
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, March 10, 1991                   TAG: 9103110292
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: D-2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

WILDER'S GUYS EYE VIRGINIA SCHOOLS

MILLS Godwin in the 1960s and Charles Robb in the early '80s were called "education governors." If earning the label depends on significantly increasing education spending, Douglas Wilder hardly qualifies. Forced to deal with a state revenue slump, his administration has been cutting funds for public schools - and prompting concern that Virginia may be reneging on its commitment to education.

The concern is warranted. Starve the schools too much and too long, and programs suffer, good teachers leave the profession, the quality of education declines. In addition, it's hard to see how school-funding disparities among local districts can be eased, and a court challenge forestalled, without increasing state school money.

Still, it's possible that Wilder, by the time his term expires in 1994, will have made his own positive contributions to public education in Virginia. In appointing Joseph A. Spagnolo Jr. as state superintendent of schools and James W. Dyke Jr. as education secretary, Wilder has signaled he does not intend to merely tread water.

With the governor's blessing, Spagnolo and Dyke are aggressively pursuing plans for major changes in public education. Their proposals, many of them controversial, envision a far different school system from what Virginia has today.

Spagnolo, former superintendent of Lynchburg's public schools, is no stranger to controversy. His bold reorganization last year of the state Department of Education drew jeers as well as cheers. Sixty workers lost their jobs as a result of his moves to streamline the bureaucracy and change the department's emphasis from issuing mandates to directly serving local divisions.

Spagnolo's plans for dramatic changes go beyond bureaucratic shake-up and into the heart of local schools. Those plans, discussed in the next editorial, seem to run parallel with a strategy for education fashioned by Dyke.

Dyke - a respected member of the state Board of Education before tapped by Wilder for the Cabinet post - recently outlined plans to restructure elementary schools, to require that every child in Virginia public schools meet learning standards linked "to the highest in the world" by completion of the 10th grade, and to establish programs, in partnership with businesses and community colleges, to deal with dropouts and non-college-bound students.

Schools, Dyke says, now emphasize college-preparatory programs and do little for those not planning to go to college. What's needed, he says, is "a revolutionary approach to assure that those students going directly to the work force are better-prepared." The governor, Dyke said, will soon appoint a new commission to lead "a crusade" to change the public-education system - by selling the need for "reform" and the financing of it to the public and the 1992 General Assembly.

"Revolutions"? "Crusades"? "Reform"? Perhaps that's just rhetoric from a pair of talented wordsmiths. But perhaps it suggests Wilder could turn out to be a new kind of "education governor" for Virginia.

by CNB