Yippee! Right?
California's boom-bust education funding
This week, [in May 2015] Governor Brown announced the “May Revision” of his proposal for the state budget. This is an important milestone in the annual budget process. The ball is now in the legislature’s court: it must pass a balanced budget by June 15. With the stock market booming, big numbers are being thrown around for this budget.
Did education "win"?
The conventional wisdom about this budget is that education, especially K-14, is the big “winner.”
Let’s say it out loud: Yes, this is a good day for education. At last. For now.
When Wall Street booms, Sesame Street cheers.
Education accounts for about half of government spending, which has become very volatile. When Wall Street booms, Sesame Street cheers. But let’s keep things in perspective: California’s tax receipts collapsed seven years ago, and schools have been skimping ever since. This budget, adjusted for inflation, at last restores California’s schools to about the same dollars per student they had to work with in 2007, when it ranked 27th. (And that rank is much worse, if California’s cost of living is taken into account.)
It's true that this budget delivers $3,000 dollars per student more than the budget at the trough of the recession did. But this is like measuring the distance from the bottom of a grave to the top of the pile of dirt that will fill it back in. The proposed budget does not make California’s schools rich, and it does not make education funding secure.
Lasting harm
Seven years of skimping takes a toll. The state and counties have borrowed heavily from the school system, and these tricks need to be unlearned. Schools and districts have been putting things off. Borrowing. Deferring. Letting empty positions linger. Making do with one less person in the office and asking teachers to take on administrative duties. Letting class sizes swell. Schools have cut corners on training, and removed days from the school calendar. Programs for arts, sports, science field trips and counseling have withered in seven years of budget drought. With teaching jobs in short supply for so long, teacher training pipelines have collapsed. It will take time to build a new ones. School staffs haven’t seen a pay increase in a long time, but rents are up, up, up. And as Carol and Mary pointed out in their top ten wish list for education investments, there is much to be done.
Bringing California's funding for K-14 education back to 2007 levels is great, long-awaited news. But we should all be very uneasy. The structure of school funding leaves kids fully exposed to the luck of the market. Unless California's legislature acts, your school's budget be even more vulnerable in the next downturn because of a bad policy known as the "reserve cap," which limits the amount of money that districts can set aside in boom years like this one in order to save for the next bust.
Furthermore, schools don’t operate in a vacuum. Advocates for social services are bitterly disappointed in this budget, which does little to address the living conditions of children on the wrong side of the achievement gap. As events in Ferguson and Baltimore have reminded us, we have a long way to go.
Join the Discussion
- What is your school district planning to do if it cannot officially build reserves in good times to prepare for the next downturn? An era of creative accounting lies ahead.
- Is your school hiring? How are you finding good candidates for long-term positions?
- What social services are still hurting in your community? Do children have access to basic services like dental care?
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