This article is political spin at its worst. If you care about public education, children, or the future of this state, vote NO on Prop 2. If you wonder if the reserves legislation can be changed, see this committee hearing where they tried to fix it, starting at 1:40: calchannel.granicus/MediaPlayer.php?view_id=7&clip_id=2239. We have done the most thorough analysis of school funding we have seen - and this is crucial to understanding why California public education funding falls so far short, and is consistently ranked at or near the bottom of the nation. How can California taxpayers appear to spend so much, yet the state consistently ranks near the bottom of the nation in per-pupil funding? Why are only a third of our 4th and 8th grade students proficient on national tests of reading or math? Why do we have the largest class sizes in the nation? As we dug in, we encountered historical action after action that significantly changed school funding – generally four to ten years after the original legislation. In each case, California appeared to be making a decision about fiscal policy unrelated to education (how to compensate cities for the VLF reduction in 2004 (Yes4ed.org), how to backfill Prop 13 losses in 1979, how to fund blight reduction, etc.). In each of these, however, school funding got wrapped into the solution and, within a decade, school funding ended up taking yet another substantial hit. Proposition 2 has all the hallmarks of another such situation. It started out in 2010 to accomplish one goal – strengthen the existing rainy day fund – then morphed this spring to include Proposition 98, and again this summer to pull $5 billion of local school reserves into the mix. It was at this point, and only at this point, that we said, No. We cannot afford yet another situation that appears only tangentially related to education, but actually threatens a significant $5 billion (10%) of school funding. We can’t afford for education to be silent, yet again, when its future is being decided. Voters need to understand that they are making a choice and what that choice is. If politicians want to offer a different choice from what is on the books, that needs to be an explicit commitment, not a paternalistic promise. Paternalistic promises have not been kept and, worse yet, have been conveniently forgotten. What we take issue with is the 1600 words added to the Constitution to allow the State to hang onto money that Proposition 98 requires to be distributed to schools. And then the 372 words added to the Education Code requiring school districts to spend $5 billion of their own reserves when the government withholds any fraction of that and puts it into its own fund for schools. As pious and unanimous as the Legislature’s goals may be, please remember that 94% of school districts in California have disciplined themselves to hold at least two weeks’ reserves. On average, they hold the 16% (two months’) that governmental standards bodies recommend. They have done so without a constitutional amendment requiring them to do so. These local, elected officials have proven that they take their fiduciary responsibility very seriously. But, instead of trusting the trustworthy, Proposition 2 gets its teeth into local school funding and sucks it back to the State. Again, we have and have had no issue with the basic reserve. It was just when the state took first one, then a second, incursion into school funding that we smelled, and cried, “rat!” Please visit our website for details on your district, as well as our responses to the inaccuracies of Prop 2, and the misinformation in their media kit, which was used to gain endorsements of this dangerous and complicated proposition. 2badforkids.org/responses_to_yes_campaign
Posted on: Thu, 30 Oct 2014 17:23:52 +0000