best for your community.”
Plotkin vowed to continue to build the association’s political strength, and he indicated the association’s leaders won’t hesitate to speak out when it benefits their members.
“I want to make it hard for [politicians] to willy-nilly turn their backs” on popular will, Plotkin said. “Representative government means something in this country, and we’re the ones who need to keep sounding the clarion call to remind people of that. As long as we keep pushing the envelope, then we’ll be a force to be reckoned with.”