Watching California public schools sink — a preventable Titanic
One hundred years ago last month, the cry “women and children first” echoed on the decks of the ill-fated Titanic. A century later, the ship carrying California’s future is listing in the water. However, it seems that today no one is willing to make a sacrifice: It’s every man, woman, and child for himself or herself.
California was once the envy of the country — beautiful beaches, good jobs, a booming economy, and the promise of the best public education system, including top-notch, affordable state colleges and universities. However, the economic seas became rough in 2007 with the impact of the recession. In an effort to keep California afloat, our leaders in Sacramento — unable or unwilling to right the ship by raising revenue — scrambled for items to dump overboard. The value of education plummeted as other budget items were given priority, and education funding became the primary target for cuts, suffering a disproportionate loss of revenue. From 2007-08 to 2010-11, K-12 education funding sustained 54 percent of the loss of revenue, although it represented approximately 40 percent of the General Fund. In contrast, corrections sustained just a 4 percent loss, despite representing approximately 10 percent of the General Fund.
As the recession persists, the captain and crew – Gov. Brown and the legislators – decide what will be loaded into the lifeboats to survive, but there’s little evidence that the children are first. (Lucky for prisoners, federal law makes sure they are at the front of the line.) Instead, lawmakers and the governor are accusing each other of failing to save the children and the integrity of our state’s educational system Gov. Brown has proposed one solution to right the ship, but it requires the children to stay on board until the voters send help by passing his tax initiative. He seems to have overlooked the fact that children may go overboard before help can arrive — their schools must open months before the actual amount of education funding is determined.
The impact of the recession and the sinking of California are wreaking havoc on the schools, as has been documented this month by reports from both the Legislative Analyst’s Office and EdSource. School districts have been left scrambling, throwing items overboard or rearranging deck chairs in a futile attempt to balance their loads. Many districts are forced to borrow funds to keep schools open when the state sends IOUs, adding to their debt burden. Since 2008, more than 40,000 teachers, counselors, nurses, librarians, bus drivers, etc. have been lost, with an additional 20,000 teachers plus thousands more school employees currently in peril. While some education bargaining units are negotiating to save themselves and their students, others seem willing to let those in third class (lower seniority) and their schoolchildren sink with the ship to save their own skins.
Our schools need adequate funding to open their doors before the tax initiative-funded lifeboat can arrive. And the truth is that even if it passes, the initiative provides little more than current funding levels. Because of the uncertainty of the initiative’s passage, districts are compelled to budget with worst-case funding scenarios. As California continues to pitch in the seas of the recession, it is truly the children who will suffer the most severe, long-term damage. They’ll suffer larger classes, shorter school years, the loss of “less important” programs such as music and the arts, the disbanding of professional learning collaborations with the shuffling of remaining teachers, and so on, leaving 6.3 million schoolchildren with permanent gaps in their learning.
One hundred years ago, when the Titanic sank, the world was stunned and outraged that so many lives were lost, and new, preventative measures were instituted to save lives. Years later, we are watching another ship, the public school system in California, go under. Where are the safety measures today for the schoolchildren of our state? California was already 50th in the nation for student-to-teacher ratio in 2008, and that was before education funding suffered $20 billion in losses. How much more water will we allow our schools to take on before we step in to do something? Will we be able to tell the children of California that we did everything to save them, or will we sit by idly, shrug our shoulders, and point our finger at someone else and say that it was his/her fault? Unlike the Titanic, we can stop this disaster. We must call out “children first” to save them and the future of our state.
Tamara Hurley is a California native, a product of the state’s public education system, and a 24-year resident of San Diego. Trained as a scientist, she has spent the past eight years volunteering on behalf of her children’s public schools, from the classroom to PTO and PTA boards as well as on district, community, and school site committees and site governance teams. Tamara is a board member of Educate Our State, a statewide, nonprofit, parent-led, grassroots organization fighting for high-quality public K-12 education in California.
Good comments. The forces that began sinking our schools actually date back to 1978, when California voters passed tax-slashing Prop. 13 — a devastatingly destructive response to a genuine problem. School funding, along with the funding for the rest of the state’s infrastructure and services, has taken a battering for 34 years now, so it was already weak and reeling when the recession hit.
