SACRAMENTO, CA--In recent years the California State Board of Education has proved serious about reform, pushing for tougher standards and statewide testing. But now the board is sending a strong signal that it will be turning back the clock to the days when the state’s education establishment saw more spending as the answer to all problems.

Freshly supplied with appointees of Governor Gray Davis, the board has hired as executive director John Mockler, a classic case of the fox guarding the hen house.

Mockler served as a consultant to the Assembly Education Committee in 1965 and went on to advise Assembly Speaker Willie Brown and to work for former state Superintendent Wilson Riles. A man of the left and an opponent of school choice, 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 lobbing firm of Strategic Education Services in Sacramento, Mr. Mockler has done a good job in seeing that these billions 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 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, even if he severs relations with his firm, Mr. Mockler will be strategically positioned to serve the interests of those with a vested interest in spending at ever-increasing rates.

Another client of Mr. Mockler’s is the Los Angeles Unified School District, not known as a bastion of achievement or accountability. That district resisted the higher math standards and has continued the destructive practice of social promotion. That district also built the Belmont Learning Center, a $200-million monument-- the building is unusable--to the reality that spending does not translate to improved student achievement.

When all funds are accounted for, the state spends an average of $7,937 per student per year. 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 scores below the 50th percentile in tests. Overall California students lag behind most of the nation and many foreign countries.

Clearly, money is not the problem. Rather, California students have been victimized by junk thought fads, self-esteem quackery, low expectations, low standards, a 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.

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 California’s parents and children. Little will change until the governmental school monopoly is broken down. Then parents and children will have the choice to walk out of that system and take their money with them.

--K. Lloyd Billingsley