When California school districts get themselves into financial trouble -- an increasing trend, unfortunately -- there's a time-tested intervention mechanism in place.

What happens, however, when a district's troubles are academic, rather than financial? Assembly Member Juan Arambula, D-Fresno, is proposing that a similar intervention system be established for school districts that persistently rank near the bottom in their students' academic achievement test scores -- and his hometown district, Fresno Unified, would be the largest district that would be affected.

Fresno Unified is one of 21 districts, according to a computer analysis done for Arambula by the state Department of Education, with half or more of their students classified as being in low-performing schools based on the state's 2004 Academic Performance Index scoring of state-mandated tests.

Although the state schools superintendent can intervene with individual schools that fail to meet academic improvement standards, and Superintendent Jack O'Connell cracked down on six schools the other day, there's nothing in law that covers academic failure by an entire district.

One Arambula bill would provide extra supervision for a troubled district by the county superintendent of schools, who could waive some sections of the Education Code deemed to inhibit the district's ability to raise academic performance, or redirect students who test poorly into extra classes. If a district doesn't improve its academic scores markedly, an academic trustee could be appointed to oversee teaching, or an academic administrator with broad authority to implement broad programmatic changes.

The second Arambula bill would create an Academic Crisis and Management Assistance Team, similar to the financial assistance team, to assist low-performing districts to raise their academic scores.

Arambula says he wants to target help to districts "where it [low performance] has been going on for years" but not low-performing districts that are making demonstrable progress.

Academically troubled districts tend to have large concentrations of nonwhite students, especially Latinos, whose first languages are not English -- with Coachella Valley Unified, which sits at the very top of the list at 99.1% low-performing, a classic example.

Coachella primarily serves Latino students. The district's assistant superintendent, Bob Bailey, says that the state should overhaul its own testing procedures before cracking down on Coachella or other low-scoring districts.

"The help we need from the state is to change the testing system," says Bailey, complaining that California, alone among the states, requires testing in English for students who have barely begun their English studies. "It takes four to seven years to teach English," he adds, pointing to Coachella's good scores for children who have been schooled in English.

Arambula is undoubtedly sincere in wanting to improve conditions for kids in the state's lowest-performing school districts, but Bailey's point about testing kids in skills that they have had only minimal time to learn, and then using the results as the basis for intervention, is equally valid. And the juxtaposition of the two exemplifies California's persistent educational quandary, one that also hangs over the state's high school exit exam; we seem to be working at cross-purposes with ourselves.

Dan Walters writes for The Bee's Capitol bureau. E-mail: dwalters@sacbee.com; mail: P.O. Box 15779, Sacramento, CA 95852.