Higher taxes, little relief
Districts unenthusiastic about Brown's tax plan
Gov. Jerry Brown will have a heck of a time persuading voters to raise taxes by $6.9 billion to benefit schools if he can’t get the education community excited about it first. And so far it’s proving to be a hard sell.
District officials do fear the downside if Brown’s tax proposal fails, but they don’t see a lot of upside if it passes. Many feel like they’re being used by Brown and his administration, who are characterizing a general temporary sales and income tax increase as a tax for K-12 schools and community colleges.
If parents and teachers end up reaching the same conclusion – and being equally unexcited – the governor’s plan could be in big trouble.
On Friday, Brown got the first pushback on the current and proposed budget, which assumes his tax increase will pass. In amending SB 81, the Senate budget committee proposes restoring $248 million in school bus funding that’s part of the midyear budget cuts. Brown is proposing to kill the whole bus program – worth about $570 million – next year.
Home-to-school transportation comprises a little more than 1 percent of total Proposition 98 funding, but, because of the quirks in the formula, the funding’s impacts vary greatly among districts. In a few districts in Humboldt County and in remote regions like Death Valley Unified School District, it amounts to $600, even $1,000-plus per child, compared with an average statewide of $55 per child. Districts like those can’t simply move money around to keep the buses going; a cut of that magnitude could put them under.
SB 81 would spread the pain equally among all districts. In restoring the midyear bus cuts, the bill would reduce general school spending by $42 per child across the board, thus still netting a $248 million reduction that Brown demands to help solve a $9 billion overall budget deficit.
Paying down deferrals
But looking ahead to the fall, the prospect of cutting bus funding in the next budget, potentially forcing tiny rural districts into bankruptcy, while telling voters that higher taxes will save schools, presents a PR problem – and a contradiction for Brown. And it underscores the bigger problem with his tax increase and budget plan.
Even if Brown's tax initiative passed, per student funding – ADA or average daily tuition – would not increase (second bar from the right) but would decrease about 7 percent or $370 per child if it failed. Click to enlarge (courtesy of School Services of California, Inc.).
If the taxes – a half-cent increase in the sales tax and an increase in the income tax on the wealthy – pass, Proposition 98 spending would rise nearly $5 billion, to about $52 billion. But money that districts will see – dollars for the classroom – would remain essentially flat: $5,281 per child ($50 per child more, about 1 percent). That’s because Brown is proposing to use the new money to pay down the state’s “wall of debt.” In the case of K-12 schools and community colleges, those are deferrals – money that the state pays schools a year late.
Deferrals are an accounting trick and a dangerous trap, and Brown is right to begin to pay them off. About $10 billion – 20 percent of K-14 spending – is in deferrals, raising borrowing costs for schools and threatening their credit ratings.
But districts, in real dollars, have lost 10 percent of their funding since 2007-08 and are down 20 percent relative to what they’re entitled to by law. They’re desperate to start seeing money they can use – to restore teaching positions and programs they’ve cut. Here again, it’s tough to sell voters on a tax increase whose benefits are invisible. I’d be surprised if the Education Coalition – the California Teachers Association, the state PTA, administrators, and school board associations – didn’t lobby Brown to offer some immediate relief, with a longer-term approach to the debt problem.
If the tax initiative fails, Brown’s proposing to cut schools by $4.9 billion. He’d dump the responsibility for school construction bond payments onto districts – a state expense they haven’t had to pay before. The consultancy group School Services of California is telling districts to build a cut of $370 per student into the budget year starting July 1, to be prudent and not assume the tax initiative will pass.
Small wonder, then, that districts are skeptical about an initiative that’s supposedly in their best interests.
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It would be a good idea for districts to audit their bus spending to determine if there are more efficient routes, bus sharing w/other districts, etc. I learned some details at our local school board meeting that made me realize that there needs to be better oversight of the spending. HOWEVER, spread the pain at $42.00 per pupil and spare the poorer rural districts the full weight of the initial cuts. That needs to happen yesterday.
I agree with you John that “invisible benefits” will not be enticing to voters, no matter how supportive of public education they may be. Because all of this is coming at the same time as the proposal to adjust the funding of K-12 schools, it is difficult to really grasp whether schools will ever receive the deferred money in time for a potential flat rate that I cannot believe high schools could sustain. In a sense, I feel that I would prefer to personally give funds to keep essential programs in place, rather than pay more in state tax and have no clue where it is headed. After AB 114 I really don’t have any shred of faith that there is transparency, or even care for prudent fiscal planning.
Shifting the interest for bonds was not in the original agreement was it? Will that be spread across districts equally?
