It may be too little, too late, but I feel compelled to write about a pressing issue in California that very few parents seem to understand: The funding of our schools.
You may wonder: Why should I, a homeschooler, care about the public schools?
First of all, my kids are both enrolled in a wonderful public school program that allows us to homeschool while keeping our ties with public education and our community.
Secondly, I think all of us should care about our public schools, whether we’re parents with kids in them, parents with kids in private or homeschool, adults who have never been parents, or adults whose kids are grown. Our public schools are an absolutely vital piece of our democracy that is being allowed to crumble. Yes, I’d love a world in which every family has the money, the education and the inclination to be homeschoolers, but that’s not the case. We need an educated population in this country simply to understand our voter booklets, not to mention to do most of the jobs that we need done. We import more and more of our educated workers because we’re doing a worse and worse job educating our own.
So what’s the big deal today with education? It’s actually tomorrow: If we as a state don’t vote to support Proposition 30 tomorrow, our already strained-near-to-breaking public school system is going to be decimated.
The misunderstandings that I’ve heard about school funding fall into a few categories:
Our schools are doing great—this is all just to get more money for bureaucrats
Well, not really. First of all, adjusted for inflation, our schools are not doing great. In the 60’s, California was at the top of the heap in K-12 funding. And is it any surprise that the kids educated in the 60’s went on to start Silicon Valley… in California? Our schools are now at the bottom of the heap in funding. Once you take into account inflation and the growth of the student population, we have been consistently cutting our schools’ funding for years. I agree that schools are too heavy on administration and don’t get enough of the money into the classrooms, but this won’t be solved by starving our schools.
The schools get the lottery
2%. The lottery is a tax on the poor that hardly affects our schools at all.
Schools keep asking for more but doing less
That is how it seems, isn’t it? Schools seem to be always begging. But let’s look at a few details in what they’re doing with the money. First of all, the biggest issue of all, is probably one that most parents aren’t aware of at all: Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act, but they didn’t fund it. Our schools went from being able to give a substandard education to kids with disabilities (a horrible situation) to having to siphon up to 40% of their general budgets into special ed, thus ensuring that all the kids were going to get a substandard education (even worse than horrible). If you’re looking at a chart of school funding, you should see a huge leap when schools were suddenly required to give a “free and appropriate education” to kids they they’d been able to ignore before. But there was none. Our schools are being sucked dry by a morally good but fiscally awful law.
Then there’s No Child Left Behind. The federal government again passed a law with great intentions, but it put huge new burdens on schools with little funding to help out. NCLB costs California schools millions for all the testing. Really, the yearly testing should just stop, today. But since it’s not going to stop, the schools need to be given the money they need to fulfill the law.
Then there’s the real estate boom and crash. Property taxes, already artificially low because of Proposition 13, plummeted in recent years, and nothing has been done to make up the lost money.
And finally, schools aren’t doing less: every year we expect more and more of them. In order to have well-educated, 21st century students, we need to have 21st century education for our teachers and 21st century equipment to learn with.
We don’t need another tax
That I agree with. Wouldn’t it be great if all the fantastically wealthy people in this state fixed our public school system? Of course, some of them have done lovely things (mostly for their own kids’ wealthy school districts). But for the most part, once people make more money than they need for their lifestyle, they just bank it. They don’t give it to the schools, they don’t give it to charities. Yes, if all our wealthy people were Warren Buffett, things might be different. But they’re not. This tax is structured to take a little bit more from people who really aren’t going to notice the difference. If you’ve never been wealthy and don’t know any really wealthy people, you might think that this is “unfair.” But believe me, all their crying and bellyaching is just for show. You’re not going to see a dive in sales of yachts, private jets, and caviar after Proposition 30 takes effect. We have fabulous wealth in this state, and it needs to be used more wisely.
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Proposition 30 is right on the edge. Historically, propositions that are this close the day before the election don’t pass. Our state simply can’t afford to cut education more. We need better schools. We need well-trained teachers. We need more variety of choices. We need education for kids we assume are not going to become productive members of society just as much as we need education for kids we think are going to become productive members of society. (And we may be surprised, years down the line, to find out which kids fall into which category.) We need to fund our schools, and Proposition 30 is what we’ve got this year. Think you can do better? Each one of us is welcome to run for governor next time around.
Click here to read more about school funding and Proposition 30
