NICE GUY HELPS KIDS FINISH LAST.

Byline: JILL STEWART 

IN a race to decide the most ineffectual, slow-on-the-uptake superintendent of public instruction in contemporary California history, I would normally nominate former Superintendent Delaine Eastin for sheer, maddening inability at the top.

But now comes this nice guy - everybody says so - Jack O'Connell, a former legislator who hasn't got a clue what troubles the schools.

While he gets on the news as an official thorn in Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's side, O'Connell fails to address the mismanagement of vast sums of money by inept school boards or bad teaching by people who cannot be fired.

O'Connell in January insisted to Knight-Ridder that our problem is money: ``We have accountability. We have world-class content standards. ... Now we have to provide nourishment.''

In July, he announced that 552 school districts overspent by $682 million last year. He implicated Arnold, saying, ``Our schools are not being adequately funded.''

Please. California schools are awash in cash - enough to ensure that our teachers are the highest paid in the United States. Local school boards spend vast sums not on classroom materials or students, but on fat perks for non-classroom people: noneducators and long-retired employees.

California is at the national median in education spending. O'Connell and his crowd dissemble about that, too, claiming it's far more expensive to educate kids here due to the high cost of living.

Balderdash. Schools do not buy buildings or land with their fat annual budgets; nor do they spend much of the budget on gas or utilities. Cost of living is a red herring.

By promoting fake troubles, O'Connell negates the real problems. Drunks and other ``teachers'' cannot be fired without battle. Green teachers incapable of controlling classrooms are granted tenure in just two years. Schools that perform miserably can offer excuses.

That's ``accountability'' to O'Connell.

Bill Evers, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, told me, ``For Jack O'Connell to say that a district that has spent on such things as open-ended health care for retirees, that somehow the governor is responsible - well, you are living in a bizarre dreamworld to talk that way.''

California test scores are rising after decades of decline - a near-miracle - thanks to strict teaching standards forced on incompetent schools by Gray Davis and Pete Wilson. Those governors were disturbed by National Assessment of Educational Progress comparisons of California kids' scores with those in 49 states.

The NAEP scores show that even California's most privileged kids are doing far, far worse than similar kids nationally. A study of that data by Eric Hanushek of the Hoover Institution shows that our ``children of college-educated parents'' - an elite subset - badly lag behind their counterparts nationally.

Is that about poverty? Funding? Immigration? Clearly not. It's about 306,000 teachers who too often don't know what to do with their seven hours in class.

O'Connell reminds me of former Superintendent Bill Honig, a nice guy who, unlike O'Connell, saw the teaching problems inside the classrooms. During the 1980s, teaching literacy to kids was not viewed by many educators as more crucial than teaching, say, health habits. California students took lifestyle-relevant courses, but couldn't read their books.

Under Delaine Eastin in the bleak 1990s, I was told by a ``language acquisition'' expert in Los Angeles that the schools could not increase what little time they spent teaching reading. Why? Because favoring reading wouldn't be fair to the other subjects.?

Honig tried to fix the teacher-driven madness nicely, by letting teachers themselves design statewide reforms. That backfired, leading to widespread adoption of the ``whole language'' approach, in which spelling tests and phonics were banned at many schools. Honig later admitted the fad was a tragic mistake that spread like a virus.

It was only when reformers got sort of, well, mean that the free fall began to slow. State officials insisted on posting school test scores. Teachers fought that. Strict reading and math standards were adopted. Teachers and inept school boards fought that.

I used to muse that Jack O'Connell was a nice but dumb guy. After seeing him do little but lash out at the governor and kiss up to stubborn teachers while pulling in a public salary of $100,000-plus, however, I've had to reassess. Anybody with a deal that sweet couldn't be dumb after all.