Huff, Honig Square Off Over State of the Schools

State Finance Director Jesse R. Huff, in the Deukmejian Administration’s most specific attack yet on state Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig, Monday criticized student test score results and the high cost of administrative overhead during the school chief’s tenure.

Huff and Honig squared off in a sometimes heated face-to-face confrontation during the taping of a show at public television station KVIE in Sacramento. The show will be aired Wednesday night in Sacramento.

Huff’s emergence as a critic of Honig is the latest twist in a series of exchanges between Honig and Gov. George Deukmejian that began when the governor introduced his proposed $39-billion state budget last month and Honig called it a “disaster” for state education.

Deukmejian has accused Honig of being a “demagogue” and a “snake-oil salesman” in recent weeks, but Huff was the first member of the Administration to focus on Honig’s performance as the top state education official.

Honig got the exchange going by renewing his criticism of the governor’s budget, claiming that the state is not providing schools with enough money to keep up with inflation.

Specifically, Honig said schools are being shortchanged in order to replenish the state’s $1-billion reserve fund.

This year the reserve dropped from $1 billion to $553 million. Honig argued that in building it back up to $1 billion, Deukmejian is creating a budget “emergency in the schools” that threatens to jeopardize a statewide school improvement program enacted in 1983. That program pumped an extra $1.6 billion into schools over a two-year period, providing for such changes as longer school days, modest pay bonuses for exceptional teachers and tougher high school graduation requirements.

Honig said such school improvements are more important “than credit ratings and building up a reserve to $1 billion.”

Huff, in defending the budget proposal during a rare television appearance, noted that Deukmejian’s budget would provide $3,351 a year for each student, or about $93,000 per classroom.

“Where does that money go? I know it’s not going to the teacher,” said Huff, departing from his usually quiet role as the governor’s top budget adviser.

Honig replied that the extra dollars have gone into academic programs and teacher salaries. “They have not gone into administration,” he said, accusing Huff of “a cavalier attitude.”

The finance director said that in 1970, the California school system had 68 employees for every 1,000 schoolchildren. In 1986, the school system had 93 employees for every 1,000 students, which Huff said represents a 40% increase in the number of school employees.

“And let me tell you, a majority of the employees in the school system today are not teachers. Out of those 93 employees per 1,000 kids, you have 43 teachers and 50 people who aren’t teachers,” Huff said.

“So what?” responded Honig. “They are janitors; they are bus drivers.”

The finance director also challenged Honig’s statement that the new budget jeopardizes the 1983 legislation.

“I think that it’s false to say that every reform has to have a dollar tied to it,” Huff said, adding, “When you talk about improving course content, when you talk about increasing graduation requirements, those sorts of things don’t necessarily take a lot of money behind them.”

He added that although some positive results have developed since enactment of the school reform bill in 1983, “I was hopeful that we’d see more results than we have.

“The test scores have edged upward, but it’s been a gradual process, and I think everyone would have liked to have seen them higher,” he said.

Later, talking to reporters, Huff sought to counter a report that Deukmejian may be backing away from a budget proposal to reduce class sizes in the first, second and third grades.

Among the governor’s most controversial proposals, it would provide $60 million during the next fiscal year, but only by eliminating over a two-year period money now spent on special state programs for gifted students and slow readers and financial aid to urban school districts.

“We are following up on that proposal. We are not backing off,” Huff said.