TEACHERS PEST GOLDBERG AS SCHOOLS CHIEF A DISASTER.

Byline: JILL STEWART

ALTHOUGH I got beat to the punch days ago, when Daily News political cartoonist Patrick O'Connor hilariously linked a story about a blob of muck threatening to overtake downtown to a rumor that Jackie Goldberg might be recruited as superintendent of Los Angeles schools, it's still a comparison worth pursuing.

For those not steeped in Goldberg-ology, she is the failed former school board president of the Los Angeles Unified School District, whose inability to get over her leftist glory days of the 1960s - and whose knack for grabbing power - has wreaked lots of damage in Los Angeles.

It was during Goldberg's era on the school board in the 1980s, for example, that the board pursued its unwritten policy to condemn no homes in order to build schools - the unavoidable practice among the grown-ups who run overcrowded school districts in cities other than L.A.

Goldberg's fantasy view that no poor families should be affected by eminent domain, combined with her obsession to wrest the Ambassador Hotel away from owner Donald Trump for a school, ultimately resulted in horrific, long-term effects on poor families citywide.

The board under Goldberg never did mount a serious program of school construction. Schools were forced onto year-round plans, and kids were badly hurt by the shortening of their school year. Despite a 1987 study that found teachers couldn't utilize the Goldberg board's absurd ``extra minutes'' each day to make up lost teaching time, the LAUSD under Goldberg clung to its no-eminent-domain nonsense. The entire city was disrupted as thousands and thousands of disadvantaged children were forced into dawn bus rides to far-off schools.

But at least a lucky few families never had to sell their homes.

In an even nuttier decision, after tying the district's hands, the Goldberg board launched a search for undesirable land like contaminated industrial sites. Although Goldberg had left the board for the Los Angeles City Council by the time the Belmont Learning Center was built, in fundamental ways that ritzy, unusable Taj Mahal high school atop a toxic oil field is Goldberg's disastrous legacy.

Goldberg's wrongheaded push to dumb-down academics so poor kids wouldn't feel bad caused endless mayhem. L.A. schools saw an explosion in grade inflation, the inability of teachers to control their classes any longer and downwardly spiraling student achievement.

Today, Goldberg seems utterly disconnected from the damage she left. She talks about her days as an LAUSD principal and school board member - a time in which local schools slid into academic purgatory - in halcyon terms.

On the City Council representing the 13th District, she became one of the most divisive members in decades. She left large areas of her district in shambles when she moved on to an Assembly seat in Sacramento, including Hollywood, which she saw as a receptacle for homeless programs, and Echo Park, where she treated local businesses who wanted to fix up the place like pariahs.

There was always a unifying theme to Goldberg's tragic brand of power: Treat the middle class and business class like a form of criminal, but fight for the poor - or, far more often, appear to be fighting for the poor.

In a city desperate to hang onto its middle class, Councilwoman Goldberg hated the middle class. In Silver Lake, when homeowners complained about drifters who decamped from the Los Angeles River to their streets, Goldberg haughtily responded by providing outdoor toilets to welcome them. In architecturally charming Atwater Village, she arrogantly handed an enormous hunk of open land over for megastores and vast parking lots, absurdly arguing that the dead-end, minimum-wage jobs being created were somehow good for low-income families.

I remember, in the heat of that battle, how Goldberg used her Machiavellian tricks, notifying Atwater Village about a hearing on her big-box plan via ``public notice'' - postcard-size notes stuck on phone poles. Classic Goldberg.

Luckily for L.A., Goldberg left for Sacramento and was replaced by the sharp Eric Garcetti, whose far-left politics look positively chamber of commerce next to hers. In Sacramento, she has supported utterly creepy and just plain outrageous legal loopholes for molesters and child pornographers, food stamps for felons, driver's licenses for illegal aliens, and always, higher taxes.

Her most damaging role is as chairwoman of the Assembly Education Committee, a powerful job she was given by Speaker Fabian Nuez when he betrayed moderate Democrats who he had pledged to empower when he became speaker. Instead, Nuez quickly empowered far-left legislators like Goldberg.

Joined at the hip to big labor, Goldberg has backed ominous bills like the unsuccessful Assembly Bill 2160, which would have handed labor unions the collective-bargaining power to pressure school districts over what is taught to kids.

Can you imagine unions deciding what children learn? Jackie can.

She backed a devastating new law - signed by Gray Davis - that drains classrooms of hundreds of millions of dollars annually by forcing schools to hire low-level cafeteria workers, gardeners and drivers at top-drawer union wages.

A stubborn backer of discredited teaching fads including ``whole language,'' ``fuzzy math'' and ``bilingual education,'' Goldberg attempts every year to roll back sweeping reforms that halted the fads. She hates statewide testing, presumably because it's not nice to poor kids, but raising that bar has been the best thing to happen to poor kids in years - and the tests show it. She opposes the smashingly successful Proposition 227, which she is attacking once again Thursday, when she will pressure the wimpy new California Board of Education to water down the excellent reading-immersion programs for Latinos.

Never mind that Latino immigrants are thriving under the 2 1/2-hour-per-day phonics-based program. Goldberg opposed it and didn't get her way. She is considered ``poison'' by serious education reformers because she is so driven to have her way that she plays with people's lives - and plays dirty.

In July 2003, for example, Goldberg's trickery got some press due to an ``oops, the intercom is on'' brouhaha that I dubbed the Squawkbox Seven. At the time, Goldberg wanted to convince voters that legislators needed the power to raise taxes with just a 55 percent vote of the Legislature - God forbid - and that Sacramento would grind to a halt under the existing two-thirds vote law.

Goldberg devised a secret meeting at which several Democratic legislators discussed the idea of sneakily delaying the overdue budget, then blaming Republicans and the nasty two-thirds vote law.

The Squawkbox Seven were accidentally broadcast via hundreds of desktop ``squawkboxes'' throughout the Capitol, and Nuez was heard openly discussing delaying the budget to make voters support the 55 percent voting threshold. Goldberg could be heard saying the public needed to be taught a lesson for still supporting Proposition 13 and lower taxes. ``Some of us are thinking that maybe people should see the pain up close and personal, right now,'' she said of taxpayers.

Too bad it was all ended by a staffer warning, ``You can be heard outside!'' To that, Goldberg responded, ``Oh, (expletive)! ... How could that happen?''

One might ask that exact question of the Los Angeles Unified School District board if deeply confused members like David Tokofsky seriously consider Goldberg - a belligerent opponent of reform, a failed board president who presided over education's decline, and a divisive politician mired in dirty tricks - to run the schools.

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Drawing:

(color) no caption (Jackie Goldberg)

O'Connor