At first, Brown and Bobb seemed an unlikely couple: Brown, a cosmopolitan, big-picture guy (aka Gov. Moonbeam), could have easily clashed with Bobb, a detail-oriented social conservative from a small Southern city. But instead they joined forces, and turned out to have a lot in common in their crusade to bring accountability to Oakland government. They both sweat the small stuff: Bobb is known for phoning city employees at random, and chiding those who don't properly identify themselves (repeat offenders get sent to training classes); Brown circles spelling and grammatical mistakes in department heads' letters and sends them back.

With the backing of the nation's most famous mayor, the pace of change in Oakland accelerated dramatically. Quickly, Brown and Bobb moved into an area where city leaders have little formal control: the schools. "If you want to improve life in the city, you're going to very quickly get to the issue of the schools," says George Musgrove, the deputy city manager Bobb brought with him from Richmond, who next month will become acting superintendent of Oakland schools. But that's getting ahead of the story. "People expect their mayor to have some control over the schools," Musgrove explains. "You'll be held accountable if you don't improve them."

So Musgrove, Bobb and Brown began looking at why decades of efforts to reform Oakland schools have produced reams of reports and recommendations, but little in the way of improved student achievement. Much of the criticism focused on Superintendent Carole Quan. Though she got high marks for good intentions, and some fledgling attempts at reform, she received failing grades when it came to making the tough choices -- cutting the bloated central administration and firing or reassigning low-performing principals and teachers -- that real change requires, at least partly because she'd been with the district more than 30 years. "It's hard for an insider like Carole to make rapid change in the district -- too many issues have people's faces on them," said one African-American education advocate, who liked Quan but thought she had to go.

Meanwhile, local state Sen. Don Perata, a white Oakland power broker (whom black conspiracy theorists see as the mastermind of the long-rumored plan to take Oakland back from black people), saw Brown's political popularity, and floated a bill in the Legislature to have the state take over Oakland's failing schools and install the new mayor as trustee in order to force the departure of Quan. And that's when the Community and Clergy Coalition got involved -- just in time to weigh in on Brown's plan to oust Police Chief Samuels, too.

Community and Clergy Coalition leader Bazile says openly what some black leaders will only say privately: that black politicians in Oakland, who've tried to make sure top jobs go to blacks, have gotten rapped simply for doing what their predecessors did before them. "The Irish did it, the Jews did it, and it's only when African-Americans took over City Hall that you had liberals clamoring for 'good government,'" he says. That ignores the history of good government reform efforts going back to Tammany Hall, of course. But it is true that blacks inherited the cities when the coffers began to empty -- as the tax base declined, the middle class fled and black cronyism was more obvious, and harder to defend, than white cronyism had been.

When I argue that black kids in Oakland schools have been hurt the most by the notion that the dysfunctional school system is a jobs program, Bazile retorts: "Schools have always been a jobs program, run by the group in power. Again, it's historical, but people only want reform when it's African-Americans in charge." Add Don Perata to the list of Brown-backers who wanted to take over the schools, Bazile says, and the black community was duty-bound to fight back. Jerry Brown was starting to look like white mayors in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York who've moved to strengthen their control over the schools -- and in the case of Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley, have won, and watched the schools improve under their control.

"You had Perata wanting to turn the schools over to the state," says Bazile. "So we said: Why get the state involved?" Some of the city's black leaders were also upset that Brown was trying to oust Samuels and Quan without properly consulting them. "He made the leaders look like paper tigers, and they are paper tigers today," Bazile says with a chuckle. "But it was obligatory for us to circle the wagons around them."

But this time, their arguments didn't carry the day. In the end, Quan tearfully resigned, averting a state takeover, and George Musgrove was named acting superintendent, a sign that Brown had won the power struggle. But the mayor isn't through. Now he wants to change the city's charter again, to allow him to appoint a majority of the School Board. He's appointed an education commission, chaired by Ed Blakely, to "study" possible charter reforms, including the notion of a mayor-appointed School Board majority. And if Blakely and Brown didn't see eye to eye on every issue during the mayor's race, they're soul mates when it comes to education reform in Oakland.

"Jerry and I have one key thing in common, and that's that we're both over 60, and the future is now for us," says Blakely, whose involvement in Oakland school reform goes back 15 years and at least five superintendents. "We can't listen to excuses anymore. I know people in the district have a lot of fear, and their fears are legitimate in this case. We're going to settle for no less than a complete transformation of the schools." Blakely won't commit himself to Brown's plan to let the mayor appoint the School board majority, but says, "There will be changes in governance, I'm sure. The mayor will have a role." The commission promises to finish its work within three months.

School reform advocates are mostly positive about Brown's efforts to date. "Jerry's right: Change needs to happen faster," says Junious Williams, executive director of the Urban Strategies Council, which has spearheaded several past school-reform initiatives. "Too much process is bad strategy, and we've certainly studied the schools to death. But I worry about whether he actually understands how hard it is to change schools, raise test scores. Does he know how to change a whole district?"

"Nobody should underestimate the intelligence and connections of Jerry Brown," retorts Musgrove, his choice to lead the school district. "He knows the best minds of everybody in the country personally. He is an amazing person. Oakland is process crazy, and Jerry knows: You've gotta move. Now."

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