Wasting Our Future? : The causes of our public schools’ problems are hotly disputed by those responsible for finding a cure. : COUNTERPOINT... : Inflating statistics won’t solve anything, and these untruths divert energy from the real issues.

Wayne Johnson’s thesis is quite remarkable: All problems facing the district--dropouts, low-achieving students, campus violence, whatever--are traceable to reputedly high administrative costs. Thus, by cutting administration expenses, we can solve everything. Problem is that Johnson doesn’t have his facts in order.

To begin with, he claims that 28%--roughly $970 million--of the 1988-89 district budget was spent on downtown and region-office administration. That would be startling--if it were true.

To arrive at his inflated figure, Johnson adds expenses that have little or nothing to do with administration. For example, he includes the cost of medical, dental, vision and retirement benefits for all district teachers and employees--$355 million. Next, he throws in the cost of student transportation--$94 million. Then, for good measure, he adds hundreds of millions for such items as school police (the district is the fourth-largest law-enforcement agency in the county), school nurses, school psychologists, utilities, building maintenance and so on. Almost all this money is spent at school sites, not at district offices.

If we replace Johnson’s creative bookkeeping with the standard accounting methods used by all the state’s school districts, the actual cost of central and region administration in the ‘88-’89 budget was 4.43%. That’s far below Johnson’s 28%. Indeed, the percentage of the district budget spent on administration is the lowest among the 20 largest school districts in California.

Johnson says that he yearns for a school district that spends 70% of its budget directly on the students’ education. Well, he need yearn no longer. The district already spends considerably more than 70% of its budget on teachers, teacher aides, books, supplies and other classroom needs. When nurses, counselors, librarians, psychologists and so on are added, nearly 90% of the district budget is spent directly in the schools.

Johnson asserts that 82 administrators are provided with district automobiles. This practice, as he well knows, was discontinued last year for more than two-thirds of the administrators. Today, only 20 administrators are assigned district cars.

Unfortunately, when questions of fact are quite important, Johnson’s accuracy doesn’t improve. He claims that the average student-teacher ratio in the district is 36-1. He surely must remember that the district is required by its contract with the teachers and by court order to maintain most class sizes at 27 students, on average. In the vast majority of schools, only such classes as P.E., drill team and band are permitted to average 36 or more students.

Johnson also contends that 70% of the district’s high-school graduates cannot read, write or compute math at the eighth-grade level. But all high-school seniors must pass competence exams in reading, language, math and writing, and more than 98% of district seniors have done so.

Finally, Johnson claims that 50% of all new teachers quit within five years because, he says, they are not permitted to use their special knowledge and creative skills in the classroom and are denied a say in teaching decisions. In fact, the five-year attrition rate is 32%, and most of these teachers quit because they move, return to school to further their education, take a teaching job elsewhere or care for a child.

No one denies that the district faces serious problems in meeting the needs of its diverse student population. Our finances are inadequate. Our dropout rate is improving, but it is still too high. But what’s clearly unneeded is the additional burden of having to deal with false charges, which can only divert energy from the true education tasks before us.