By Nick Anderson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 19, 2006

SANTA MONICA, Calif. -- The superintendent fought tenaciously to narrow the gap between schools that serve the well-to-do and those that serve the poor. He pushed a controversial fix through an unusually divided school board.

But the uproar in the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District wasn't about an achievement gap. It was about private donations to public schools. Specifically, it was about an educator's insistence on redistributing wealth.

The stand John E. Deasy took on school fundraising illuminates the philosophy he will soon bring to the Washington area as the next schools chief in Prince George's County.

"This was a stake-in-the-ground issue for me," Deasy said yesterday in an interview. "This was about, 'Are we a community or not?' "

A lean man with close-cropped hair and an accent from Boston and Rhode Island, where he grew up, Deasy expanded on his record over breakfast (cottage cheese, wheat toast, bacon and French-press coffee) in a cafe on Wilshire Boulevard while rain pelted palm trees outside.

Interviews in this city with key school board members, union leaders and parent activists confirmed what the Prince George's school board asserted last week when it chose the 45-year-old Deasy: He has a record of mobilizing broad support for his education initiatives.

There appear to be few hardened critics of Deasy's nearly five-year tenure at the helm of a system with 19 campuses and nearly 14,000 students from pre-kindergarten through high school.

The typical signs of a superintendent under fire are missing in Santa Monica-Malibu Unified. No one on the school board disparages Deasy. The president of the teachers union said he respects him as an institutional adversary. The community has rallied twice in recent years to vote for tax increases -- by overwhelming majorities -- to support the schools. Santa Monica and Malibu also have increased city funding for schools.

But the "equity fund" debate of 2003-04 sticks out.

"He went through a very difficult year," said Linda Gross, a Santa Monica mother who runs a foundation that supports the school system. "People were very angry, throwing tantrums, screaming and yelling. But he didn't budge."

The issue Deasy confronted is, in some ways, analogous to what he might face in Prince George's. Like the county, the communities within this district have pockets of wealth and poverty.

In California, school funding is heavily constrained by a statewide property tax limit. Parents often step in to fill the void through PTA fundraisers and booster clubs. At one Malibu school, Deasy found that the annual giving amounted to more than $900 per pupil. At a Santa Monica school, the donations totaled about $30 per pupil.

"I said, 'Okay, this is a problem,' " Deasy recalled.

So he proposed a mandatory deduction of 15 percent from money raised to benefit individual schools. The deductions would flow into a fund to benefit all schools under a formula tilted toward those in high-poverty neighborhoods.

Critics called the mandatory deduction a "gift tax" that would cause fundraising to dwindle. Some warned it would alienate Malibu, the smaller of the two cities in the district. The school board, after months of debate, approved the proposal on a 5 to 2 vote in March 2004. It was one of the few times Deasy's board had not been united.

But his prediction held true: Fundraising did not slacken. The equity fund amassed more than $170,000 in its first year.

School board President Julia Brownley said Deasy was hired in 2001 on a unanimous vote and has kept his board "fundamentally unified" since then.

"He has a spectacular relationship with the board," member Jose Escarce said. "He's remarkably visible in the community, knows everyone, is an incredibly knowledgeable and innovative educator. I don't think there's anything negative to be said."

Deasy is married and has three teenage children. He said they are old enough that he can move cross-country to a job that will place him in the big leagues of public education. His eldest daughter attends Catholic University in Washington. His son is about to graduate from high school, and his youngest daughter is a sophomore. Deasy said he plans to move to Prince George's after he and the school board reach terms on a contract. His tentative start date is May 1.

Over breakfast, Deasy showed detailed student achievement statistics to support his claim that he knows what it takes to raise minority test scores in a system that is 10 times as large as the one he runs.

Evaluating test scores is difficult because they are heavily influenced by student demographics and academic standards that vary from state to state. But Deasy's system appears to measure up well under California's academic performance index. With a student population that is more than a third Latino and about one-tenth black, Santa Monica-Malibu Unified has posted solid and sustained gains in reading and math.

On a scale of 200 to 1,000, with the statewide target being 800, the system is rated at 806 on California's index. That is nearly 100 points ahead of the state as a whole. From 2002 to 2005, data show, Latino and black students in the system made larger gains than non-Hispanic white students.

Whether he can replicate that in the 133,000-student Prince George's system is an open question. There are plenty of operational challenges in the county that Deasy does not face here. For instance, his system does not provide bus service for most students. In Prince George's, more than 90,000 students ride buses every day -- a major operation that the schools chief must monitor closely. In Prince George's, the annual schools budget is $1.4 billion. Here, it's about $100 million.

Deasy asserted that he can handle the operational portions of the job.

But he said he has a singular focus on helping teachers. "I cannot be successful if they're not successful," he said. He frequently makes the rounds in all of his schools to observe classrooms and make improvements, he said.

To reach out to teachers here, Deasy forged a relationship with their union leader.

Harry M. Keiley, president of the Santa Monica-Malibu Classroom Teachers Association, said in an interview that he had numerous differences with the superintendent.

"He likes to go 75 to 80 miles per hour on issues that are really important to him," Keiley said. "And we've had to slow him down."

At one point, Deasy supported a proposed public charter school. But the union was lukewarm to the idea, and it died at the school board. Deasy and the union also clashed over his plans for revising report cards and teacher evaluations. They compromised after taking more time than Deasy would have liked.

But Keiley said he respects Deasy. "It's not about liking him or not liking him. It's about what we've done together," he said.

Keiley cited two successful campaigns to raise taxes. That was a major accomplishment because the ballot measures needed at least two-thirds voter approval to pass. Deasy said he knocked on doors along with the union and other pro-school forces in those campaigns.

Without the revenue from the higher taxes, the system would have been forced to lay off teachers. Instead, Keiley said, the teacher corps has grown even as enrollment has fallen slightly.

Keiley said Deasy also took an important symbolic step during two tough budget years: The superintendent declined to take performance bonuses he had earned under his contract.

"How could I not give him credit for that?" Keiley said. "It was obviously the right thing to do."

Staff writer Sonya Geis of the Los Angeles bureau contributed to this report.