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Friday, Jul. 10, 2009

School funding plan seems fair

Democrats should tone down rhetoric and negotiate a state budget solution.

Sometimes California's Capitol is like a house of mirrors, where images bounce off each other in a life-size political kaleidoscope that can distort reality and make you dizzy if you try to focus too much on what people are saying and what they are doing.

Consider education spending, and the way the Democrats who control the Legislature have acted over the past two weeks.

On the night of June 30, the Democrats were pushing a bill that would have cut education spending by $3 billion, or about 6 percent.

When Republicans balked because they wanted those cuts to be part of a comprehensive solution to the state's massive fiscal shortfall, the bill failed, the clock struck midnight and a new fiscal year began.

Now the same cuts the Democrats were pushing cannot go into effect without a suspension of Proposition 98, the constitutional amendment that sets a floor beneath school spending.

And many Democrats are saying they won't vote to suspend that measure, even to implement the very cuts they were so recently demanding.

In a perfect world, we wouldn't cut education spending either. While there's little or no proof that more money for the schools leads to better outcomes for students, California is already well below average in per pupil funding, near the bottom of the states by some measures.

But this is not a perfect world. We are in the middle of an economic calamity, the state has already raised taxes once this year, and there simply is not enough money to finance all of the services to which we have become accustomed.

It can be difficult for the layman (or even the average legislator) to follow the ball on education spending in California, because the school finance system is so complex and has so many moving parts, even in normal times.

Now add to that mix a surge in federal aid from the economic stimulus package and the state's practice of deferring some of its payments to schools from one fiscal year to the next, and it is nearly impossible for most people to see how much the schools are getting, and when.

But here are the important numbers, courtesy of the nonpartisan and widely respected Legislative Analyst: In the 2007-2008 budget year, kindergarten through 12th grade schools got about $8,600 per student from state and local taxpayers.

In the 2008-2009 year that ended June 30, that funding dropped to about $8,340.

And in the 2009-2010 budget year, after counting all of the shifts, deferrals and new federal money, the schools would be back up to $8,584 per student if the most recent proposal from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger were approved.

That's a cut of $19 per student over two years, a reduction of far less than 1 percent. It's also more than the schools received as recently as three years ago, and 22 percent more than the $7,047 per student the schools got in the 2004-2005 budget year.

School officials will justly point out that these numbers tell only part of the story.

For one thing, the figures don't account for the effects of inflation. And not all of the new federal money can be spent on the general population of students because some of it is earmarked for the poor and the disabled.

There are also questions about how much the schools budget should and can grow in the future, which will be decided in part by whether the Legislature suspends Proposition 98.

But given the sorry state of California's economy and its budget, a school spending plan that leaves per-student funding intact over a two-year period and leaves it far ahead of where it was five years ago other than the effects of inflation seems fair to us, if not ideal.

Education lobbyists will always clamor for more.

But Democrats in the Legislature should say no to them, tone down the rhetoric and get back to negotiating a budget solution rather than trying to scare teachers, parents and children into thinking that a bad situation is even worse than it really is.