More Spending Doesn’t Mean Better Schools : Education: Be wary of teachers who talk softly and carry big public-relations sticks.

Although the next statewide election is more than a year away, the opening salvo for school reform will be launched in March. That is when the California Teachers Assn. will begin its dual-purpose television blitz announcing how little California spends per student and how it has the nation’s most crowded classrooms.

One goal of the blitz is to set the stage for the CTA’s 1996 ballot measure. The second purpose is to garner public support for school funding in the upcoming state budget debates.

Executive Director Ralph Flynn says it is time for the CTA, the state’s most powerful lobby, to take charge of school-reform matters. In 1993, the organization spent $12 million to fight school reforms rather than promote its own.

Its draft proposal uses language designed to strike a chord with voters. It promises to reduce class size, raise teachers’ salaries, provide instructional materials and supplies, limit administration, upgrade staff training opportunities and improve school security.

While it may sound good, there is a catch: The CTA wants to raise taxes to pay for it.

According to an internal CTA memo, the organization wants to “sell” a 1-cent sales-tax increase to all taxpayers. The memo says that the sales-tax route was chosen because it won’t provoke the state’s businesses to join the battle on the other side.

The CTA says more money is needed to improve schools--lots more. It wants an additional $400 spent per student, bringing the total to $5,600. Or, to put it in perspective, they want spending for each 30-student classroom to increase from $156,000 to $168,000 per year.

It strains the imagination to justify this increase. Being generous with figures, consider this: If a teacher is paid $50,000, and books and supplies cost $25,000 and the classroom costs $25,000 per year, the total cost is $100,000 per class. Of course there are transportation, food and other costs involved, but do those expenses add up to $68,000?

Their proposed sales-tax increase will knock the legs out from under the state’s economic recovery.

The CTA’s concern over overcrowded classrooms begs the question why it spent more than $560,000 to fight Proposition 187, which addressed the estimated $1.4 billion spent to educate illegal immigrant children.

Republicans in Sacramento have long sought legislation that would provide greater local control, site-based management, parental choice and private management of non-education services. Gov. Pete Wilson wants to throw out the state’s gargantuan 7,523-page Education Code and start over. Yet just two weeks after Wilson suggested this in his State of the State address, officials in the governor’s office reported that the education forces (the CTA) are too strong and that his efforts will be much less than anticipated.

By putting its own school-reform measure on the ballot, the CTA is hoping to derail support for an expected push by school-choice supporters.

Since the 1993 election, school-choice supporters have been meeting on a regular basis to discuss the lessons learned from the campaign and how to improve their efforts. Today, they are ready to move forward and will do so with strong financial backing, strong enough to compete and win. And win they must, for their answer is a step in the right direction.

Per-student spending has risen 40% over the last 20 years, yet our SAT scores have fallen to 36th in the country. New Jersey spends more than $9,000 per student and its test scores are worse than California’s. Utah spends little more than $3,000 per student and its SAT scores rank in the top five. Clearly, more spending and higher taxes are not the answer.

To improve education in California, Californians first need to be educated to the cynical CTA public-relations blitz.