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With all due respect, it is time to put aside the notion that Prop 13 is the source of the funding crisis facing schools in CA. Yes, we have had 34 years of prop 13 and along with that 34 years to fix funding in CA, and failed miserably to find a viable model. Along with that failure has been a lack of accountability among state and local policy makers and the grip of unions around the necks of our local school districts ( in great part due to the lack of courage among local board members and distrcit administrators to deal with the union demands). Time to stop blaming Prop 13 for the difficulties schools are facing. There has been ample time to act and act in a way that is responsible and advocates for the best interests of our children.
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No, it’s not time. Prop. 13 was the beginning of the destructive, magical-thinking notion that public services and infrastructure are riddled with “waste, fraud and abuse” and all we need to do is “cut the fat.” I was born and raised in California, have lived here my entire life and was a California voter in 1978 when Prop. 13 passed, and I’ve seen the results over the decades. I am going to insist on the last word on this.
We’ve had 34 years for the tax-cutters to prove their notion that our state can survive under their “shrink government till you can drown it in the bathtub” philosophy. Our infrastructure and services have crumbled gradually but steadily over the decades. This notion has been conclusively disproved and is a crashing failure, and the proponents need to own the shame of what they’ve done to our state, rather than continuing to bluster and posture.
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Finger-pointing won’t get us there, and whatever happens with Prop 13 in the future, we are where we are and we are living in a ‘pay later’ society that leads to rises in social service and prison costs, and ruined children’s futures. We can blame Prop 13, we can blame unions, we can blame the system, but it won’t fix the problem. We need to hear ‘children first’ from the electorate, not ‘me first’. It’s the future of our state on the line.
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@Katherine, it isn’t finger-pointing for the sake of finger-pointing. We need to understand the cause so we can find the solution.
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Thank you for this call to action Tamara. I share your outrage and sense of dismay. If California is going to stop its drift to an apartheid system with just a few good schools for the wealthy and a lot of pathetic ‘charity’ schools and prisons for the poor, we need massive change throughout our system – taxes, the ed code, school governance, salary & benefit structures, elections — all of it. And, yes, most importantly, change in people’s minds and hearts. California still has enormous wealth – but we must choose to use it wisely.
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The PTA/Molly Munger initiative is the only initiative that will start to restore our schools. Many of our school districts are hanging by a thread and the governor’s siphoning away more money last year due to his realignment plan, his initiative that only pays money that has already been taken from schools and now his proposed Weighted Student Formula will further damage school districts that are already compromised. PTAs and educational foundations can not fill in the huge gap that has been created. Many districts don’t even have the resources for PTA fundraising and educational foundations — and so the gap widens even further for some — creating varying degrees of inequity, again — in an overall compromised system.
The PTA/Molly Munger, Our Children, Our Future initiative relies on a broad based, sliding scale tax — after deductions. It sends money directly to our schools, NOT Sacramento! ourchildrenourfuture2012.com
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Well said, CarolineSF. While I don’t see Proposition 13 in and of itself as an insoluble problem, I agree that the mentality that it heralded has done permanent damage. It is simply not possible to maintain service levels while cutting funding.
In education, the situation is even worse because the scope of services has increased beyond the ‘inflation + population growth’ benchmark in Proposition 13 (and other related tax limits). In English Language Development and Special Education, today’s high unit costs and high eligibility rates could not have been predicted.
For over 30 years now, California voters have accepted the fiction that it is possible not only to do the same with less, but to do more.
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Caroline, You are 100% correct in all of your statements regarding Prop. 13 . For over a decade I have been studying the origins of the fall of the California public education system. We moved here 11 years ago and I could not believe how poorly the schools were funded in an affluent school district. (Little did I know that was the heyday of education funding). Many people do not realize that Prop 13 did more than cap Property tax rates, which wiped out 60% of property tax revenue overnight. It transferred control of school funding to the state, making it subject to the political whims of state legislators and forced to compete with corporate special interests vying for never-ending tax breaks. (Have you seen the tax code lately?) It also imposed 2/3 requirement for school and other special taxes (even though prop 13 passed on simple majority) and prohibited the imposition of ad valorem taxes on property. Additionally, the biggest beneficiaries were commercial property owners that now enjoy the lowest property taxes in the country. Pre prop 13, commercial property tax revenue comprised 60% of the total and residential 40%. Those numbers have flipped. And, lastly, there’s the problem of older homeowners who are not even paying enough to cover their trash removal, while younger families are saddled with high home costs, plus expensive Mello Roos or CFD fees.
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