SAN MARCOS -- Steve Lilly is stepping down as dean of education at Cal State San Marcos, but he hardly plans to tone down his efforts at making sure all schoolchildren in San Diego County get an even break.

And though Lilly, who arrived here from Washington State University in 1990 as the founding chief administrator of Cal State's College of Education, formally gives up his post as dean at the end of June, he will be staying on campus to help fledgling President Karen S. Haynes ease into her new job.

"He's going to be sorely missed, I'll tell you that," said Doug DeVore, the superintendent of the Encinitas Union School District, where Lilly has a grandchild enrolled, and one of a score of educators in the region with whom Lilly has worked. "He's an innovator and he has really, I think, changed the face of teacher education."

Lilly, in an interview last week under the canopy on the plaza outside the campus Dome, said he cannot imagine giving up his career-long advocacy of students, especially those in kindergarten to 12th grade whose low levels of performance may well belie their high levels of intelligence.

He talks of a chasm between white and Latino youths in scholastic achievement, and also a gap between special-education students and the rest of the student body. He has long argued ---- raising many a furrow in the foreheads of school district administrators ---- that perhaps four out of five students labeled "special" and separated from the main stream could do as well or better in regular classrooms.

"When a kid is not learning," Lilly said, borrowing a saying from Richard Riley, the secretary of education in the Clinton administration, "think of it as your house burning down."

The dean said it is time to pull the alarm, especially in light of the mounting evidence of a gap in student achievement levels in the public schools, but also because too many special-ed students may be falling behind when they do not have to be.

As far as the gap that has begun to be measured and documented in San Diego County, the county Office of Education's tally, based on data from the 2001-02 school year, shows that black and Latino students drop out up to 30 percent more often than whites and qualify about half as often for admission to state universities. Black and Latino students are also trailing other groups in passing the high school exit exam.

Lilly said such facts ought to be sobering to everyone. "I don't think anybody can feel good about their own future," he said, "if they envision a future in which all the kids caught in the achievement gap come out of school without the necessary skills."

And just what skills are necessary in these times?

"I think I know what the most important goal of education is," Lilly offered. "...It's to enable students, when they finish school, to get a job that pays benefits. Benefits are freedom from being one illness away from bankruptcy."

The fact of the achievement gap's existence adds a sense of urgency to the jobs of the teachers, principals and support staff at work in the schools ---- and to the studies of 500 future educators enrolled now in the credentialing program at the College of Education at Cal State San Marcos.

Lilly suggested there are ways at least to narrow the gap that don't require an overnight sea change in the way pubic schools approach education.

"There is no magic bullet," he said, "but there are pieces."

Among those pieces: Distribute the teaching talent evenly throughout a school district so that experienced teachers work alongside the newest recruits; give the experienced teachers leadership roles in the schools; pay the top teachers "substantially more" to work in more challenging environments even though their seniority may enable them to choose the schools where the students need the least help; and create support programs for beginning principals much akin to the mentoring that first-year teachers get from more seasoned classroom veterans.

He also says no one expects wholesale change to take place overnight.

"If the object is to see the house built," Lilly said, "you're never going to get there."

The youngest of four children born to parents who never finished grade school, Lilly grew up in New Albany, Ind., a town near the state's southern border with Kentucky. His father was a roofer who went to work as a school janitor and all-around handyman after being injured on the job.

Lilly attended parochial schools from day one, graduating from a Franciscan college in Louisville, Bellarmine, before going on to Vanderbilt University in Nashville to earn master's and doctoral degrees with an emphasis on special education.

Several of his publications made the case for putting most special-education students into regular classrooms and somehow ending the stigma of the labeling of their maladies. Lilly said that too many students who carry such labels are shunted aside when they could function fine in the mainstream.

As are so many of the students with whom he works with at Cal State San Marcos, Lilly was the first in his family to go to college.

And perhaps if it wasn't for college, Lilly would not have met his wife of 38 years, Marilyn, who was a student at Spalding, a Catholic women's college in Louisville and who lived across the street from a Bellarmine student with whom Lilly carpooled to campus. Marilyn, a special-education teacher, works for the county Office of Education in the court and community school in San Marcos. They have five children.