Marlene L. Garcia

Uses research to help shape California legislation

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By SARA HEBEL

With many states, including California, placing term limits on lawmakers, Marlene L. Garcia believes legislative analysts like herself -- who carry a long-term, data-driven view of issues -- are increasingly important to identifying state needs and shaping policy to respond.

Working as an education analyst in the California Senate since 1998, Ms. Garcia guides legislators in crafting bills that are grounded in data from academic and other research. That, she says, helps them zero in on the most-pressing, far-reaching problems facing Californians.

That approach became central as Ms. Garcia helped spearhead state efforts to develop a new system for collecting and analyzing data that would help the state and its higher-education institutions monitor and improve how well they provide broad educational opportunity, help students succeed, and meet other statewide goals.

Higher-education officials and analysts in the state credit Ms. Garcia for forging a consensus approach to bringing more accountability to postsecondary education. Many state officials and analysts believe a better, statewide system is needed because lawmakers have often relied too heavily on institutions' self-assessments when setting policy.

Ms. Garcia's work on the issue began as she and state legislators reviewed the state's master plan for higher education in 2002 and commissioned researchers at California State University at Sacramento to study how California could help improve educational outcomes. The analysis, Ms. Garcia says, showed that state lawmakers had no system for determining how well the state's public and private institutions, as a whole, were serving California's students. Each state higher-education system reported its own data on how well it operated in and of itself, she says, but the research highlighted gaps in the information the state collected on how well the systems worked together on overlapping issues, such as making transfer between institutions easier and clearly articulating what students need to do to prepare for college.

Ms. Garcia knows firsthand how elusive information about transfers can be. She had planned to go from Rio Hondo College, a community college, to a Cal State campus, not knowing that she was only one course shy of being eligible for the University of California. She found out, she says, after stumbling upon a college fair, where a University of California representative reviewed her record.

Ms. Garcia helped lawmakers write the accountability legislation and sought the advice of higher-education administrators and national college-policy experts. The bill passed the Legislature last year, but Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, vetoed it, saying it would be premature to put in place a new data-collection system before his administration finished a review he had ordered of how well state government was working.

A similar bill is moving through the Legislature again this year, and its advocates say the governor might change his position, now that his governmentwide review is complete.

Among other key legislation Ms. Garcia has influenced is a measure, enacted in 2000, that expanded the state's need-based Cal Grant program, which had helped her pay for college. "I am dealing with issues," she says, "that are at the core of what was influential for me in my life."