Schools Don’t Need More Talk, They Need Action

I’m not sure precisely when it happened, but sometime between that fall day in 1953 when I first entered a California public school and a fall day in 1980 when my daughter did the same, people in this state seemed to stop caring about education.

It saddens me, as a son of this blessed commonwealth, that we have reached a point where our state education budget is so tight that California, which once led the nation in spending on public schools, is now among the states that spend the least amount of money per pupil. We ranked 47th in a recent survey that measured percapita spending on schools.

Many people can share the blame for this state of affairs.

Start with former Gov. Ronald Reagan and the student protesters whom he campaigned against when he first ran for office in 1966. Reagan promised to make students in the state’s colleges pay tuition for the first time in history, arguing that they should have to “pay to carry their picket signs.” He got voters to take an us-against-them attitude toward teachers, too. Public education in this state has yet to recover from the resulting alienation.

Former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. didn’t help, either. After a generation in which Republican and Democratic governors alike supported public schools and built a great state college and university system, Brown made little or no effort to reverse Reagan’s negative trend. In fact, his “small is beautiful” philosophy may have fed the public perception that California, a state built by people who thought big, had done enough for its young people.

Howard Jarvis, the godfather of Proposition 13, the property-tax-limitation initiative approved by state voters in 1978, put his heavy hand into the mix, too. With its meat-ax approach to government expenditures, Proposition 13 forced public officials all over California to cut not just the fat in their budgets but meat as well. Among the most badly hurt were public schools, which were the most dependent on property-tax revenues.

Paul Gann delivered a second devastating blow in 1979, when voters approved his initiative that took Proposition 13 a step further, limiting the amount of tax money that the state can spend each year. Its formula has proved so restrictive that the state is now spending too little not just on schools but also on health care and other vital services. Even people who still think that Proposition 13 was useful have doubts about the “Gann limits” that are strangling California’s ability to provide public services.

Educators are to blame, too. School administrators have not done enough to reform the education system that they oversee. And many teachers’ unions seem more interested in pressing their demands through strikes than in improving the quality of their members’ work.

The tragedy of all this is that public support for California’s schools dried up precisely when it was needed the most--just as many urban school districts started struggling with an influx of students whose parents are immigrants from Latin America and Asia, and when schools everywhere began preparing young people to work in a changing world and national economy.

It has become a cliche for political and business leaders to talk about the challenges facing California in the 21st Century, of the riches that await us if we exploit our ties to the Pacific Rim, and of the harm that could befall us if we let aggressive competitors like Japan continue to outpace us. The latest such effort, a report titled “Return to Greatness,” was put together by a commission that included representatives of high-tech companies like Apple Computer and Hewlett Packard and AT&T.;

Unfortunately, that’s all that California’s current crop of leaders have done about schools so far--talk.

We can start getting action on Nov. 8 if state voters approve one of the least publicized but most important initiatives on the state ballot. Proposition 98 would lift the Gann limits on the state’s education budget, requiring that schools get no less support than they received in 1986-87, roughly 38.6% of the general fund.

Proposition 98 is controversial. Because it would leave the Gann limits in place on the rest of the state budget, its opponents argue that other services might suffer in order to pay for our schools. They call for trying to repeal the Gann limits across-the-board. But how long is that going to take? And what happens to this state’s children in the meantime? Leaving a few thousand more kids to a few more years of mediocre education smacks of cruelty.

Ever since a lame Franciscan friar, Junipero Serra, had the courage to start building a chain of missions in what was then a desolate outpost of the Spanish empire, this has been a state of doers. That’s how ‘49ers made their fortunes. That’s how San Franciscans built a jewel of a city from the ashes of a terrible earthquake. That’s why, despite the Depression, Angelenos banked on a film industry to send celluloid dreams all over the world. That’s how our aircraft and ship builders helped win the biggest war in history. It’s how we built a freeway system that’s the envy of the nation, and a public school system that used to be--by doing rather than just talking.

We’ll revive some of that get-it-done tradition if we approve Proposition 98.