Politicians to Blame for Sorry State of Our Schools : The Van Nuys campus and others can’t meet enrollment demands because for 25 years, legislators have cut back on resources necessary for good education.

Recently we read and heard about the possible closing of one of the three magnet schools at Van Nuys High. Everyone started pointing fingers. Some blamed the principal, others blamed the school site council and everyone blamed the school district. The real culprits, of course, got off scot-free.

Van Nuys High, where I have a daughter in the Performing Arts Magnet, is in trouble because like many schools in Los Angeles it has more potential students than it has seats, but no money to build new facilities to house those students.

The real culprits in this tragedy are the politicians in our state who have for the past 25 years starved our schools and our students of the resources they need for a good education.

When I was a student, the politicians kept the engine of our economy, our public schools, healthy. California spent 110% of the national average in per-pupil expenditure on my K-12 education. Our public schools with the proper support from Sacramento produced the workers that our industries and our society needed and demanded.

Today the students at Van Nuys High and all other students in our state are being educated with 79% of the money spent per-pupil nationwide. Forty of the 50 states spend more per pupil than we do, and our class size is the highest in the nation: California classes have seven more students per class than the national average.

This sorry state of affairs is not because our state is one of the poorest in the nation. If we use personal income per capita as a measure, California ranks 12th. Of the 38 states that have average lower personal incomes than California, 30 spend more to educate their kids than we do.

And it’s not as if we don’t spend money on important public and private services. California ranks fifth in expenditures for police protection, seventh in fire protection and ninth in health care and hospitals.

Why do we have problems at Van Nuys High? Why was there a threat to the magnets there? Why is Van Nuys High, like many of our schools, on the verge of not having enough seats for all its students?

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We have been looking for the answers to these questions in all the wrong places. The answers are not to be found in the principal’s office at Van Nuys High, nor will the answers be found at a meeting of the school site advisory council, nor even at LAUSD headquarters at 450 N. Grand. The real answers are to be found in the office of the governor and in the state Assembly and the state Senate.

There was a time, not too long ago, when the governor and legislators believed that kids and their education were important to the well-being of the state. What the politicians have done reminds me of a commercial I used to see on TV: A mechanic would stand beside a car engine which had failed, and he would hold up an oil filter and say, “You can pay me now or pay me later.”

Well, the great minds in Sacramento have not put a new oil filter in the engine that drives our economy, our public schools, for the last 25 years. Why have we, as citizens of one of the richest states, not held our politicians accountable for the mess they have allowed us, our children and our schools to get into?

Is it any wonder that we have problems at Van Nuys High?