UPDATE: Jerry Brown is hosting a education budget summit at 10AM. Click the link to view it live.

There’s no doubt that California’s public schools are facing a severe crisis. Having been hit with $10 billion in cuts in recent years, the dropout rate has risen, teachers have more kids in their classrooms, and more schools are running afoul of federal No Child Left Behind law (which was designed to undermine public education itself). And with next year’s budget deficit at $28 billion, any cuts will include further cuts to public schools – which as Brian pointed out yesterday, can barely handle the strain.

Handling the funding problems facing our schools is going to be enough of a challenge facing Jerry Brown. He also has to deal with the Obama Administration’s embrace of right-wing education “reform” programs pushed by wealthy individuals like Bill Gates that are designed to treat students like automatons and pave the way for mass privatization of schools. Already leaders such as Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa are embracing these “reforms,” despite evidence that they don’t really work as advertised.

As the LA Times reports, however, Jerry Brown is having none of it:

Brown has expressed serious reservations about some of those proposals.

“Look, we’re facing big changes, and people who haven’t been around always want to reinvent the wheel with yesterday’s tried-and-failed programs,” Brown told representatives of the California Teachers Assn. in June.

He was even more blunt last year, when as the state’s attorney general he weighed in on Race to the Top. He castigated the draft regulations as simplistic, unproven and overly “top-down, Washington-driven” and called for a “little humility.”

“What we have at stake are the impressionable minds of the children of America. You are not collecting data or devising standards for operating machines or establishing a credit score,” he wrote in the August 2009 letter. “In the draft you have circulated, I sense a pervasive technocratic bias and an uncritical faith in the power [of] social science.”…

“Declaring war from Day One on your employees is not the strategy here,” he said. “He’s going to see if there are any agreements that can be reached, rather than declaring teachers organizations and employee organizations the enemies.”

Wow. I’ve praised Brown’s progressive issue framing before, specifically on immigration, but here again our once and future governor is demonstrating a progressive streak that will be welcome in Sacramento. He understands that the public does not want their children reduced to test scores, and that there is much to distrust in the way the “reform” movement approaches child development and education.

The LA Times article explains that while Brown did not have much involvement with education while governor in the 1970s and 1980s – primarily because, at the time, it was still seen as something handled locally – his experience with the Oakland schools while mayor there has given him much more insight into what works, and what doesn’t work.

Brown has been a proponent of charter schools, helping set up two of them in Oakland. But he doesn’t see them as a panacea, and doesn’t believe they should replace public education as we know it. He certainly does not seem swayed by the flavor-of-the-month reforms backed by Michelle Rhee and Antonio Villaraigosa, where teachers are held to blame for problems largely outside their control, and where test scores are used as a stand-in for the more holistic education that our children want and deserve.

That’s not to say that the only things California schools need is more money – just that it is the primary thing. The flaw with the education “reform” movement is it tends to assume that it is the quality of the teacher that matters most, when most people with actual classroom experience know that what matters most is the social situation of a student.

To reduce inequality in student learning outcomes, we must reduce inequality, period. Students whose parents are unemployed or who have unmet nutritional and health care needs, who live in communities suffering from crime and other effects of 30+ years of deliberate neglect and abandonment, or who do not have firm command of the English language consistently perform lower on a range of academic assessments, not just test scores – and have higher dropout rates. It’s impossible to expect schools to solve those problems on their own.

At the same time, there’s a lot that can be done to improve conditions in the classroom. Smaller class sizes are a tried-and-true method, as are including teaching methods and curriculum that speak to a range of learning styles. It would also be good to involve parents as much as possible, keeping in mind of course constraints on this, especially in lower-income communities where parents are often working multiple jobs just to make ends meet.

In any case, the fact that Brown is rejecting the flawed “reform” movement as exemplified by Rhee and Villaraigosa is a positive sign – he knows that first, he must do no harm. Brown should experiment and be open to ideas, but should also demand that those proposals be backed with firm evidence, and be offered in the best interests of the students and the community – and not in the service of a billionaire or a hedge fund.