Budget gap spotlights public school funding
By Dan Walters - dwalters@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
12:00 am PDT Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Inevitably, every debate about California's deficit-riddled budget
morphs into a fight over how much money we should be spending on
public schools and how that money should be spent.
It's happening again as the Capitol's political figures wrestle with a
deficit that's worse than usual and as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger
proposes - semiseriously - a $4.8 billion whack in state aid to
schools.
This month, as required by law, local schools are sending tentative
layoff notices to thousands of teachers who would lose their jobs
under the governor's proposals. Democratic legislative leaders are
insisting that they will absolutely refuse to enact them, however, and
dozens of school superintendents and other educators invaded the
Capitol on Monday to demand that Schwarzenegger's cuts be rejected.
Public education is the budget battlefield not only because it's the
state's largest single public program and consumes about 35 percent of
the general fund, but because the state's 6 million public school
students are a microcosm of its social and economic trends, their
schools are beset by poor high school graduation rates and academic
test scores, and the state is near the bottom among states in per-
pupil spending.
All of those factors generate ceaseless circular debate in academic,
political and civic circles over whether schools need more money and
if so, how that money should be raised and spent. Early last year, a
1,700-page series of studies overseen by Stanford University concluded
that while the schools need billions of more dollars, just spending
more money without, as one study leader put it, "systemic and
fundamental reform," would be useless.
At the time, Schwarzenegger and other Capitol figures proclaimed that
2008 would be the "year of education" in which long-range policy and
financial decisions would be made, but as the state's fiscal situation
deteriorated, the battle ****fted to whether school money should be
reduced to close the deficit.
"This has been the year of education evisceration," Jack O'Connell,
the state superintendent of schools, said as local superintendents
rallied Monday before heading into the Capitol for one-on-one
lobbying. Their targets were mostly Republicans who have joined
Schwarzenegger in resisting new taxes to balance the budget - even as
the governor edges away from that position by saying he wants to close
tax loopholes to give schools more money.
"We don't have a spending problem," O'Connell - a potential candidate
for governor in 2010 - told the superintendents, intentionally
parodying the Republicans' refrain. "The problem is with our
priorities." He called Schwarzenegger's proposed school cuts
"abdication of a responsibility to set the values and set the
priorities" and added, "This budget must be stopped."
Given the line-in-the-sand attitude of the Legislature's majority
Democrats, it's already been stopped. The question remains, however,
whether reducing school aid would be the disaster O'Connell and other
education advocates claim, or, indeed, whether there's any correlation
between spending and academic performance.
Cutting school financing, as Schwarzenegger proposes, certainly
doesn't make the task of improving performance any easier but, as the
Stanford researchers implied, merely spending money doesn't, unto
itself, guarantee a better outcome. There is virtually no statistical
correlation between a state's level of per-pupil spending and its
standing in national academic tests or high school graduation rates.
Other factors such as poverty, peer and familial pressure, and
cultural values all play roles in academic outcomes that merely
spending more money doesn't alter. Unfortunately, however, the Capitol
is incapable of debating education in any terms other than money.
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