California School Funding: "Worse than a retreat; it is a massacre"
California Progress Report
June 1, 2009
By Paula S. Campbell,
President, California School Boards Association
Nevada City Unified School Board Member
As public schools around the country prepare for a “Race to the Top,” California’s schools are sinking to the bottom in funding. Nationally, $5 billion in the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund has been set aside for “Race to the Top” competitive grants. In a speech last week in San Francisco, U. S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan noted the decline of public schools in California from “the best education system in the country,” and asked, “is California going to lead the race to the top or are you going to lead the retreat?”
Governor Schwarzenegger’s May Revision of the budget offers a clear answer to that question: all out retreat. It proposes further funding cuts this year followed by more cuts next year. These are on top of cuts that were imposed in February, which themselves were added to the cuts in the original budget last fall. By the time we enter the next fiscal year that begins July 1, school budgets will have been cut four times since September.
That’s worse than a retreat; it is a massacre. We know that, based on a cut of “only” $3 billion last September, schools have already reduced or eliminated important programs and services. Class sizes are growing at all grade levels, after-school tutoring and summer school programs are being eliminated, school counselors and librarians have been laid off and the curriculum is shrinking with the loss of high school electives, arts and music education and advanced placement courses.
These are the consequences of ranking 47th in the nation in per-student funding, according the Education Week. California has far more students per teacher, librarian, counselor and nurse than the national average. We even have fewer school site and district level administrators and—contrary to popular opinion—are among the most under-administered schools in the country. And, as any good business person will tell you, strong administration is absolutely essential for quality control.
Despite these conditions, California’s schools are performing remarkably well. Since 1999, the percentage of schools that meet or exceed state targets on the Academic Performance Index (API) has tripled. In 1999, an elementary school with an API score of 680 would have been among the top 30 percent of the schools in the state. In 2008, a school with that same score would be in the bottom 10 percent.
These are impressive gains, but they will not be sustainable with the addition of the newly proposed cuts. We are gutting the very programs that made these gains possible and that are needed to continue the momentum so that all students can be successful. The problem is not that our schools are failing; it’s that we are failing our schools.
There is an alternative to the cuts—raise the revenues that are needed to properly invest in our schools, our youth and our future. We can no longer do more with less, and it is time for California’s elected leaders to make a decision: do they want to live in a state that is systematically dismantling its public education system, closing its parks, releasing its prisoners, neglecting its infrastructure, selling off its assets and eliminating health care and other services for more than a million children?
A cuts-only solution to the budget gap will throw tens of thousands of teachers and other school employees out of work. The economic impact of this job loss is no less than the impact of job loss in the private sector, but it is compounded by the added impact of the loss of educational opportunities for our children. Even in these tough times (perhaps especially in these tough times) California cannot afford to shirk its responsibility to prepare its youth for college, the workforce and citizenship.
We have heard many times from our leaders in Sacramento that this is a time for tough choices. One of the easiest of those tough choices should be to raise the revenue needed to keep California golden. Continuing to decimate education funding is a travesty that will only further tarnish the futures of our children and our society.
Paula S. Campbell, a board member in the Nevada City School District in Nevada County, is the 2009 President of the California School Boards Association. The California School Boards Association is a collaborative group of virtually all of the state’s more than 1,000 school districts and county offices of education. It brings together school governing boards and their districts and county offices on behalf of California’s children.