Does anyone have figures as to how many school districts are now in trouble after the bus funding cut?
I suppose that March 15th will see the usual pink slips if $370.00 is the amount per pupil reduction.
With so many districts in the situation of facing promised pay raises, that cut will be disproportionately deep if there isn’t a dash to the bargaining table.
Thanks for the update.
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I would Guess that most victims of a train wreck would be happy to hear the doctor say their foot could be saved. The tax story can be spun so many ways it makes one dizzy.
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If this is to be the path chosen by Brown and his advisors, it needs to be accompanied by waivers from the Legislators that mandate rather than negotiate the shortened school year ( 1 week? 2 weeks? 3 weeks?) and allow all staff a waiver for a full year pension credit. As a parent leader I prefer a shorter year with smaller class sizes and programs intact over a ” full year” with everything cut to the bone including morale. Brown may be counting on the PTA troops to rally voters to pass his initiative, but if ” the fix” at best offers flat funding which now equals continued draconian cuts…
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Another problem with the current structure of Governor’s proposal is it is based on a temporary five year tax but contains permanent language to shift dollars from the Prop 98 guarantee. As a result, schools run the risk of having the voters think the school funding crisis has been fixed, much like when they voted for the Lottery.
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Good article. There is still a major problem with transportation funding if they reinstate it. It’s drastically outdated – roughly 40 years. Maybe districts have grown considerably since then and their lost funding wasn’t much. Now those districts would get a much bigger cut than they were supposed to. I’m not saying it is right to cut the whole transportation funding, but if you are not, the allocation must be rebenched.
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John, I’m going to use the excerpt below from your piece in an upcoming article (with attribution, of course) if it’s all right with you:
“But (California) districts, in real dollars, have lost 10 percent of their funding since 2007-08 and are down 20 percent relative to what they’re entitled to by law. They’re desperate to start seeing money they can use – to restore teaching positions and programs they’ve cut.”
These figures will support my argument against spending $1.6 billion on standards that (whether they’re better than the current ones or not) are a waste of money. Particularly if Brown’s tax bill does not pass, where will that money come from? How much of the $6.9 billion will go to Common Core? Is that public knowledge?
By the way, I appreciated many aspects of your recent piece on CCSSI. You’ve got the facts right, though for some reason you seem reluctant to sat that the standards are a waste of money. Why is that? I’m not qualified to comment on the math standards, but I’ve consulted on the ELA CCSSI and I found them rather strong. Here and there you can find something worded better than in the current CA standards, and here and there the current CA standards are better, but basically it’s a wash. If we’re in the financial shape that you describe, why would we spend $1.6 billion on this?
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Doug: The figures from which I derived the percentages are as follows (source: School Services of California, Inc.):
In 2007-08, ADA was $5,821; it fell to a low of $4,981 in 2009-10 and rose to $5,231 in the current budget, which is 10 percent below 07-08. If districts had received COLAs allowed by law, ADA this year would be $6,535. The difference is 20 percent.
Next year, with a 3 percent COLA, ADA should be $6,742. If the tax initiative fails, ADA will drop to $4,921 – a 15 percent drop from 2007-08 in actual dollars and a 27 percent difference from $6,742 that schools should be getting. That would be disastrous.
I don’t know how many more times to repeat that those whose views I respect agree that the $1.6 billion figure for adopting Common Core that you cite is overstated.
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The Home-To-School Transportation funding program is a horrific mess for so many reasons.
First, districts’ entitlements to funding from the program are based on decades old data that bear little apparent relation to need or equity, except by chance. Specifically, the funding is based on what districts received decades ago, adjusted only if the district fails to spend the money. There are no adjustments related to any other measure of need such as changes to enrollment, miles driven, or any other reasonable factor. Shrinking districts with declining costs receive a much higher proportion of their costs reimbursed than do growing ones that were not funded when the music stopped. The result is a helter-skelter and increasingly arbitrary allocation of funds among districts.
Second, some years ago, the program was split into two pots, including “regular” and “special education” transportation. Districts were given the choice of whether to attribute their entitlement to one pot or the other. For those districts that argue against cutting the program because special education transportation is a mandate, the rather arbitrary nature of these splits, combined with the outdated entitlement data severely undercuts their point.
Third, the program seems to subsidize what is, for many, a lifestyle choice (living in the sticks, far from schools)–and does so at the expense of others in the K-12 system. It also discourages potentially cost-effective strategies such as online/distance learning and the like.
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I would be fine with a rebenching of the transportation funds to actual need. Whether that would benefit or hurt my particular district I don’t know, but I do think transportation is important to many districts.
