Yesterday I wrote a post about a SacBee editorial entitled “Shared Sacrifice”. Looking back, I think I probably focused a bit too much on the teacher pay, which was really a relatively minor side issue, and not enough on the question of Prop 98. Nonetheless, the name of the editorial certainly goes a fair bit towards inflaming itself.
But, the question of Prop 98 is a good one. Certainly the SacBee got it right when they called it the CA Teacher’s Association’s sacred cow. And given that CTA is one of the most powerful interest groups in Sacramento, that’s not nothing. However, is it a good thing? I think that’s a fair question.
Let’s talk Prop 98 over the flip.
Looking at education funding, where we currently reside around 46th in the nation in per pupil spending, it is clear that Prop 98 alone is not the answer to all of our problems. Prop 98 leaves our K-12 (and community colleges) insulated only when times are good. When we hit a rough patch, they are vulnerable as well. After all, it’s based on the total size of the budget, and with the pie shrinking, so does education funding.
Of course there were other options at the time of Prop 98, and there are other options now. CTA has filed an initiative with the state that would increase the sales tax by 1% and give that money to schools. Any method is bound to have drawbacks, because at some point we must put some faith in our legislators to fairly and fully fund education, at all levels.
I’ve never been a huge fan of ballot box budgeting. It converts a perfectly good representative democracy into a mess of direct democracy. It requires citizens to fully understand issues in a few hours that the legislature argues over for months. And ballot box budgeting doesn’t give us the flexibility to adjust in times of crisis. Like, say, now.
All that being said, Prop 98 shouldn’t be an amount to peg education spending. Prop 98 should be a floor. In a perfect world we wouldn’t need that. We wouldn’t need to force our legislators to fully fund education, because they would just do it because that was the right thing to do.
Yet we have the Legislative Republicans, carrying their Grover tatoos right over their heart. Vowing to never increase revenue, above all else and all sound policy. California grossly underfunds education, even when we meet Prop 98 spending levels. Yet Prop 98 is the problem?
In 2005, California spent $8,067 per pupil, according to a 2007 Census Bureau study. In the same year, West Virginia spent $9,005 per pupil. Wyoming spent $10,255/pupil, Alaska spent $10,830, and New York spent $14,119. And yes, our cost of living is substantially higher than any of those states save New York. So teachers must be compensated at higher levels, and everything else is squeezed.
And that’s the floor that Prop 98 has brought us, and that’s from 2005, a relatively stable budget year. Can’t we do better than lagging $1,000 behind West Virginia? Where do we go once we have produced a generation of under educated Californians? How do we continue to be the hub of innovation that we have been for so long?
No, Prop 98’s problem isn’t that it’s too high or too inflexible, it’s that it is irrelevant. Or that it should be, but that it’s not. There is no reason for a state like California to be constantly flirting with minimum spending levels like this. There is no reason why we spend so little on what must be our greatest natural resource for the new economy.
So, forget Prop 98, that’s a red herring. If you want to write an editorial entitled “Shared Sacrifice”, there is only one logical target: Prop 13. It has decimated our revenue base and threatened the “California dream.” We once knew that we could count on our state to provide all of us with a solid education that would place the state in good stead for the long haul. And we didn’t have to worry about things like Prop 98, because we knew our legislators would fund education.
But no longer. If we want to talk shared sacrifice, let’s look at the right place.
