Forecast to pick up where Annual Conference left off
CSBA’s Forecast Webcast on budget, policy coming Jan. 13
Published: January 1, 2011
The final General Session of CSBA’s Annual Education Conference and Trade Show in San Francisco last month set the stage for the association’s next Forecast Webcast, coming over the Internet Jan. 13.
The setting was ominous.
“These are dark times for schools—how dark, we’ll find out soon enough,” moderator John Fensterwald, who blogs on education issues for the Silicon Valley Education Foundation, intoned at the start of the Annual Conference’s State of the State session. For the next hour, Fensterwald led CSBA Assistant Executive Director for Governmental Relations Rick Pratt and Sacramento-based education experts Kevin Gordon and Jannelle Kubinec in a frank discussion of the impact state budget problems have on California’s public schools.
“We’ve seen education lose about 15 percent of its budget” in recent years, noted Kubinec, associate vice president of the consulting firm School Services of California Inc. “This problem didn’t get created in a year, and it’s not going to go away in a year.”
Other speakers echoed that theme. Recent state budgets have been balanced on one-time solutions, gimmicks and accounting tricks, such as passing the state’s cash-flow woes onto schools by deferring payments owed to them. Gordon, president of School Innovations and Advocacy Inc., noted the state Legislative Analyst’s Office has suggested that $1.7 billion owed to schools next July—part of their 2010–11 revenue stream that’s been deferred—could be lost as the state’s new governor and Legislature grapple with a general fund deficit pegged at more than $28 billion through June 2012.
“Don’t be fooled” into thinking that the losses would stop there, Gordon said. If the state reneges on that $1.7 billion, he explained, that would lower the minimum amount owed to schools going forward under Proposition 98’s complicated funding guarantee. “Between the two, it’s really a $4 billion hit to public schools,” Gordon said.
Pratt soon expanded the discussion to “the bigger picture,” acknowledging the state’s unprecedented fiscal problems and noting that further cuts alone cannot bridge the chasm between revenues and expenditures.
“We need to look at both sides of the equation,” Pratt said. A cuts-only budget will further damage the state’s battered economy, feeding a vicious cycle of reduced tax proceeds and additional cuts. By the time the economy recovers—in the middle of the next decade, according to the LAO’s outlook—“we will have lost the momentum for improvement” demonstrated in recent measures of student performance, Pratt said. “The academic cycle is longer than the budget cycle.”
Forecast Webcast Jan. 13
The impact of the state and national economy on school budgets will once again be a topic of CSBA’s Forecast Webcast Jan. 13—just days after new Gov. Jerry Brown unveils his budget proposal. Pratt and other CSBA policy experts will be joined by Christopher Thornberg, founding principal of the Beacon Economics consulting firm, in a wide-ranging analysis of education and fiscal issues. Complimentary registration is open to CSBA members for the two-hour presentation, which will begin at 10 a.m.
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