Monday, March 1, 1999 | 11:27 a.m.
SACRAMENTO -- California Gov. Gray Davis has been in office fewer than two months, but already he is learning how much harder it is to change the direction of a big, troubled school system than to talk about it in a campaign.
His experience sends a cautionary signal to Washington politicians who fancy they have found a magic formula for improving student performance.
On the face of it, Davis has everything going for him. The plight of California's schools, which have sunk almost to the bottom of the states in standardized test results, was his key issue in last fall's campaign.
With a big boost from the teachers' union, which warred constantly with retiring Republican Gov. Pete Wilson, Davis won by a landslide 20-point margin, the first Democrat elected as governor since 1978.
With friendly Democratic majorities in both houses of the Legislature, Davis might have expected easy sailing for the four school reform bills he put at the top of his 1999 agenda.
Not so fast. Chances are, much of his program will be passed by the March 31 target date he has set, but it is clear it will be altered substantially before it reaches his desk. Davis is discovering daily how hard it is to change the thinking of teachers and the practices of schools -- and how hard it will be to achieve results that will be visible to voters when they judge whether he has kept his promises.
Davis' bills embody mainstream school reform ideas: intensified reading instruction; a high school graduation exam; peer review of teachers and a procedure for weeding out failures; and report cards measuring the performance of schools.
Last week, the legislative analyst's office -- comparable to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office -- criticized Davis' program as too prescriptive and insufficiently flexible, an echo of the complaints many governors offer about President Clinton's national education reforms.
When I asked Davis about this criticism, he exploded as much as his tightly controlled personality ever allows. "We've had local control of schools for 50 years," he said, "and it's been an abject failure. When you have an earthquake or natural disaster, people expect the state to intervene. Well, we have a disaster in our schools."
Because that sense of disaster is so widespread, legislators of neither party are likely to oppose the Davis reforms outright. But state Sen. Jim Brulte, a leading Republican strategist, put his finger on the problem Davis faces: "We did so much in Wilson's last term," when economic recovery pumped billions more into the schools, financing longer school years, smaller class sizes, new library books, etc., "that what is left for Gray is the tough stuff. It's the accountability measures, and they pit him against his own constituency, the teachers."
The California Teachers' Association, which contributed more than $1 million to Davis' campaign, officially is neither supporting nor opposing his reforms. But working through its allies in the Legislature, it is busily sandpapering down the bills, cushioning its members against wrenching change.
For example, Davis proposed that school districts which do not adopt the peer-review system for identifying weak teachers would lose their annual cost-of-living adjustments. That provision disappeared in committee, replaced by a much weaker sanction. "The governor wanted a hammer in there," said John Hein, the top political operator for the teachers' union, "but we think it can work only if it's done in a collegial way."
Brulte and Assembly Republican Leader Rod Pacheco concede that Davis has gained politically by putting himself "out on the point" of a school reform movement the public wants. "But," Pacheco said, "he also has taken responsibility for the performance of our schools, and if they're no better four years from now, which I fear may be the case, he will have to take the blame."
"I accept that," Davis told me. "I expect to be measured by the results."
But one measure will be missing. Under Davis' timetable, the new high school graduation test will be given for the first time to the Class of 2003 -- the year after he is up for re-election.
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