School Budgets Get Caught in Political Mire

When evaluating the performance of elected officials it is always useful to compare their political rhetoric with financial reality. For some time there has been much political blather about the status of public school finances in California. Some lists even put California’s per-student expenditures for public K-12 education at the bottom of the 50 states. Voters can expect to hear similarly dire pontifications about the status of California public school financing soon. Proposition 39, a statewide school bond initiative, is on the upcoming November ballot.

In this highly charged political environment, what is the reality of public school finance in the Golden State? Pretty golden, it turns out. In fiscal year 1995-96, per-student spending was within a few dollars of $6,000 per year. Estimates by state Rep. Thomas McClintock (R-Granada Hills), based on data from the legislative analyst’s office (the nonpartisan professional analytical group that supports the Legislature), put 2000-01 per-student spending at $8,673. Of course, not all school districts have the same resources. Thanks to California’s shamefully complex school financing scheme, per-student expenditures vary substantially. A detailed analysis of selected public school district budgets by Pacific Research Institute co-director Lance Izumi and colleague Carl Brodt provides sobering evidence of this fact. In 1999-2000, Los Angeles Unified budgeted $10,934 per student. San Francisco Unified budgeted $10,021. By comparison, San Bernardino City Unified budgeted $8,521, while the amount for Santa Ana Unified was $8,234. The large gap between LAUSD and San Francisco on the one hand, and San Bernardino and Santa Ana on the other, is remarkable, and disturbing. More disturbing still is the fact Sausalito Elementary budgeted $15,409 in 1999-2000.

The oft referred-to Serranto-Priest court ruling, which in theory mandated substantially equal school funding statewide, obviously has not curtailed state legislative and bureaucratic sleight of hand.

The painful inability of the Legislature and the state educational bureaucracy in Sacramento to allocate education funds in anything approaching an equitable manner is sad.

The problem the state has in disbursing funds equitably has arisen again in a successful lawsuit regarding a statewide school construction bond issue approved in 1998. The proceeds of this bond issue have been distributed on a first-come, first-served basis, with the state doling out construction funds to districts that had acquired land and prepared state architect-approved building plans. Nimble districts have been so much more adept at this process than others, a judge has ruled that the state had not established an equitable system of distributing the funds.

These problems notwithstanding, the Legislature has placed Proposition 39 on the ballot this November. It would reduce the threshold for locally approved school construction bonds to 55% of the voters, instead of the currently required two-thirds. Perhaps emboldened by the narrow defeat of a similar initiative in March that would have lowered the approval threshold to a simple majority, legislative powers have decided the slightly higher 55% requirement might attract enough voters who rejected the simple majority initiative.

Cynics might suspect that the primary thrust of Proposition 39 has nothing particularly to do with financing new schools, and everything to do with an ongoing effort to eliminate the two-thirds voter approval requirement for bond issues in California. This cynicism cannot be dismissed out of hand, when considering the fact that the state Department of Finance estimates the total state budget for fiscal year 2000-01 at $99.4 billion. That is an increase of $12.7 billion (or about 14.6%) over the 1999-00 figure of $86.7 billion.

If education was really the priority of the Legislature, a large slice of that $12.7 billion could easily have gone to school construction.

The current system of financing public K-12 education in California is crude and cumbersome, to say the least. The legislative analyst’s office suggests the state distribute funds to local districts with fewer strings attached, and reward districts that are improving student performance, but will the Legislature move in this direction?

Experienced educators frequently point out that many children in California’s public schools suffer from a variety of handicaps: poor, single-parent households; weak parental support for education; inadequate nutrition; dangerous, crime-ridden neighborhoods. The unfortunate litany of problems confronting too many kids seems endless. These are the most vulnerable children in California’s education system, a system that has not been very successful in effectively targeting resources to meet their needs.

Unless the state educational establishment and its allies in the current Legislature manage to allocate education funds in a manner that improves student performance across the board, and especially help those children who are most vulnerable, California voters eventually might start seriously considering other ways of allocating tax dollars for education. Will the threat of vouchers bring the Legislature to its senses?