Published on June 22, 2003
By Angela Hill, STAFF WRITER
RICHMOND - There's clearly not just one solution, and none will be quick.
But kernels of legislative reform for California's struggling public school system were offered at Saturday's inaugural hearing of the Assembly Select Committee on Bridging the Achievement Gap at Richmond City Hall and drew about 100 community members.
Chaired by Assemblywoman Loni Hancock, D-Berkeley, the meeting began with lessons learned the hard way -- the examination of three local districts that have gone bankrupt and were taken over by the state at some point during the past 10 years. Those districts are West Contra Costa County, Emeryville and, most recently, Oakland.
"What has caused this? How do districts get to the point of bankruptcy?" Hancock asked, starting off the discussion. "Is it mismanagement, underfunding or just bad luck?"
Panelists recognized that this system and its problems evolved over time. "It's the product of things like Prop. 13, rather than a planned system of education," Hancock said.
Basically, panelists agreed, it comes down to that old definition of stupidity: You keep doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result.
"It is generally true that if a situation repeats itself frequently, the causes are systemic, rather than personal or individual," said committee member Nicolette Toussaint from the Bay Area School Reform Collaborative.
"Districts go bankrupt because the state under-invests in its schools," she said. "Inadequate resources are provided to do what the state mandates that schools do. And funding is inflexible -- money earmarked for one thing can't be turned over for something that's needed."
And timing is everything.
"We need to realign the budget calendar," said George Harris, board member of the West Contra Costa district. "Schools don't know how much they're getting every year. Fiscal years for districts have to be approved long before the state has adopted a budget. So districts don't know what they'll get and have to base financial and personnel decisions on guesswork."
Henry Der, the state administrator currently running the Emeryville school district, said there's a great need for more business-trained superintendents and upper management.
"There's more to it than promoting K-12 teachers into business administration and then up to superintendent," Der said.
Harris agreed that administrators need better business training. "When I got elected, I knew very little -- OK, I knew nothing at all -- about education financing," he said. "That needs to be institutionalized at the state level."
In addition, districts lack the systems, the personnel and the infrastructure to do a good job of administration, panelists said. The intense pressures of the job of a schools superintendent combined with the frustrating lack of funding to meet these demands mean high turnover rates in key positions.