Unless we forbid those families from having kids, or pave over the whole state, there are going to be rural students.
@Eric Premack, you should know that online learning in most of these rural communities would mean using a dial-up or possibly satellite connection. I invite you to experience that for yourself and then consider if that’s an acceptable education for our state’s kids. You should also be aware that in many of these communities the state has not seen fit to fund sidewalks or shoulders that would make it possible for the kids to walk or bike to school even if it’s not all that far.
In the cities, public transit may take up some of the slack, and parents may be able to drop the kids off on their way elsewhere. But in general, school buses benefit the whole community by lessening air pollution, energy use, wear and tear on roads, and lowering costs to parents.
Eric, I am sure you grow all your own food and timber, and that you don’t expect to pump gas or eat at a restaurant on your way to enjoying our state parks or traveling between our major cities.
This is one of the schools in Southern Humboldt potentially affected by the loss of transportation:
http://70.182.179.210/spotlight/principals/4111/?nomination=1
Come out and visit. You may discover that you know less about rural schools than you think.
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Let’s not forget that transportation funds are also for special ed kids. It’s hard to fathom what alternatives some of these kids might have to get to school. It’s also not clear how distance learning could work for them.
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@el: You’d be surprised to learn that I do grow my own timber (at least the stuff I burn in my stove) and live much of the time in the sticks–and love it. The state ‘gummint hasn’t seen fit to put sidewalks in where I live either–nor has the town seen fit to put in a road–so my neighbors and I pitch-in to share the costs of patching and plowing our bumpy, private road. Yes, the Internet service stinks (low-grade DSL), picking-up the mail is a real pain, propane gas is very costly (hence the timber bit), and the electricity goes up-and-down like a y0-yo.
These are lifestyle choices I have made and I’m not sure it would be appropriate to ask other taxpayers to shoulder the extra costs.
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@Eric, people like you and me, who are educated and who have choices, will make sure our kids are literate and go out in to the world with some skills. We have the resources between our own knowledge, our friends, and the tools we bring to connect to the outside world.
The majority of the kids here do not fall into that bucket. Many of their parents did not go to college. Some do not have trivial access to transportation. Many do not own computers and have never used one. Some are not literate in any language. And these families aren’t typically the sort that could just uproot themselves to the city even if they wanted to.
These kids will not be served by online education even via T-1 to their home, because they won’t have a built in adult for support. And these kids will be just as expensive to educate in the city. It is a state obligation to educate every California child. For kids who don’t live within walking distance of other kids, in-person school creates many other positive opportunities for both kids and community members.
It’s true transportation costs are higher, but it’s also true that staff salaries are lower. And if you do the math on what it costs to drive a kid to say a charter school – especially if you use the IRS rate of 50 cents a mile – it’s pretty easy to get to $1000 a year for the parent’s car. That’s just 11 miles a day for 180 days, divided by two roundtrips a day, which gets you to a home-to-school distance of > 2.8 miles.
I was surprised you live out in the sticks. I cut my own firewood too. Of course, by the time I’m done cutting it, I’m already warm…
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As I read Eric’s comment, I found myself agreeing with the elimination of transportation funding.
It would be easy to reimburse districts for actual and current special education transportation costs, and this should be done, as we’re talking about a mandate.
For non-special education transportation, districts should choose whether to allocate ADA revenue, levy user fees (which would, admittedly, be high), or eliminate the service. In the current funding landscape (this changes under weighted funding, admittedly) I don’t see too many categorical programs set up to cover exceptional costs incurred by urban districts. Why should it be different for rural districts? And suburbam districts have no excuse: parents should shoulder the extra cost of living near schools, or pay the cost of transporting their kids, and local leaders should finally begin to think about pedestrian and bicycle safety and convenience, and transit convenience, as features of community design.
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I understand entirely who and what el is talking about. In all honesty, the whole transportation system and funding needs an overhaul, and I am always in favor of sliding scale. If people are earning off the grid they can pay cash! In California the children have a right to public education, and no matter what responsibility we might wish their parents to take, sometimes they cannot or will not. Bottom line: access to education is the priority. My parents, thirty years ago wanted me out of education because of their religious and cultural “beliefs” – - -fortunately I had the right to an education, and obtained an almost fully funded place to university so I was no longer subject to their whims. Maybe there are kids out there whose parents wouldn’t take them to school if transportation was ended – I just don’t want that option exercised!
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Eric is right that the formula for transportation is inequitable and outdated, since districts that have grown since the formula was determined have not gotten their share. Nonetheless, at this point, it would make sense to treat transportation as any other flexible categorical: Let districts keep the money and decide whether or not to spend it on taking students back and forth to school. They’ll have to do the math: ADA lost when kids don’t show up to school versus using the money for other needs.
