Journalist Examines Decline of Schools
Film Shows How State Fell from`FIRST TO WORST'
By Nicole C. Wong

"Californians in a way have chosen mediocrity,'' said John Merrow, the driving force behind a new documentary on the downfall of education in the Golden State.

Merrow, an award-winning TV journalist, chronicled the state's crumbling public school system in "First to Worst,'' an hour long PBS documentary that airs tonight in the Bay Area. He asserts that all Americans should be concerned about the problem -- because one in eight children in the country attend public school in California.

"These are tomorrow's voters. If they're uneducated, they're going to be taken in by charlatans and worse,'' Merrow said.

Back in the 1950s, California's schools surpassed all others. Stanford education Professor Michael Kirst, who appears throughout the documentary, remembers it as a time when school districts "had so much money that they didn't even use the state textbooks. . . . They bought textbooks off the market that they thought were better.''

But today, some students learn beneath leaky roofs and broken light fixtures. Others meet in the cafeteria for music class -- if their school can even afford a music program.

What changed was a growing consciousness of inequality in the school system and a backlash against mounting property taxes. The documentary points to the 1970s, when the state Supreme Court threw out the old system of funding schools with local property taxes because wealthier districts had better resources than the rest.

And in 1978, voters approved the wildly popular Proposition 13, which halted property tax increases on homes and businesses and required a two-thirds vote to impose new local taxes.
Proposition 13 also shifted control over schools to the state capital, where politicians told teachers what techniques to use and districts how to spend state money.

"California has an incredibly centralized system,'' said Merrow, who lives part of the year in Palo Alto and whose children went to school on the East Coast. "What happens when you do that is people lose touch with their school."

"It'd be a little bit like your paycheck coming in 88 little envelopes,'' he added. "This is for bread. This is for movies. This is for gas for your car.''

Schools suffered further in the 1980s and '90s as the state's population mushroomed with an additional 10 million people, including immigrants and their children.

One segment of "First to Worst'' focused on Ocala Middle School in San Jose, which Merrow said is "a perfect example of the strains that California schools are under.'' The video camera captured how difficult it is to teach a classroom of students who understand limited, yet varying, levels of English.

"Some of them have only been here two weeks,'' Ocala teacher Leti Guttierez said in the documentary.

By 1994, the film goes on to explain, California ranked last according to test scores. While it still hovers near the bottom, Kirst is hopeful the nation's wealthiest state will continue to improve.
Californians, Kirst predicted in an interview, will need to forge an "overarching coalition'' that could pass a ballot initiative to fix school funding and restore control to school districts.

"Improving schools also will require more money," Merrow said.

Beth Jimison, a San Carlos parent who has two children in public schools, watched "First to Worst'' on Thursday and wants more people to see it tonight.

"This is pretty empirical evidence of what happens with or without tax money,'' Jimison said. "If we don't invest in kids, then we don't get quality schools and we don't get a quality workforce.''