The California State Board of Education has sent a strong signal that it will be tilting toward business as usual rather than continuing the reforms of recent years.

Freshly supplied with appointees of Gov. Gray Davis, the board has hired as executive director John Mockler, a former lobbyist for the Los Angeles Unified School District, not known as a bastion of achievement or accountability. The move is a classic case of the fox guarding the hen house.

A long-time insider and man of the political left, Mockler served as a consultant to the Assembly Education Committee in 1965 and went on to advise Assembly Speaker Willie Brown and work for former state Superintendent Wilson Riles. But he’s more of a money man than an educator.

Mockler is the author of the 1988 Proposition 98, which made education the state’s biggest expenditure, currently more than $40 billion yearly. As president of the private lobbing firm of Strategic Education Services in Sacramento Mr. Mockler has done a good job in seeing that these billions in taxpayer dollars flow freely to the clients he represents.

These include the Association of American Publishers, who lobby furiously to sell their overpriced and often deficient textbooks. Other clients include the Los Angeles Unified School District, Lexmark International Inc., California Public Radio and Television, the Los Angeles County Office of Education, and the California Association of Administrators of State and Federal Programs, a bureaucrats’ union.

These and other clients are well aware that public education in California is indeed a for-profit industry, with billions at stake. Reformers here are concerned that, as executive director of the state board, Mr. Mockler will be strategically positioned to serve the interests of those with a vested interest in spending at ever-increasing rates. But those interests are not the same as those of California’s students, who as recent test show, currently lag behind most other states and many foreign countries.

Mr. Mocker’s client, the Los Angeles Unified School District, built the Belmont Learning Center. This $100-million debacle stands as monument to the reality that spending does not translate to improved student achievement.

After decades of research, professor Eric Hanushek, the nation’s leading education economist, concluded that “there is little systematic relationship between school resources and student performance.” State superintendent Delaine Eastin constantly understate those resources.

Eastin and others claim that the state’s per-pupil spending rate is $6,025 but this amount excludes federal and lottery money, which with other sources brings the amount to $7,937. Many districts spend more, including $9,028 in San Jose, $10,021 in San Francisco, and a staggering $16,555 in the Sausalito Elementary School District, where a majority of students score below the 50th percentile in tests.

Clearly, money is not the problem. Rather, California students have been victimized by junkthought fads, self-esteem quackery, low expectations, low standards, a ridiculously short school year, bureaucratic rigidity and union indifference. Since the system is a public utility with guaranteed funding and captive clients, there is virtually no incentive for serious reform.

The higher academic standards launched by the previous state board, along with charter schools, have made some progress. But education secretary Gary Hart has stood by as bills backed by teacher unions have robbed charter schools of their ability to innovate with distance learning and home-study programs. Superintendent Eastin wants to extend the school system to infants when it isn’t serving current students. Her Department of Education has also been embroiled in financial scandals.

California schools are becoming a vast Belmont Learning Center, at which little learning takes place. These dismal conditions cry out for true reformers not captive to the blinkered thinking of a reactionary education establishment. The choice of a lobbyist as executive director reveals a state board of education more intent on preserving the system than serving the needs of parents and children.

Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley is editorial director of the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco and the author of From Mainline to Sideline: The Social Witness of the National Council of Churches. He can be reached via email at klbillingsley@pacificresearch.org.