PPIC poll: Tax us to protect K-12 schools
Two-thirds of adults surveyed in a Public Policy Institute of California poll say they support higher taxes to maintain funding for K-12 schools. And a full 82 percent, including a majority of Republicans polled, oppose cutting K-12 education to reduce the state budget deficit. No other part of state spending comes close to engendering such support in the poll, which was released Wednesday.
Gov. Schwarzenegger should keep those numbers in mind, because they’ll only go up in coming months, as school districts lay out next year’s severe budget cuts and, in March, when they send out layoff notices to teachers.
The governor can say, “No problem. No taxes needed, because I pledged in my State of the State address to protect K-12 schools.” But if that’s so, then why are districts startewide talking about, in various combinations, knocking five days off the school year, expanding class sizes in elementary school to 28 to 30, eliminating summer school and about every discretionary program left and asking staff to take additional pay cuts?
What matters to Californians is how many dollars school districts will actually have to meet payroll – not Schwarzengger’s technical definition of meeting a Proposition 98 formula that he has contorted. The gap between the reality facing schools and Schwarzenegger math is huge.
The most commonly cited figure is that districts face about a $200 per student cut next year. But when all of the governor’s proposed cuts are totaled — $500 million in the class-size reduction program, $300 million in phantom savings from contracting out services, $900 million in Prop 98 manipulation, $1.2 billion in as yet undefined cuts to districts “administration,” and $200 million in a negative cost of living adjustment – the figure, according to the California School Boards Assn., is closer to $400 per student– about a cut of 6 percent in state dollars.
But this is only part of the story. Federal stimulus dollars filled in holes last year, but districts have used most of that money up, and the $1 billion additional that K-12 schools had assumed would be theirs next year will end up about half. (At least the governor diverted it to a good cause: higher ed.)
And then there’s the future to worry about. Unlike most governments, school districts are required by law to produce a three-year balanced budget. Looking ahead, there’s trouble: the expiration of temporary state sales and income tax surcharges starting in 2011 and a phase-in of a billion-dollar corporate tax credit. The Legislature may rescind the credit and extend the taxes, but districts can’t count on that now.
So they’re slashing because their reserves are disappearing, and they can’t assume on any extra revenue at least for two or three more years. Going into next year, San Jose Unified, calculates it faces an ongoing cut from thee years ago of about 22 percent.
That is not protecting K-12 education.
In the PPIC poll, voters talk out of both sides of the mouths. That’s nothing new. Sixty percent, including a majority of Democrats, said that, in general, state government could spend less and still provide the same level of services. Only about one out of six adults understands that, at about 40 percent, K-12 and community college spending is the largest source of spending, by far, in the state budget. (Most Californians assume it’s the prisons, whose budget they want cut.)
But Californians know what they see, and they are witnessing a dismantling of their public schools. And the PPIC poll says they say they’re willing to pay more to stop that, even in this recession.
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The results seem to indicate once again, to no surprise of my own, that the same general electorate that says they don’t like “Welfare” or those that must use it, in whatever form it takes nowadays, are also prone to misunderstand the true level of funding required to provide this state’s society with the services it requires to meet the demands that the electorate expect to receive without questions.
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Given that charters account for 80% of the top 15 schools in the state now, serve more low-income students than districts and are only receiving 80% of what districts receive per-pupil, any cuts are going to hurt charters and thus our neediest children most.
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And charters would not get any money from a parcel tax that districts pass, if I’m not mistaken. Correct me if I’m wrong, John. (Also a point to note at the Charter Summit on Saturday.)
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The press continually repeats the claim that Prop. 13 is the “third rail of politics.”
That’s not valid. Not many of today’s Californians even have any notion of what Prop. 13 is. Only those of us born before June 1970 and living in California in June 1978 were able to vote on Prop. 13 — and we must be a tiny percentage of the today’s populace. And of those who weren’t present and aware at the time it was voted in, very few people know anything about it.
Prop. 13’s support came from people who were in their 60s and 70s in 1978, those born between 1900 and 1915, say — and most of them have gone to the great low-taxes-less-government haven in the sky.
Polls show that Californians support Prop. 13. But I asked Mark DiCamillo of the Field Poll once how the pollsters deal with the respondents who, asked their opinion of Prop. 13, don’t know what it is. He acknowledged that a large number of people don’t know what Prop. 13 is, and sent me the brief, dry description that Field pollsters show respondents.
But an opinion given on the spot by someone who has no information about the subject, based on one brief description, is not sound or valid. It would be easy to write a brief description that motivated most of those people to disapprove of Prop. 13. So those polls are simply not based on reality. The press needs to stop promoting the notion that most Californians support Prop. 13, because that’s just not true.
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I would refer readers of this site to the California Budget Project’s various work on taxes in California. Californians have elected both Democrats and Republicans who have created a tax structure that has created most of our budget problems. We have enriched large corporations and the elite at the expense of the middle class.
http://www.cbp.org/publications/state_taxes_land.html
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