Schools Lose

Education was scarcely mentioned when the California Legislature approved Gov. George Deukmejian’s plan to mail checks for as much as $118 to every state taxpayer.

A recent public-opinion poll said that most taxpayers thought that the money should have gone instead to the state’s public schools to expand reforms designed to improve the quality of education in California. But Deukmejian was able to sell the fiction that the law left no alternative to rebating about $1.1 billion in state revenues that exceeded a spending limit imposed by the Gann amendment in 1979. Democrats tried to break loose at least $700 million of the money for schools, but Deukmejian had the votes to stop them. In the end the Democrats bickered over whose name should appear on the rebate legislation. The mere thought of being able to murmur modestly that it is only what they deserve when voters in the home district mention the checks obviously touches something in some politicians that an investment in schools never can.

The money now is irrevocably lost to the schools, and the reforms will mark time until the next budget. A commission appointed by the governor will spend some of that time exploring whether California gets full value from the money that it does spend on schools. It is not the end of the reform movement, but the time and the money are not likely ever to be made up.

The schools need not be shortchanged again, however. Bill Honig, the state superintendent of public instruction, is trying to qualify an initiative for the ballot next year that would change the formula that determines state government’s spending limit each year. The ceiling now is based on the rise in the consumer price index, which measures what a family spends on food and shoes and other things but bears no relationship to what happens to the costs of state services.

We would prefer to see the limit wiped out altogether, but Honig is willing to settle for a formula based not on prices but on California’s ability to pay for state services, and that alone would be a vast improvement.

Some true believers in education may go so far as to chip in all or part of their tax rebates to the Honig initiative campaign, but most people, we suppose, will find a way to use the cash. The campaign will of course need substantial contributions, but the biggest contribution that Californians can make to the campaign--and to a school system of high enough quality to give new generations a fighting chance with the future--will be a vote to make sure that reform programs cannot be made to mark time again.