Summit Aims to Improve Public Schools : Reform: Supporters hope the two-day meeting of top political, education and business leaders will help push education to the top of California’s legislative agenda. But can competing interests come together?

For two days this week, some of California’s best and brightest leaders will get a lesson in dropouts, crowded classrooms, campus violence, skimpy budgets, low test scores, rising poverty, the complexity of educating youngsters who do not speak English and flagging public confidence.

None of this will be new to Lannie Foster. As a longtime teacher at Jordan High School in Watts, she has more than a nodding acquaintance with the problems besetting many of the state’s 7,600 public schools.

Nonetheless, Foster is hopeful about the statewide education summit to be held in San Francisco on Tuesday and Wednesday. Convened by Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco) and featuring a broad spectrum of political and educational views, the summit reflects a growing recognition that Californians want better results from their $24-billion-a-year system of public schools.

“I’ve heard people talking about what we need for 25 years, but I’m hoping that this time we’ll get a strategy, a proactive plan for California,” said Foster, who could not wangle a hard-to-get invitation to the summit. Referring to the summit’s packed roster of political, business, education and community leaders, she added: “This time we’ll have the movers and the shakers, and I hope they’re ready to start moving and shaking.”

Reformers hope the summit will help push education to the top of the state’s legislative agenda, now dominated by crime and the economy. They also want to build consensus for overhauling the state’s system of public schools, the largest in the nation with 5.2 million students.

Cable television stations statewide will make gavel-to-gavel coverage available to 6 million households, and Brown’s office has set up a hot line for people to call in their comments and suggestions. With almost a week to go before the summit, the toll-free hot line, (800) SPEAK 94, had logged more than 7,200 calls, Brown’s office said.

The summit will explore ambitious topics--the status of the education system and its changing student profile, how school quality affects California’s economic future, the teaching profession, ways to reorganize and pay for schools, and campus violence.

“I think the education community will say, ‘Gee, yes, we knew all that stuff,’ but this is a seminar for the public and for the legislators who represent them,” said Maureen DiMarco, Gov. Pete Wilson’s secretary for child development and education.

“It’s going to be in the broad context of where we are, where we need to be and what it’s going to take to get us there--just defining that will put us 10 years ahead of where we’ve been.”

Sherry Loofbourrow, president of the California School Boards Assn., sees the summit in part as a long overdue opportunity to set the record straight.

“There are a lot of misconceptions about public schools. . . . We should be able to get reality out on the table and look at the good, the great, (as well as) what’s not working,” she said.

Education reform faces many obstacles, including deep disagreement over exactly what needs to be done and who should be running the reform show. Some divisions will be in evidence at the summit, as groups ranging from the California Teachers Assn. to the Assn. of Urban School Districts to Children Now forward their proposals.

Some groups will call for higher spending; others will want to set standards for student achievement and hold teachers and principals accountable for the results. Others will want changes in the way teachers are trained and evaluated.

Making reform work is especially complicated in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the state’s largest, where costly efforts to revamp the way schools operate must be reconciled with a pledge to end a 10% pay cut imposed on teachers. The teachers union is talking strike if salaries are not restored.

There is also some concern that politics will dominate the summit, given the upcoming races for governor and state superintendent of public instruction and the expected presence at the summit of all the major candidates. Brown has close ties to the politically powerful California Teachers Assn., the biggest education lobby in the state.

“A very important player in this is Willie Brown and his attitude in this,” said one education leader. Reform is possible, the source said, if Brown “sends some key signals at the summit that he is serious about this.”

Brown has said school reform is a top priority and that he would consider any proposals. Optimists cite Brown’s statewide economic summit of a year ago, which is credited with helping break the gridlock in workers’ compensation reform and clearing the way for economy stimulus legislation.

But others wonder whether anything of substance will result.

“I’ve become fairly cynical about most politicians and their ability to deal with schools,” said George Woods, a social studies teacher for 26 years at Venice High School in Los Angeles. “I’m sick and tired of some phonies talking about how to fix education. The issue is we don’t spend enough on public schools.”

Business leaders said they will make the case that school reform is a key to ensuring a healthy economic future.

“This is much more than a schools issue, this is an economic issue, and it’s the key to many others--you can’t fix crime until you fix education,” said Jere Jacobs, a Pacific Telesis executive active with the California Business Roundtable’s education task force.

Yet the state’s economic problems continue to pose a roadblock to reform and widen the rift between those who believe schools should learn to get by on what they have and those who say there is not enough money to do the job.

Recession-induced budget cuts in Sacramento, which provides most of the money for public schools, have forced local districts over the last few years to increase class sizes, cut scores of services and let campuses fall into disrepair.

Once among the most generous to its schools, California slipped to 42nd among the 50 states in the amount it spends per student. At the same time, the proportion of needy students and those who do not speak English is growing. In the Los Angeles Unified School District, 280,000 students are not proficient at speaking English.

California’s nationally heralded reforms of a decade ago, launched with broad political and education Establishment support and money to pay for the changes, resulted in a stronger curriculum that put the state at the forefront of the school improvement drive. Better teacher training, new ways of assessing student achievement, fewer dropouts and larger numbers of students taking college preparatory courses were some of the payoffs.

But the efforts still failed to reach large numbers of the most troubled students, and did nothing to ease the burden heaped on local districts by a seven-volume set of state education regulations.

Now there is a move to free schools and districts from most state requirements and allow local educators and parents more power to decide what is best for their students.

“We have spent lots of time telling people how they have to operate and relatively little time measuring outcomes and deciding what to do when those outcomes fall short,” said state Sen. Gary K. Hart (D-Santa Barbara), a key player in much of the state’s education reform legislation for more than a decade.

“Now we’re beginning to get out of the way and give schools a great deal more freedom in managing their educational affairs,” said Hart, who spearheaded last year’s pioneering charter schools law, which allows up to 100 schools to chart their own courses.

Working in the summit’s favor is the wide recognition that public sentiment for reform is running high. That became clear in last fall’s ballot fight over a proposal to let parents use tax vouchers for private school tuition, presumably from funds set aside for public education.

The state’s voters rejected the measure after the education Establishment spent more than $16 million on a campaign that argued that public schools would be devastated by the voucher measure. But that did not mean voters were satisfied.

“Analyses showed that only 1% of the people who voted against the initiative did so because they thought the schools were OK,” said Guilbert Hentschke, dean of the USC School of Education. “This was clearly a wake-up call.”

Hoping to capitalize on the momentum for change, the governor turned to the head of a national education advisory group to attend the summit and serve as an “honest broker” in building agreement.

Wilson’s choice, Frank Newman, president of the Denver-based Education Commission of the States, said he has been working with Brown’s staff and is “enthused” about the summit.

“I think everybody at this point sees these two (efforts) as going together,” Newman said. “It’s really hard to get thoughtful, coherent, systemic reform, and there needs to be a nonpartisan, nonpolitical agent to bring that about.” The summit could help, he said.

“California educators were scared by the voucher initiative, and they have begun to realize that if you want more money--and certainly the schools in California are going to need it--you can’t get it unless people believe that you are actually moving toward higher performance,” Newman said. “You have to have a plan, have to be going somewhere.”