Executive director’s note: Welcome to California, the state of dysfunction 

From time to time, I look back over my prior columns to make sure that I’m not too repetitive in the themes I offer and the topics I discuss. Doing so recently, I found that much of what I’ve written lately has had at least something to do with the current fiscal crisis in California, the impact of that crisis on our public schools, and the desperate need for political and budgetary reform.

But at the risk of repeating myself, the situation in which schools find themselves right now—exacerbated by the state budget recently signed by the governor—demands that I devote this space to current efforts to address the patently dysfunctional system that our public schools depend on for support.

As the years have gone by and the state’s extraordinarily volatile revenue system has subjected us to feast-or-famine budgeting, many of the “solutions” adopted by our Legislatures and signed by our governors have been nothing more than clever and, at times, wishful concoctions of chewing gum and baling wire, designed to do little more than get the state through another fiscal year. Often, when the times have demanded balanced political compromises designed to make things work better, the politicians have instead delivered expeditious, “get out of town” so-called solutions that avoided the hard decisions called for among bad but unavoidable choices, for both revenues and expenditures.

This year, the meltdown of the global economy and the state’s astonishing two-year deficit of over $41 billion—an incredible number to contemplate—left state policymakers with little choice but to begin making those hard decisions. To their credit, enough legislators realized a deficit of that magnitude could not be closed with cuts alone—a position that this association has advocated all along.

But make no mistake: The cuts to public education that are a part of this 18-month budget are unprecedented and catastrophic. We’ve reviewed the record, and they represent the first year-to-year reduction in funding for California’s public schools since the Great Depression. School funding dropped by a total of about 25 percent on a per-pupil basis in the seven years from 1928 to 1935, a span that includes the Depression’s deepest trough. This year’s Budget Act creates a deficit of funding for the public schools in the neighborhood of 16 percent in one year!

This shameful turn of events has school people scrambling in ways that have not been seen in over 75 years. While many members of the Legislature seem to believe that the flexibility provided in the budget will allow schools to escape the crisis unscathed, governance teams know that notion is just a pipe dream. Plenty of folks at the local level are trying to make the best possible decisions for kids and preserve and protect their core academic programs. Many of these decisions require negotiations, and the trade-offs that have to be made at the bargaining table are not easy.

It is likely that other school districts and county offices will have no choice but to follow the courageous lead of districts like San Jose Unified, whose management and labor bargaining teams recently reached agreement on wage and salary reductions in order to preserve jobs and programs for kids. Sometimes an unthinkable crisis results in folks coming together and agreeing to terms that no one thought possible.

This is fascinating, and frustrating. Barely two years after the “Getting Down to Facts” studies out of Stanford University asserted that our system was underfunded by about 40 percent, no reasonable person can now doubt that with this budget we are headed in precisely the wrong direction. After all, California already ranked near the bottom nationally in per-pupil funding—despite having academic standards acknowledged and recognized to be the country’s highest!

So what happens now? Do we wait for the next economic boom to rescue us from the current bust? That’s not a prudent course. At CSBA’s recent Forecast Conference Webcast, Beacon Economics co-founder Christopher Thornberg warned us that the economic bust that afflicts California will not ease soon—and that even when it does, the state will not return to the wealth we enjoyed so briefly in the late 1990s and the mid-2000s. The structural problems with the state’s economy are going to be with us for a long time, and the political system is not equipped to work us out of this dilemma.

Two statewide groups with strong connections to the business community are studying this problem closely, and CSBA is actively engaged in those discussions. One group, California Forward, is promoting a variety of specific proposals for budgetary and political reform. Another, the Bay Area Council, hosted a summit in Sacramento in February and is advocating for a constitutional convention to overhaul the state’s political and budgetary system—an event not seen in California since the 1870s! But as interesting as those two groups’ efforts may be—and for now, they are about the only game in town, in terms of true reform—they are both fraught with challenges and, even if successful, will take years to fully implement.

And that is why it is incumbent upon this association to do anything and everything it can to move the reform conversation forward. The members of the Legislature who were courageous enough to put their political careers on the line to do the right thing for California—both Democrats and Republicans—deserve our support and admiration.

But that’s not adequate to the challenge facing us now, and we can’t trust other groups—however well intentioned—to take the lead on reforming our state’s broken system. That’s why CSBA has joined with our friends in local government in the Cities, Counties and Schools Partnership to launch a task force on fiscal reform.

You can be assured that CSBA will be at the front lines of the battle to ensure that the state funds public schools at a level commensurate with the standards it has set for them. But we cannot do it alone—we need each of you to engage your local communities and policymakers in support of the public schools.

It may sound overly dramatic to say it, but nothing less than the existence of our public schools, as we have known them, is at stake.