On February 20, 2009, California state legislators ended months of negotiations when they closed a vast $41.6 billion budget gap through fiscal year 2010. Even after factoring in the expected federal stimulus funds, the final agreement called for spending cuts, temporary tax increases, and new borrowing. Public education has been one of the budget crisis’s biggest victims, since state funding of schools had already been slashed nearly to the bone. Under the new budget agreement approved by the California legislature, already-strained schools and community colleges will be forced to cut $7.4 billion from their budgets this year and $3.2 billion in the next year.
“This is the worst budget crisis that I’ve seen in my 24-year career as a public school teacher,” said Kay Townsend, who is employed by the Irvine Unified School District in Orange County, in an interview with the HPR. California State Senator Gloria Romero, Chair of the Education Committee, agreed. “California has never faced a budget deficit this large; therefore the cuts to all services are unprecedented,” she told the HPR. In recent years districts across the state have been making cuts in light of reduced funding, but previous cuts have been more modest and less visible, such as trimming maintenance and slimming staff. Now, however, educators have had to start making far more painful decisions. Teachers and administrators have been issued layoff notices, academic and extracurricular programs not mandated by state and federal law are being cut, instructors’ class budgets have been frozen, teacher and specialist trainings have been cut back, and class sizes will be increasing in the fall.
California’s Funding Problems
As Tina Flournoy, an assistant to the President of the American Federation of Teachers, told the HPR, California’s unique governing system has led to difficulties in the consistent funding of public education. “The state’s fiscal system is broken,” Flournoy said. “The two-thirds supermajority requirement for the budget coupled with term limits have meant that legislators cobble together a succession of gimmicks and bad decisions just to get through each year.” Furthermore, California’s controversial proposition system has been a mixed blessing for education. Flournoy pointed out that while some ballot initiatives—such as Proposition 98, a cost of living adjustment that guarantees that K-14 funding grows with the economy—voters do not often address the issue of how to pay for these programs. “The promises aren’t really kept, or we rob Peter to pay Paul,” Flournoy explained. “That’s why one of the measures on the ballot this year is restoring $9 billion in funding that we believe should be there anyway under the Prop 98 formula.”
Mary Perry, Deputy Director of EdSource, told the HPR that the current budget crisis primarily reflects the downward spiral of business as usual. “We’ve been in a budget crisis since 2002 when the funding for schools from the state started to stagnate,” she commented. Still, this year is extraordinary, because there are actual cuts in the amount of funding per student. To her, the clear culprit is Prop 98. Since the proposition is so conditional to the state’s budget, “when the state is doing well, education prospers. When the state is doing badly, education shares that pain,” she explained.
Another challenge to funding schools lies in California’s state constitution, which holds legislators to difficult rules when passing the state budget, including a complex funding formula for education. Furthermore, the Republican minority has taken a very hard stance on taxes, “There has been a balancing act in California for years of how to sustain spending commitments without raising taxes,” said Perry. With a polarized legislature the result of extensive gerrymandering, a governor who is not part of his party’s mainstream, and specific clauses in the state constitution from voter initiatives “tying the hands of the government in Sacramento,” California’s existing governance structure had formed the climate for a perfect storm.
A number of intiatives have been proposed in response to this budget shortfall, and will be presented to voters in two short weeks in a special election on May 19. One provides funding based on future lottery proceeds; others suspend spending requirements proposed under previous initiatives. Finally, others create a spending cap and restore the aforementioned $9 billion. The spending cap may yield future problems, however: combined with Prop 98, it may force the state to drastically reduce funding for other critical programs, like children’s health care and four-year colleges.
The Federal Government’s Role
Relief may be on the way. Under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, California has been allocated $8 billion by the U.S. Department of Education, of which $4.9 billion will go toward stabilizing the state education budget by reducing the need for layoffs and promoting reforms. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan released the first round of the federal grant money on April 1, and California will grab $562 million for the lower income Title I schools and $634 million for long-underfunded special education programs. But the promise of stimulus dollars does not allay the concerns Capistrano Unified School District deputy superintendent Ron Lebs. “There’s a challenge with the stimulus funds…We don’t know when it will come, or how much it will be, or what it will look like,” Lebs said in an interview with the HPR. Because of this ambiguity from the states and the federal government, he has not included federal funds in the budget for the coming year.
The influx of money from the federal government to the states for education raises the perrennial question of who should take charge in funding and shaping our nation’s public schools—the White House or the states. Historically, the structure of education finance in America reflects the predominance of state and local control. Of an estimated $1 trillion spent nationwide on education at all levels during the 2007-2008 school year, a substantial majority of the funds came from state, local, and private sources. This is especially evident at the elementary and secondary school level, where less than 9 percent of the funds came from federal sources.
To Flournoy, “the increasing national involvement in funding education is a good thing.” The Obama administration is setting its mark in history, she continues, addressing the question of who funds and sets the educational mandate. The Bush administration, noted Flournoy, also broke ground with the controversial No Child Left Behind act, but it was “underfunded” and “basically flawed.” The Obama administration, she continued, “is taking a more active stance, as we can see by how it is using the bully pulpit to talk about national standards…Sometimes the bully pulpit, and a little cash, can go a long way.”
Lebs is less comfortable with the idea of funds coming directly from the federal government. The burden of funding education is better rested at the state level because “the more hands touch the money we get, the more restrictions are placed on it,” he said. Indeed, to receive money from the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund, California had to set specific reform goals. These goals include improvements in teacher effectiveness and ensuring that all schools have highly qualified teachers, progress toward college and career-ready standards and rigorous assessments that will improve both teaching and learning, improving achievement in low-performing schools by providing intensive support and effective interventions in the neediest schools, and gathering information to improve student learning, teacher performance, and college and career readiness through enhanced data systems that track progress.
Can Any Good Come From the Budget Crisis?
As the dark deficit clouds show little sign of receding any time soon, is it possible to make out a silver lining? Townsend is generally pessimistic, but still sees some opportunities for improvement. “It’s been really sad seeing promising young teachers getting pink slips because of the budget cuts,” she said, “But, at the same time, there’s no simple formula for deciding how else to identify who to lay off other than by seniority.” Maybe, Townsend suggests, the budget crisis will lead to a re-evaluation of how districts evaluate its teachers to make both lay-offs and rewards more fair and less subject to the impersonal and imprecise methods currently in use—seniority and test scores in particular.
Lebs also looks at the budget crisis as an opportunity to improve. He sees the recession and the challenge it presents to government spending could be used to correct and amend the school funding system at the state level, explaining, “When the status quo is prevailing, change is difficult to get started. But in times of crisis we have to change in order to survive.” State Senator Gloria Romero sees a more dramatic need for improvement. She believes the education system in California does not need a reform—it needs to be transformed. “It’s not working and we’re well beyond Band Aid fixes that will not realize long term and in-depth solutions,” Romero said to the HPR. Still, she continued, the budget crisis has provided an opportunity for “public scrutiny and public debate of our education system.”
But beyond cutting the low-hanging fruit of experimental programs, maintenance staff, and other less vital and visible programs, recent cuts have dug into the meat of the education of California’s children. The federal stimulus package’s education earmarks have certainly offset the cost to the state, but it is not clear that the money will amount to more than a short-term boost. Lasting change in the school districts of Mrs. Townsend and Superintendent Lebs cannot happen without reform in Sacramento, particularly in the state’s constitution and governing system around the budget. Californians now look to the May 19 special election to see if their votes will create the necessary pressure on the system to effect change.