Poor Jerry Brown. The former governor, now Oakland's mayor, is like some character from "The Twilight Zone." He's been granted what seems to be an eternal life in politics. The only catch is that he has to live it under the laws he signed as governor.
First was an ethics measure he championed in his first campaign for governor, which later was interpreted to prevent him from voting as mayor on issues affecting his Oakland property. Then came the criminal sentencing reforms he signed in the mid-1970s, which he now believes have resulted in the premature release of dangerous felons who prey on his fellow citizens.

Now Brown is getting religion on teachers unions, which he unleashed on California by signing legislation requiring local school districts to negotiate with teachers through collective bargaining. While the mayor says he continues to support the concept of collective bargaining, he's frustrated as can be by the unions' opposition to education reforms that would give poor kids more choice in the kind of schools they attend.

Brown was in Sacramento last week lobbying unsuccessfully for the cause of charter schools, which are public schools free of most of the state and local regulations that weigh down traditional campuses. Usually formed by parents and teachers, charter schools offer energy, creativity and hope where often there was none before. But to exist, they must first obtain permission from the local school district, the very power they are seeking to expel.

The former governor, who has helped start a military academy and an arts school in Oakland, has joined a coalition of charter school supporters asking the Legislature to allow universities, big-city mayors and major nonprofit groups to grant charters and oversee the schools. But Brown's fellow Democrats, who control the Legislature, don't like the idea.

"This is a matter where people want a particular kind of public education and others want to deny them their legal and constitutional rights," Brown said. "That's what's really at stake here. The integrated, unified system is fine, but it is failing hundreds of thousands of parents and students, many of whom want to go to a charter school. They won't be able to find one unless this bill passes. It's that simple."

The idea, Brown says, "is as American as apple pie, though it is resisted by some of my fine Democratic friends who are following another agenda that often doesn't surface in a very honest or explicit way."

What is that agenda? In Brown's words, it's a "total monopoly" for the conventional public school system -- and the unions that represent nearly every teacher who works in them. The unions are free to organize teachers in charter schools, but they find it much more difficult to do so.

Brown, having been a union supporter all his life, is not about to give up on the idea of public sector collective bargaining. He even says he understands where the unions are coming from in refusing to cede a single potential member. Union chiefs, he says, have an obligation to resist anything that weakens their ranks.

"That's a very important interest," he said. "But that doesn't mean it's the public interest. I understand it. I can support it at some level of theory. But in practice parents have the right ... to choose the education they feel is best."

What really galls Brown is that his fellow Democrats, who once prided themselves in fighting "the system," have become it. They are the establishment, and they do whatever it takes to defend their perch atop it -- even if that means dooming poor kids to a terrible education.

Charter schools only survive if parents want them. If they don't excel, they close.

"Charters are not some body snatcher from an alien planet," Brown said. "It's parents, it's community, organizing a learning environment that they, under their parental rights, wish. And they're actually going there. ... So it's the essence of liberty, freedom, all the good stuff the New Left used to say. Decentralize. Put your body in the middle of the machine and grind it to a halt. That's what a charter school is."

Brown doesn't claim that charter schools are the only answer for what ails public education. But he thinks they are part of the solution. If they can form a critical mass of about 5 percent of enrollment, double what they have today, he believes they can provide enough of a stimulus to move the traditional system in healthy ways.

Without them, he says, there is far less hope for change. Since he was governor in the 1970s, Brown has been hearing people say that improving the education of black and Latino kids has to be a higher priority. But for those kids, little has changed in all that time.

"I think the people who fight this have a lot of explaining to do," he said. "The only hope for poor kids of color is a great high school education. If it has not been reformed for 25 years, what's the big structural change that's going to make the difference? I don't see it."