Seed Corn for Education

In the latest episode of Gov. George Deukmejian in the role of a scout for a wagon train of pioneers headed for California, we find him proposing to get through the winter of ’87 by eating the seed corn. How the pioneers would get through the next winter and the winters after without the crops that the seed corn would grow he didn’t say. Maintaining the momentum of education reform in California, with a goal of reaching at least the average of expenditures per pupil in other industrial states, will require an increase in the budget for public schools of about $950 million during the next fiscal year. A surge in revenues has left state government with more than enough surplus revenue to cover those costs.

But the governor proposes to give back $700 million of the surplus to the state’s taxpayers. If it is divided even roughly according to the formula under which personal income taxes are collected, about one-third of the money would go to families with annual incomes of more than $100,000; a slightly larger share would go to families earning between $50,000 and $100,000. Banks and corporations would get one-fourth of the money and a few kernels would be left for families in lower-income brackets.

Deukmejian insisted in a televised message on Tuesday that the Gann amendment to the Constitution, which limits increases in spending to increases in the consumer price index, leaves him no choice. That is not true. For all of its faults, not the least of which was setting ceilings on spending according to a formula that has nothing to do with the growing needs of California, the Gann amendment left a number of options, among them distributing funds that exceed its arbitrary spending limits among local governments.

Public school districts qualify as local governments. Having advised Californians that they had plenty of time before the Gann limits approached, and having been dead wrong about that, Deukmejian now turns to the worst of all possible ways to correct his mistake. The future of California lies no less in the best possible education for its young than does the future of its young.

Failing to spend enough to teach children not only how to make their way into gainful employment but, more importantly, to be thinking adults, could be excused in an impoverished state where the money simply was not available. But there is no excuse for proposing a lesser future in a state that is on the cutting edge of technology and agriculture and cultural improvement, wants to stay there, and can easily afford to do so.

Even if Deukmejian’s so-called surplus were divided equally among taxpayers, the average family would get a check for about $70. Or it could be used to chip a quarter-cent off the state’s 6-cent sales tax. At current prices, that is not much seed corn. Certainly not enough to warrant breaking the back of a school reform movement that in less than three years has started to show dividends in the form of higher test scores, in the form of a crop of young people better able to carry on the tradition of California’s pioneers. The state Legislature should put the necessary machinery in motion at once to reserve the surplus seed corn for education, before the scout gives it away.