‘Reverse Robin Hood’ Steals From Schools

Recently, state Sen. Ray Haynes (R-Riverside) used a colorful Ross Perotism to oppose a school construction bond measure by Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg (D-Los Angeles). Haynes said: “If we’re going to approve bonds, L.A. can’t be sucking it all out.”

The giant sucking sound he imagines is a myth. It is a myth that fuels the “reverse Robin Hood” school construction funding that enriches developers and leaves more than half a million poor kids in California’s public institutions without classroom seats. Its end is long overdue.

Raising the specter of greedy L.A. bureaucrats devouring the state’s scarce school construction funds is a tactic that has helped divert money to developer preferences and away from districts that need classroom seats. The Coalition for Adequate School Housing, or CASH, routinely floods small, rural and suburban districts--and their legislators--with bulletins urging annihilation of any school construction bill that ends “the first-come, first-served” system that harms overcrowded urban districts. CASH, as the acronym implies, represents big money, not kids.

Specifically, CASH is funded by the building industry. The building industry, of course, thrives on selling homes in newly developed suburban and exurban areas with no overcrowding problems. A new school near a recent development means the homes sell faster and for more money. Every dollar of school construction funding that bypasses cities and flows to the sagebrush is a boost to the builders’ bottom line. And so, over the years, the builders’ CASH machine has found the perfect message to ensure that state funds are spent to subsidize exurban developments. The message: “Don’t watch what we’re up to, just keep worrying about funds whooshing into the hungry and undeserving coffers of big, bad L.A.”

While CASH raises the alarm about Los Angeles and other crowded urban districts, exurban districts, the real winners in the state system, quietly walk off with far more money than their overcrowding warrants. Places like Riverside.

A suit brought last year by Los Angeles parents, students and taxpayers documented the consistent anti-urban skew in state school construction funding for the last decade under the first-come, first-served system. With 12% of the state’s K-12 students and 34% of its multitrack pupils (those whose classes are so overcrowded that they rotate in and out of school to share seats), the Los Angeles Unified School District has received only 6% of the funds since 1990. In contrast, Riverside County districts, Haynes’ area, with 5% of the state’s K-12 students and only 8% of its multitrack students, have received more than 14%.

And the pattern was statewide. With fund-starved districts shown on maps in khaki and heavily funded districts shown in green, we could find virtually every urban area in the state without labels, just by looking for a beige area surrounded by a ring of green. The court held this allocation system to be unlawful, which led to a settlement that has reformed the system, at least for what remains of 1998’s school construction bond, which remains badly skewed overall.

The challenge is whether for the next bond lawmakers will resurrect the reverse Robin Hood scheme or find a system that sends the money where overcrowding really exists.

Thus, the new tug of war that has broken out in Sacramento. The Goldberg bill Haynes castigated actually took a measured approach in the face of this history, asking only that the next bond be allocated in proportion to the number of each district’s count of “unhoused” students. Because of the way these formulas work, the LAUSD’s share was estimated to be only about 14%. The bill opposed by Haynes was, in fact, a statewide compromise that the LAUSD didn’t support.

But true to the old playbook, CASH and its allies are again spinning the story of L.A. “sucking it all out.” They have opposed any allocation formula that deviates from the system that starves urban districts and that led to last year’s lawsuit. None of us in California’s urban areas should be misled. As the saying goes: Fool us once, shame on you. Fool us twice, shame on us.