Trail to Trouble

Surely it happened in the winning of the West that a scout would choose an easy trail, thinking it would make him immensely popular with the pioneers in the wagons that he was leading, only to have the pioneers say nothing doing.

Surely history is repeating itself with Gov. George Deukmejian’s decision to take $700 million from California public schools to turn over to grateful taxpayers, only to have most of them say that he is on the wrong track.

A sampling of taxpayers spoke this week through the California Poll, conducted by Mervin Field, 57% saying that money in excess of a limit on state spending imposed by the Gann Amendment should go to public schools; 38% said that they would rather have the tax rebate.

It was not the first such advice that Deukmejian had heard. Bill Honig, the state superintendent of public instruction, was perhaps a shade too shrill about it, but he had the statistics on his side when he said that the schools needed $700 million more than the governor put into his budget just to keep the state’s four-year-old school reforms on schedule. Democrats in the California Legislature urged Deukmejian to reconsider the rebate plan. The governor simply dug in his heels until the end of the fiscal year on June 30--after which the money went into escrow, where the schools could not touch it. The closest that he came to bending was in appointing a commission to find out what the schools were doing with all the money that he gave them--this in a state that spends less of its per-capita income on schools than 31 other states and whose school libraries get about two-thirds as much money for books as the national average.

But the California Poll is a different kind of advice, coming from voters in both parties who seem, unlike Deukmejian, to have their priorities straight.

The governor keeps insisting that the Gann Amendment, approved by voters in 1979, gives him no choice but to rebate the excess, called anyone who disagreed with him a scofflaw, and slashed Honig’s administrative budget in retaliation for the fuss that the school superintendent made. The governor is simply wrong about the law, which spells out clearly the steps that can be taken to put excess state revenues to good use.

One step that remains would be to put the question to a vote of the people. The poll suggests that, in the parlance of political percentages, the answer would be a landslide for the schools. The Legislature could do it, but making the move stick in the face of a probable veto would require a two-thirds vote--the same form of minority rule that gave Deukmejian the power to seal off the extra funds from the schools in the first place.

Thus Deukmejian’s bad judgment probably has sealed the $700 million off from public education irrevocably, but it need not happen again. Honig is working to qualify an initiative for the state ballot next year that would change the formula for setting the state spending limit to one that closer fits the needs of a growing state, and of its schools. That will give Californians a chance to serve notice that when it comes to education and the future of their children, the easy trail is not as immensely popular as your average politician might think.