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I just heard the details of Molly Munger’s proposed initiative, and frankly it’s much better for schools.
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@Paul, for most of the rural districts, charging parents for transportation is not all that practical an option because a majority of the kids qualify for free and reduced lunch, and thus cannot be charged for it.
I’m not necessarily against eliminating it as a categorical and giving districts options on how it is spent, or against rebenching it to make it more equitable, even if that hurts my home district overall. But, in this case, we’re talking mid-year cuts of on order $1000 per student in some districts versus $42 in others, and naturally that would wreak havoc. Given that most of the districts with the large cuts are relatively small in population, it’s not even necessarily saving the state that much money.
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@ El, I agree that mid-year cuts are impractical and unfair. Changes of this magnitude should be scheduled years in advance, so that districts can adjust.
Regarding free and reduced-price lunch, is there a legal provision that blocks districts from charging other special service fees to such families? (I know that transportation fees would have to be set quite high if districts chose to recover all transportation costs from user fees. I am expecting that rural districts would divert some of their core ADA revenue to transportation, in the same way that urban districts allocate some of their core ADA revenue to costs particular to urban environments, such as higher salaries/higher cost of living, higher office rents, special services for concentrated English Language Learner populations, and special services for homeless students.)
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Paul: yes, as I understand it, you cannot charge fees to students who are in the free and reduced lunch categories. For that matter, aside from transportation, you can’t really charge fees at all for school-oriented activities like sports and drama or field trips. You can ask for donations, but there always has to be the option for the family to say no, I won’t/can’t pay that money. There have been recent legal actions along those lines as schools have tried to add fees for various activities.
I would point out that rural schools also have substantial concentrations of ELL and homeless kids. The only advantage rural schools have there is that there may be fewer different languages in play. Rural schools educate the kids of the people who pick your strawberries, lettuce, grapes, pears, etc.
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Hi @el, can you elaborate on the legal actions to which you refer? It seems that would only make sense if there were an assumption that such activities were deemed a required part of schooling. Or is the thought that even optional things cant be provided in a setting where there is unequal access to them? Do after-school programs count? Would the end result be that its ‘better’ (fairer I guess) to not allow music classes at all than to allow music classes for those who are willing to pay for them? Obviously the ‘right thing to do’ is to require them for everyone, but thats not happening. Libraries were recently deemed optional in our district..
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navigio, here are some links:
http://www.aclu.org/blog/human-rights-racial-justice/aclu-sues-california-over-public-school-fees-students
ACLU/SC’s investigation uncovered more than 50 public school districts in which at least one high school openly acknowledges on its website that students must pay fees in order to participate in educational programs. The illegal fees that we discovered include numerous mandatory fees related to core academic courses that fulfill high school graduation requirements — requiring students to purchase required text and workbooks for academic courses, charging lab fees for science classes, charging material fees for fine arts classes, and requiring students to purchase school-issued P.E. uniforms. They also included many instances where schools charge students hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of dollars to participate in school-sponsored extracurricular activities.
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/dec/10/local/la-me-school-fees-20101210
December 10, 2010|By Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times
Under a settlement agreement announced Thursday, California students will have new protections against being charged fees for a public education that is required by law to be free.
[...]
Under the terms of the agreement, if auditors conclude that a school district has charged illegal fees, it would be required to reimburse parents or suffer a financial penalty. And parents could challenge such fees immediately through a complaint process that must be resolved within 30 days. The agreement includes notification provisions.
“There won’t be a classroom in the state that won’t have posted the prohibition against the imposition of fees,” Rosenbaum said. “And every student and his or her family will also receive an individual notice that fees may not be imposed.”
The bill that was supposed to codify the settlement was vetoed by Gov. Brown, so this is still in play.
The case that controls the situation is Hartzell v. Connell, a 1984 California Supreme Court decision: http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=5003041756918031632&hl=en&as_sdt=2&as_vis=1&oi=scholarr
Accordingly, this court holds that all educational activities — curricular or “extracurricular” — offered to students by school districts fall within the free school guarantee of article IX, section 5. Since it is not disputed that the programs involved in this case are “educational” in character, they fall within that guarantee.[14]
Defendants argue, however, that the fee-waiver policy for needy students satisfies the requirements of the free school guarantee. They suggest that the right “to be educated at the public expense” (Ward v. Flood, supra, 48 Cal. at p. 51) amounts merely to a right not to be financially prevented from enjoying educational opportunities. This argument contradicts the plain language of the Constitution.
