SAN MARCOS ---- The California State University chancellor gave his full backing Tuesday to a call for sharp improvement in how high schools prepare students for college and jobs.

"The CSU for the last six years has said that one of our top priorities has to be helping improve the public schools of California," said Chancellor Charles B. Reed. "If the public schools get better, we get better."

Reed's remarks came as CSU trustees, meeting in Fresno, heard State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell ask for the university's help in making California's high schools a quantum jump better. The speech was monitored live by reporters around the state through a telephone hookup.

O'Connell sought the CSU's support for a bill before the Legislature that would let the high schools themselves decide how best to use some $450 million in state money now earmarked for special programs.

Calling improving the high schools "the most critical challenge" facing education in California, the superintendent asked the CSU to join a so-called working group to focus on putting more rigor into the high school curriculum.

Even students not headed for college would reap great benefits in the workplace if they were required to take such college-prep subjects as geometry and algebra, O'Connell said.

Said Reed: "We want to be your partner. We are your partner ... You can count on the CSU. It's the entire university's responsibility to help improve our public schools."

The CSU has been falling short of a goal set by the trustees that 90 percent of all freshmen be proficient in math and English by 2007. On the 23 CSU campuses as a whole, 63.3 percent of freshmen who showed up in fall 2003 were ready for college math and 51.8 percent for English.

At Cal State San Marcos, entering freshmen remain behind their colleagues throughout the system. Of 839 freshmen enrolled in fall 2003, 56.4 percent were deemed proficient in math and 46.1 percent in English.

Said O'Connell, "Far too many of our students ... lack basic fundamental skills to succeed at the college level and to succeed in the workplace."

He also told the trustees that California's 1.7 million high school students are also graduating ill-equipped to be effective citizens.

O'Connell outlined a plan ---- dubbed the high achieving high school initiative ---- that places special emphasis on expecting more from students and teachers at the high schools. "If you expect more from the students and you expect more from the staff," he said, "you get more."

The plan calls for developing "world-class" teachers and school leaders, putting better textbooks and other instructional materials into the schools; working with elementary and middle schools to ease the move into high school; and bringing the community into education to foster achievement by high school students.

If schools put the plan in place, O'Connell said, they would become eligible for their share of the $450 million in state education money now earmarked for special programs.

"I refer to it," he said, "as flexibility with accountability."

O'Connell said that educators shouldn't be deterred by the state's budget crunch, nor should they think that his plan will be a quick fix. But it would be a start, he said, and "we simply cannot let a generation of students be ignored and go unprepared for college and the workplace."

O'Connell also asked for help in overturning an item in the budget proposed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in January that would hike tuition for teachers in training at CSU by 40 percent. "That to me makes absolutely no sense when we want to attract the best and brightest to this profession," he said.

O'Connell is scheduled to bring his message to the regents of the University of California today as they meet in San Francisco.