Scandal Should Raise a Flag About School Fund Measure

The noble occupation of teaching does not deserve to be tarnished by the California Assessment Program test-cheating scandal that has reached into 40 public schools in the state.

That CAP tests were tampered with goes beyond question. We are told that it is not known exactly who doctored the answers so that students would come out with better results. Nor are the motives of those who changed the scores entirely clear.

What is evident is that public-school administrators and officials agreed to try to keep the cheating scandal a secret. Once it was disclosed, we were presented with lame excuses from school officials that resembled those from the most abject students who ever tried to explain why they failed a test.

Paul Possemato, a Los Angeles district administrator, said that the issue was not really one of “cheating,” but of teachers “who were frustrated because they knew their students knew the right answer but had answered wrong . . . . They were trying to be helpful.”

Los Angeles school board member Jackie Goldberg said, “These things happen because there’s too much pressure out there about these tests from parents.”

But how can we shift the blame to concerned parents? They have every right to expect that their tax dollars spent in support of education should provide a high level of performance from students and teachers and administrators.

Most puzzling of all is the excuse that there was no written policy concerning teachers cheating on tests administered in California’s public schools.

Are we to assume that obvious ethical wrongs must be forbidden in writing before they are punishable?

Common sense tells us that the way in which this school scandal has been handled by the insiders cannot be ignored. And that is especially true in light of Proposition 98, which will appear on the November ballot.

Proposition 98 is sponsored by California’s largest teachers’ union. It would mandate an ever-increasing share of the state’s general fund to the schools to the detriment of all other general-fund programs and the Gann spending limit.

Education is currently the top priority in the state budget. While the general fund has grown by 44% in the last five years, education’s share of the pie has increased by 54%. But the authors of Proposition 98 want even more.

Proposition 98 would guarantee a high level of school funding and then add to thatbase by laying claim to the first revenues brought in above the Gann limit--up to 4% of the schools’ general-fund allocation.

If Proposition 98 had been in effect last year, $700 million of the excess funds collected over the Gann limit would have gone immediately to schools, dropping the amount rebated to taxpayers from $1.1 billion to $400 million.

Once additional revenue is added to the school budget, Proposition 98 calls for it to be built into the guaranteed base that the schools receive in the next budgetary year--forcing other state programs to fight for whatever is left. In other words, school funding no longer would be decided by the Legislature and the governor in the context of determining California’s total budget needs.

Yet, in return for this bigger piece of the pie, all that the teachers’ union offers us is “accountability.”

Proposition 98 would create a “school accountability report card” for every school district. Purportedly it would tell the public how the billions in school funds are spent, how those funds contribute to academic achievement, the quality of school instruction and leadership.

The teachers’ union initiative says that the report card would be fashioned bythe state superintendent of public instruction in consultation with a task force made up entirely of members of the education Establishment, manned by a majority of teachers.

Now that we know that educators tried to cover up the CAP cheating scandal, then defended their actions with incredible excuses, we should be ready to reject the in-house approach to accountability.

Responsibility for education belongs to the community as a whole. It is the community that funds our public education. Proposition 98, however, would allow the education Establishment to set up a system permitting no outside influence to determine how much money it receives, and no outside judgment as to whether or not the money is being spent wisely.

This promise to give us accountability in education in exchange for additional funds is not new. In 1983 the Legislature pumped an extra $900 million into the schools for the then recently elected Supt. Bill Honig’s education reform plan. Honig said then that parents and the public should hold him and local school officials accountable for improvements in the quality of education.

Of course, we didn’t get that in writing.