Jerry Brown's Next Project: Oakland Schools

By Catherine Gewertz

Oakland, Calif.

Into this gritty city by the San Francisco Bay rode Jerry Brown, past the boarded-up shops and paint-chipped schools, welcomed like a savior by the droves who sent him to City Hall in hopes that they had found their great fixer.

We want you to make our streets safer, they said. We want you to overhaul our schools so our children can learn. We want something we haven't known for decades: to live in a city where good things seem possible.

So faithful were the voters who elected him mayor in a June 1998 landslide that they gave him rare, expanded governing authority over the city's affairs. And on March 7, they will decide whether to give him even more power, this...