The Biggest Loser: Schools
Educators are madder than hell at Howard Jarvis
By Greg Katz
Mention dreaded Proposition 13 to Pam Worden and she’ll recall the exhaustion inspired by packed and understaffed classrooms at L.A. Unified’s Miles Elementary School. “No school should have 2,500 students, but it does.”
Worden, who was an assistant principal at the Huntington Park school when Prop. 13 passed and now works for L.A. Unified’s chief financial officer, blames crowding at the school on Prop. 13. “Although we didn’t realize it directly, we did no building. It was prohibited by Prop. 13 because you couldn’t pass a bond” – due to the two-thirds vote requirement that the amendment imposed. “The schools were growing and the only thing we could do was make them year-round. We ended up with almost a whole district that was year-round at one point,” she says. “That means you’re working every day that school is open. You have 350 employees working there, and that’s hard on a facility. You don’t have time to step back and think, ‘How am I doing this and how could I do it better?’“
Miles remains year-round, and it’s one of Worden’s many concerns with having school funding in the state’s hands. Before Prop. 13, local “property tax was paying for all of the schools. This year, property tax will only provide 20 percent of the money that comes [to L.A. Unified] and the rest of the money is state money,” Worden says. “A big gripe in the schools is: If you could just let us decide, we could do it. If you let us decide how to spend this money, we’ll spend it how we think we should spend it, and we’ll get results. But when you have the state coming in and putting in that kind of dollar, the state says, ‘No, you’re going to do it this way.’”
It creates a struggle at the state level for funds, she explains. “When you look at Los Angeles Unified, we’re almost 50 percent limited-English speaking. The average in the state is 25 percent. You can imagine these Northern California communities saying, ‘What bilingual program? Why do you have to have people who speak another language there?’ We have 50 languages in this district. They don’t understand the problems. Our local people understand the problems, but they’re not in control anymore. The state is more and more in control. And any rise in money that’s come recently has come from the feds, that’s even more distant from where we are.”
Mary Perry, executive director of the non-partisan organization EdSource, which has been trying to solve California’s school funding problems for decades, hears echoes of Worden’s experiences throughout the state. “What you have is, the administrators in a school trying to do the same work as everyone else in the country’s trying to do, with twice as many kids,” she says. “Typically, the teachers in our schools, their caseload, if you will, is about a third larger. If your job is to help students achieve, there is a maximum capacity that a human being has to do that work. At some level, however you choose to use the money, it’s all about how many people you buy, how much money you have to train those people, how many supports they have to help them do their work well.”
Prop. 13 is partly to blame for that, she says. “What Prop. 13 did was to create a situation that made it difficult for Californians to respond to the needs of a growing student population. It did that in a couple of ways: by effectively giving the state control of school funding, and eliminating the state’s option for property taxes to be a source of additional revenue,” she says. “Ever since, the state’s been trying to figure out how to compensate for that revenue loss through other revenue sources, but with a very serious bias, especially in the last 10 years or so, on the part of at least one-third of our legislature against anything that looks like increased taxes.”
So, exactly, what has this cost California? “What we know, as an example, is that the pupil-teacher ratio has not gotten worse than it was 30 years ago … in almost every other state in the country, it got better. The expectations that we have for our schools today are much higher than what the expectations were 30 years ago. Thirty years ago, if half the kids dropped out, that was fine, totally okay, and they could go to work on the assembly line at GM. What we’ve done is to really raise the standard of what we expect schools to deliver and to be able to do. In California, we’ve raised the standard without perhaps increasing the resources as much as is necessary to meet those expectations.”
Perry suggests that a reform of Prop. 13 would help California’s educational system meet current expectations. “If it happened, yes, it would increase revenues, and yes, those revenues would go to schools.” But the existence of Prop. 98, which voters intended to guarantee school funding, might complicate the effects of reform, she explains. “If you’re filling more of that Prop. 98 bucket with property tax revenues, it doesn’t automatically increase the size of the bucket. On the other hand, it does give the state some flexibility to be able to invest in K-12 above and beyond the Prop. 98 guarantee. It could be a piece of the solution.”
And while it’s hard to imagine what a perfect system would look like, let alone a perfect system that would be possible under California law, there are many possible examples to draw from. “Connecticut does a wonderful job of providing lots and lots of money to its schools by levying property taxes – the same way that California used to do it 35 years ago,” Perry notes.
State-by-state surveys typically rank Connecticut’s public schools among the top three in the country; California’s are usually in the bottom three. According to the Tax Foundation’s 2005 survey, while Californians pay 10.3 percent of their incomes to state and local taxes compared to Connecticuters’ 10.5 percent, both above the national average of 10.1 percent, Connecticut homeowners pay an average of $3,865 in locally collected property tax, compared to the average Californian homeowner, who pays $2,278, according to the National Association of Home Builders. According to the National Education Association, California ranks 13th in state funding to education while Connecticut ranks 40th. Meanwhile, the NEA says that state and local governments in both states spend more than the national average, per capita, on K-12 education.
The numbers don’t make an open-and-shut case that a flood of locally-raised money would perfect California schools – not even close. Still, it’s a little frightening that Californians and Connecticuters pay similar total taxes, spend more than average on students per capita, and yet see such different results in classrooms.
Published: 01/23/2008
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