School Accountability Bill Clears Panel

SACRAMENTO —  The last of Gov. Gray Davis’ special session bills on education, which would rank all 8,000 California public schools and identify 300 for improvement, sailed out of a key legislative committee Wednesday on a 9-0 vote.

The $192-million school accountability bill approved by the Senate Education Committee, an integral part of Davis’ education reforms, has drawn criticism from liberals and conservatives alike.

Some Democrats fret that it provides more to reward good schools than to help troubled ones. They worry that schools in poorer neighborhoods would automatically rank below those from richer ones.

“It will give the parents in Hillsborough, in Beverly Hills . . . a right to put bumper stickers on their cars. So what!” said state Sen. John Vasconcellos (D-Santa Clara), who did not vote on the bill. “I hate the shame-and-blame approach.”

Republicans decry the bill’s mixing of student and teacher attendance with test scores to rank schools. They say the bill gives local districts too much leeway in punishing schools that do not improve.

Sanctions could be “as little as just writing really nasty letters saying, ‘You’re doing a bad job,’ ” complained Sen. Ray Haynes (R-Riverside), who also withheld his vote.

The bill creates an Academic Performance Index, or API, that would be based 60% on a school’s score on the statewide test, 40% on other factors, including attendance and graduation rates.

Schools falling below the 50th percentile would be eligible for state intervention, which would link more scrutiny with more help and funding. Top-scoring schools would be eligible for awards of up to $150 per student and a variety of nonmonetary rewards.

“As a teacher, I found kids respond just as well to a little star on their forehead as to cash,” said state Sen. Richard Alarcon (D-Sylmar).

Because the administration’s bills are on a fast track, all four measures--school accountability, reading improvement, teacher peer review and the high school graduation exam--will head to Senate and Assembly appropriations committees in the coming weeks.

There, final massaging of language and evaluation of their $444-million total cost will take place before full Assembly and Senate votes are taken.

One last-minute snag surfaced this week, with release of the legislative analyst office’s annual report on the state budget, which criticizes the governor’s approach to education reform as too top-down.

Reiterating concerns raised in a report she issued last month, Legislative Analyst Elizabeth Hill said decisions about how to fix troubled schools should be left to school districts instead of the state.

But some of Hill’s complaints have been addressed, as legislators amended the bills to provide for more local control.

Hill also said the teacher peer review program should be voluntary. The administration has agreed to allow districts not to participate, but if they do so they lose their annual cost of living raise.

On the reading improvement bill, Hill suggested consolidating funding for the governor’s reading programs with five existing programs that attack deficiencies in reading and other skills.

In response, Davis spokesman Michael Bustamante said the governor is aware of Hill’s criticism but stands by the bills as they are emerging from the committees. “It’s the direction that the governor intends to take California,” he said.

Meanwhile, the first Republican special session bills met mixed fates Wednesday afternoon in the Assembly Education Committee.

One, by Poway Assemblywoman Charlene Zettel, calls for review of teacher tenure protections. After accusations that the review panel was heavily weighted against teachers, Zettel withdrew the bill for further review.

The other, by Assemblywoman Lynne Leach of Walnut Creek, passed the committee. It provides for a review of the test required of teachers, the California Basic Education Skills Test, which has long been criticized by Republicans for being too easy and by Democrats for discriminating against candidates whose first language is not English.

Republicans plan to introduce at least three dozen special session bills, all of which take a harder approach to the same basic public school woes targeted by Davis.

But they know there is a slim chance that significant numbers of their bills will pass, because Republicans’ numbers have declined to the lowest levels in years, to 15 of 40 in the Senate and 32 of 80 in the Assembly.

“Practically speaking, they don’t have to take any of our amendments, they can kill all our bills, they can dither around the edges on this stuff and create the facade of full reform,” Assembly Minority Leader Rod Pacheco (R-Riverside) said.

About half of the 25 bills Assembly Republicans introduced may be shut out of the special session, Pacheco said, because the Rules Committee said they fall outside the session’s stated framework.

Conservatives’ only real leverage is the governor’s reading improvement bill, which as an urgency measure requiring a two-thirds’ majority will need Republican votes. Pacheco is considering asking fellow Republicans to withhold their vote, though he insists he would do it because of objections to the bill, not simply political tit-for-tat.

The other hope among Republicans is that, once thrown into the ring, their ideas will gain momentum through public support--if not this year, then next year as glitches in the Davis plan emerge.

In the past, “we said a lot of things that now we hear the governor saying,” said D. Everett Rice, spokesman for Haynes, who is crafting three additional Republican bills. “We think maybe we can force Democrats to move our way.”