SACRAMENTO - Saying California has failed to educate some high school students as well as it can, state schools chief Jack O'Connell called Wednesday for "tough, roll-up-our-sleeves measures" to combat low student achievement in high schools.

"Sadly, the majority of California's 1.7 million high school students simply are not today reaching the academic levels that are needed for us to be able to call them a success story -- not in the workplace, not in college and not even to be effective citizens in this democracy," he said.

O'Connell, a former legislator who is beginning his second year as the elected state Superintendent of Public Instruction, announced his top priorities for the coming year in his first "State of Education" speech.

East Bay school administrators agreed more attention should be focused on high schools, though they say they already are trying to improve them.

In addition to improving high schools, O'Connell wants to cut back on state-required paperwork and streamline student testing.

Overall, schools are making progress, and the state should not depart dramatically from its current course of setting high academic goals, testing students on their progress and intervening in schools that fail to improve, he said.

But high schools have not kept pace with the steady gains in elementary and middle schools. Only 10 percent of high schools have met the state's goal of attaining an 800 score on the Academic Performance Index, a scale from 200 to 1,000. And two-thirds of California high school graduates are not adequately prepared for college or trade school, O'Connell said.

The state must change high schools from the inside out, by setting higher academic expectations, providing more training and support for teachers and principals, and creating a new "seal of approval" for high school textbooks, he said. All students should be required to take the courses needed for admission to the state's colleges and universities, he added.

To pay for the changes in a time of deep budget cuts, O'Connell proposed allowing districts to redirect up to $450 million that is now set aside for other special programs toward improving high schools.

O'Connell's office has no legislative power, so he plans to work with state lawmakers to draft bills that would make the necessary changes in state law.

Steve Ahonen, principal of Pittsburg High, said changing high schools is much different from reforming elementary schools.

"It's much harder to make movement here because there's so much involved," Ahonen said. "It's almost like trying to turn an aircraft carrier."

All students are encouraged to take college preparatory classes, he said, but some students are not interested in attending a state college or university so it's not practical to require them to take those classes, he said.

David Moss, principal of De Anza High School in Richmond, cautioned that many students, including those who are not fluent in English or who are disabled, need extra support to make it through the higher-level classes needed for college admission.

Moss believes that dividing large high schools into smaller groups of students and teachers, a practice called "smaller learning communities," has promise.

"The way high schools are currently structured, they don't work very well," he said.

De Anza split into smaller communities this school year. But the loss of about four teachers to budget cuts has made the change difficult to maintain, Moss said.

O'Connell said the state's budget shortfall should not be used as an excuse for failure.

"Quite frankly, we are not living up to our obligation to educate all of our high school students the best we possibly can," O'Connell said Wednesday. "Our students are being deprived of opportunities because of low expectations, lack of focus and weak fundamental skills."

To free school districts from some bureaucracy, O'Connell pledged to reduce the number of reports that state law requires them to produce. For instance, he said, districts and schools must report student ethnicity more than 40 times each year.

"This is the kind of bureaucratic overkill that schools and the public rightly despise," he said. The state's school testing system also needs to be refined, by reducing the tests "where and when it makes sense," he said.

California's school testing and accountability legislation expires in January 2005. State Sen. Dede Alpert, D-San Diego, is working with the state Department of Education on a bill to revise and reauthorize it.

Alpert said she was happy to hear O'Connell's proposals for fixing high schools.

"That has been an issue that we've acknowledged," she said. "We thought the best bang for the buck was starting at elementary schools, but the reality is high schools have been very difficult to change."

O'Connell plans to visit a Los Angeles high school today to kick off his campaign to improve high schools.