Governor Keeps Emphasis on Education

Gov. George Deukmejian’s frustration was evident in his words last week as he defended his budget proposal to provide increased support for education. The professional doomsayers, led by state Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig, had succeeded in totally misrepresenting the budget to the public.

The truth is that the governor’s budget, pegged at $39 billion, continues a Deukmejian-inspired shift that places the state’s spending emphasis on the education of our children--not on welfare and social programs. Indeed, state support for education has risen to a new mark--from 51% in 1982-83 to 55% in this year’s budget.

This high mark has been achieved despite tremendous economic and political pressures to further increase spending elsewhere. Welfare-rights advocates are pushing for a full cost-of-living increase in welfare benefits--not the midyear adjustment proposed by the governor. Medi-Cal spending has increased to the point at which the Administration has had to cut payments to doctors and hospitals. In order to continue paying for programs that are increasing faster than the state’s revenues, the governor already has had to cut into the treasury’s slim reserve. It now stands at 3.2% ($1.039 billion) of the general fund total--far below the 5% emergency fund level recommended by the legislative analyst. A sour economy, poor estimates of the number of prisoners, welfare recipients and public school students, or a runaway Legislature could soak up all this tiny reserve at almost any time.

Deukmejian obviously wielded a firm hand to deflect these demands for more. With only minimal increases in tax revenues, the increases that he has made for education reflect his real priorities.

To his credit, the governor is not simply throwing money at education. Instead, education funding must be linked with improvements in education quality and outcome. He is targeting the money where it will do the most good while continuing base-line funding for the bulk of the education program. Too often legislators have increased the budget without asking for improvements in return.

Among the increases that the governor seeks are $66 million to expand services to handicapped children, $4 million more to reward high-quality mentor teachers, an additional $6 million to teach English to adults, $8.8 million more to offer education and job training to welfare recipients, $124 million more to protect the integrity of the pension benefits for retired teachers and $100 million in energy funds to be spent on new school buses. Rather than acknowledge that these increases are tied to specific improvements in programs and services, the critics simply ask for more money overall.

The most exciting initiative for education in the proposed budget would eliminate four low-priority categorical programs in order to reduce class sizes in the first grade. In two years, first-grade classes would drop from 28 to 22 students per teacher. Teachers would be able to pay more individual attention to students during this primary learning period. The education establishment will object to the loss of these less-than-productive programs, but truly the burden is on them to match the governor’s creativity and to find ways to improve programs with existing dollars.

California ranks near the bottom on some indicators of support for education, such as class sizes. But the amount of money spent on education overall ranks much higher nationally. How can this be? Over the years the education bureaucracy and the Legislature have consistently chosen to increase the number of administrators, specialists and aides rather than hire more teachers. A 1985 report indicates that California is the fifth highest state in the nation in teacher aides per pupil. Money has been purposely diverted from teachers to non-teaching employees. This is wrong.

State taxpayers will be paying $3,351 per student in the coming year (compared with $2,360 in 1982-83) under the proposed budget. This does not include funds for teacher retirement or for school construction. Considering the average class size of 28, the per-student spending works out to $93,000 per classroom. Yet after paying for utilities, janitors, textbooks and the unusual expenses for administrators, specialists and non-educators, there is precious little money left to pay teachers an adequate wage.

Unless bureaucratic overhead is reduced, it will not be possible to reduce class size. Why are the governor’s critics so protective of the non-classroom bureaucracy? This excessive overhead that prevents both a reduction in class size and a professional level of pay for our teachers must be eliminated.

The time has come for all who care about quality education in California to declare themselves. Should we continue to divert funds away from the teacher in the classroom, or should we concentrate our resources by hiring more teachers to reduce class sizes? I stand with the governor in bringing the education dollar back into the classroom where it belongs.