In guaranteeing “free” public schools, article IX, section 5 fixes the precise extent of the financial burden which may be imposed on the right to an education — none. (See Granger et al. v. Cascade Co. Sch. Dist., supra, 159 Mont. at pp. 528-529; Bond v. Ann Arbor School District, supra, 383 Mich. at p. 700.)[15] A school which conditions a student’s participation in educational activities upon the payment of a fee clearly is not a “free school.”
The free school guarantee reflects the people’s judgment that a child’s public education is too important to be left to the budgetary circumstances and decisions of individual families. It makes no distinction between needy and nonneedy families. Individual families, needy or not, may value education more or less depending upon conflicting budget priorities. As John Swett, the “father of the California public school system,” recognized in 912*912 1863, “[i]f left to their own unaided efforts, a great majority of the people will fail through want of means to properly educate their children; another class, with means at command, will fail through want of interest. The people then, can be educated only by a system of Free Schools, supported by taxation, and controlled directly by the people.” (Swett, Duties of the State to Public Schools,reprinted in Swett, History of the Public School System of California (1876) p. 110, italics added.)
The free school guarantee lifts budgetary decisions concerning public education out of the individual family setting and requires that such decisions be made by the community as a whole. Once the community has decided that a particular educational program is important enough to be offered by its public schools, a student’s participation in that program cannot be made to depend upon his or her family’s decision whether to pay a fee or buy a toaster.
Nor may a student’s participation be conditioned upon application for a special waiver. The stigma that results from recording some students as needy was recognized early in the struggle for free schools. Thaddeus Stevens once declared, in response to an 1835 proposal that teachers keep a list of “poor scholars”: “Sir, hereditary distinctions of rank are sufficiently odious; but that which is founded on poverty is infinitely more so. Such a law should be entitled `an act for branding and marking the poor, so that they may be known from the rich and proud.’” (Stevens, A Plea for Free Schools, in Educational Ideas in America: A Documentary History, supra, at p. 188.) Defendants’ extracurricular programs are not truly “free” even to those students who are eligible for waivers. “[T]o a child or his parents financially unable to pay the additional fees and charges imposed by a free, public school system any waiver procedure is a degrading experience.” (Granger et al. v. Cascade Co. Sch. Dist., supra, 159 Mont. at p. 529 [holding that a waiver plan cannot render a school fee constitutional].)
Google say “aclu school fees” for more articles.
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(If you TOP-ed people ever upgrade the site, a blockquote function would be swell!)
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I hear you, el.
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The spam filter got me, so until my comment leaves moderation, the most important link is for Hartzell v. Connell from the California Supreme Court, which is where the Court held that charging fees for any school activity, even if extracurricular, even if waivers are provided, is unconstitutional.
http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=5003041756918031632&hl=en&as_sdt=2&as_vis=1&oi=scholarr
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fyi, i asked the ‘powers that be’ about this… the word is that long URLs get caught up in the spam filter. using something like tinyurl or similar seems to avoid it.. :-)
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Thanks El. I love reading court decisions. A couple points of note:
“It can no longer be denied that extracurricular activities constitute an integral component of public education. Such activities are “`generally recognized as a fundamental ingredient of the educational process.’”"
“The free school guarantee reflects the people’s judgment that a child’s public education is too important to be left to the budgetary circumstances and decisions of individual families. ”
“The free school guarantee lifts budgetary decisions concerning public education out of the individual family setting and requires that such decisions be made by the community as a whole. Once the community has decided that a particular educational program is important enough to be offered by its public schools, a student’s participation in that program cannot be made to depend upon his or her family’s decision whether to pay a fee or buy a toaster.”
“This court recognizes that, due to legal limitations on taxation and spending (see ante, fn. 1), school districts do indeed operate under difficult financial constraints. However, financial hardship is no defense to a violation of the free school guarantee. ”
“This fundamental feature of public education is not contingent upon the inevitably fluctuating financial health of local school districts. A solution to those financial difficulties must be found elsewhere — for example, through the political process.”
That last one is quite important imho. Essentially the court is acknowledging that districts (communities) may choose to do away with extracurricular activities altogether as a result of this decision but if that happens the concerned parties should try to address the issue by getting funding increased. Or, as hinted in another part of the document, file suit that these programs are an integral component of education. It seems clear that most districts are failing to grasp this last concept since there are so many extracurricular activities that simply are not provided. Note, this decision was from 1984, so perhaps something has also changed since then.. ?
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ACLU filed a suit in 2010 because of various fees getting into classrooms and other activities. Google “aclu school fees” for more articles. There was a settlement, but the legislation that went with the settlement was vetoed by Gov. Brown.
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