Summer 2003

Table of Contents

Cal-Tax Home

Email Editor

Guest Commentary 

Daniel Weintraub is a columnist for The Sacramento Bee. His daily web log on California politics and public policy is available at www.sacbee.com/insider. This July 3, 2003 column is reprinted with permission.

Californians from all over the state ought to be watching the nasty fight playing out this summer in the Sacramento city schools. It shows what reform-minded administrators and a supportive community can do to try to turn around public education in low-income neighborhoods. It also demonstrates, unfortunately, how far the state teachers union will go to block such changes.

The district has been trying to re-invent Sacramento High School, a troubled school in the city's largely minority Oak Park neighborhood, a few miles south of the state Capitol. The campus was officially on the list of the state's "low-performing" schools and participated in a state program targeting new resources at such failures. But Sacramento High didn't improve, and faced a possible state takeover.

Instead, the district school board voted earlier this year to close the campus and hand the grounds to a nonprofit corporation headed by former NBA basketball star Kevin Johnson, who graduated from Sacramento High before going on to lead the Phoenix Suns as an all-star point guard. Johnson has returned to his childhood digs and is using his money and connections to try to spur an economic and spiritual resurgence in the area.

Under the leadership of Johnson's group, the new school is to be split into six small academies, in line with an emerging thesis that teenagers do better in more intimate surroundings than in the massive, impersonal environments that have come to characterize the modern American high school.

Sacramento High would be a public charter school, meaning it would get its funding directly from the state and escape many of the rules and regulations that weigh down traditional public schools. It would be held accountable for its results rather than its processes - and the students would be expected to meet clear academic and behavioral standards. At least at the start, the teachers would not be members of the local union, the Sacramento City Teachers Association.

That's the problem. The union could not accept the loss of membership and control, and has done everything possible to stop the school's rebirth. The harassment started while the district was pondering the change, as teachers at the old Sacramento High frightened their students with horror stories about what would happen if the transition occurred. But the signatures of more than 1,000 parents on petitions supporting the proposal carried the day.

Once the school board voted narrowly to move ahead, the local union, with the backing of the California Teachers Association, took the district to court. The teachers' claim: The school was illegal because it wasn't really new but only a conversion of the old campus. State law, the union insisted, required the support of half the school's teachers for a conversion. If the school was closed and reopened, parental backing would be sufficient.

The first judge who heard the case rejected the union's request for an emergency order blocking the move and told the plaintiffs they had little chance of prevailing at trial. So the union used a legal maneuver to dump that judge for another.

The new jurist, Superior Court Judge Trena Burger-Plavan, issued a ruling blocking the school district from moving ahead. She didn't say the district could not close the school. Nor did she say the district could not close the school and reopen it later as a charter school. She simply said it had been done all too quickly. Her ruling, now under appeal, seemed to suggest that if the district left the campus shuttered for a year or so, all would be forgiven.

Now Johnson's St. HOPE Corp. is calling parents of more than 1,000 students already enrolled for the fall and circulating new petitions, which they hope will clear the hurdles Burger-Plavan erected. The union is vowing an all-out fight and is pressuring the school board to cave and return the campus to traditional status.

One subtext to all of this is that the district's teachers are threatening to strike this fall over a new contract. If the new Sac High is allowed to proceed with non-union teachers, it could well stand as the only school in the city to open on schedule in September. That would give it tons of publicity and potentially weaken the union's position in negotiations with the district.

Despite the uncertainty, the school's founders are moving ahead and have hired dozens of teachers and a corps of well-regarded administrators. Even more heartening, the community isn't giving up on St. HOPE. The nonprofit just announced it has received commitments for more than $1 million in new donations and scholarships. A local developer, a building supply company and a private law school were among the donors. This comes on top of $1 million already pledged by another developer and the UC Davis Medical Center, and $3 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The reborn Sacramento High School has the leadership and the support it needs to soar to new heights on behalf of the capital city's most disadvantaged students. All the school needs to do now is shed the teachers union that is fighting to keep it tied down.