In the Golden state, leaden school scores

The California Teachers Association (CTA) now claims Governor Schwarzenegger has reneged on a promise last year to pay back $2 billion he borrowed from education funding during last year's budget crisis. And they say Schwarzenegger wants to weaken Proposition 98, a 1988 guarantee of minimum funding for schools.

"The governor can play with the numbers all he wants, but it doesn't change the fact that he broke his promise," says CTA President Barbara Kerr. More evidence of financial hardship, she says, is layoff notices delivered to 2,400 teachers.

But Schwarzenegger claims that during a severe budget crisis, his commitment to education is still strong. His finance department defends the squeeze on school funding, saying is their only other choice would be worse: cuts in health and human services.

"Any more reductions to health and services would have impacted families, low-income kids, and the developmentally disabled," says H.D. Palmer, spokesman for the state finance department.

At the same time, the Bush administration has been pressuring the state to better identify failing school districts. Federal law calls for states to list districts in which students have not improved standardized English and math scores two years in a row. But the state has been allowing districts to avoid the list if students from low-income households reach a set score on a different measurement.

The US Department of Education is telling California state school administrators that if they do not change the way they classify struggling districts under the federal "No Children Left Behind Act," they will lose federal dollars.

As state superintendent, Mr. O'Connell and other experts see such pressure as an unfair Catch-22 that further threatens budgets.

"We support the goals of 'No Child Left Behind,' " says O'Connell. "But [federal] methodology in trying to define good schools and bad has been inconsistent with our own data. They don't recognize the diversity of California education."

Such comments underscore the challenges facing frontline teachers like L.A. High School's Cynthia Augustine who, faced with more than 20 nationalities in her classroom, says that funding isn't the only problem.

No. 1, she says: "The bureaucracy needs to be cut so that we have fewer administrators doing nameless tasks and more money for teachers in the classroom." And No. 2: Parental involvement needs to increase.

"For me it's a tossup whether not having enough money is the biggest problem or parents who don't care enough about their kids," says Ms. Augustine. On parent-conference night, she says, only 1 of 200 parents show up, but when the L.A. district attorney recently sent letters threatening jail to parents of those whose children had missed 10 or more school days, 1,200 showed up.

"Wish I'd had that much interest for my parent conferences," says Augustine.

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