There’s a Limit

Gov. George Deukmejian has put his finger on the coming school-financing crisis, but he is pointing in the wrong direction for a solution. With the state about to bump up against its constitutional spending limit, Deukmejian has warned that if school administrators want more money to help reduce class sizes they may have to cut some programs, because they cannot count on additional state help. The governor would better maintain his deserved reputation as a friend of education by attacking the cause of the problem: the limit itself.

Proposition 4, which was passed in 1979, set a limit on state and local spending and required the tax collector to refund any extra money that accumulated. The formula for determining the spending limit, a combination of the consumer price index and population growth, has nothing to do with the realities of the state’s obligation to educate children, provide health care for the poor, fix the roads and help clean up toxic dumps.

What, for example, does the consumer price index have to do with how many students each teacher must teach? The latest figures from the U.S. Education Department show that California ranks next to last in that category. Only Utah, which does not have the varied and transient population that confronts California schools, has a poorer pupil-teacher ratio. California has 23.3 students per teacher; comparable industrialized states like New York and Texas have 17.8 to 1. Normal class sizes in California are more like 28 or 30 or more because, as in other states, some teachers who are counted in the ratios work with small groups in special programs.

California schools had 4.2 million students in the last academic year. By 1990 they will have 568,000 more. Class sizes may be going up just when they should be coming down. Already 12% of California’s students have limited English proficiency. That’s 525,000 students--more than the entire school population of 25 states. That number is growing, too; better-trained teachers will be needed to handle the needs of these students.

California is breaking out of its bottom-heavy statistical profile in one area: Average teacher salaries now rank fifth in the nation. That’s a direct result of recent education reforms that are now in jeopardy.

One last statistic: California stands 48th out of 50 states and the District of Columbia in the ratio of education spending to personal income. As recently as 1972 that ranking was 18th. This means that California can afford to do far better than it is doing to provide for its future. But it won’t and can’t until Proposition 4 is repealed.