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The Topsy-Turvy State of Funding Public Schools By Suki Wessling
Since the 1960’s, California’s per-student funding of public schools has gone from number 1 to rankings ranging from 29 to 49 out of 50 states. With over six million students in our public schools, we have a population two million more than the next largest state, Texas. California has more non-native speakers of English than any other state, and a greater than average percentage of kids living in poverty.
Our schools need to devote extra funds to offering education to our large migrant and non-English-speaking populations. And due to the awkward Average Daily Attendance (ADA) method of school funding, schools with migrant students actually receive less money when they really need more. Under ADA funding rules, a school must staff for the school population in August, but only receives funds for the days that students attend during the year.
According to the National Association of Independent Schools, the median tuition for their member private day schools in 2005-2006 in the United States was around $15,000. Depending on how you analyze the numbers, California’s per-student contribution to our public schools is eight to ten thousand dollars.
In the thirty years since Prop 13, however, further changes have eroded our public schools. As the spending on public schools held more or less steady, accounting for inflation, the cost of education rose dramatically. With the passage of the American with Disabilities Act, more Special Education students were mainstreamed into the schools, and children who would have received no services were suddenly acknowledged to need expensive, one-on-one instruction.
At the same time, the cost of living in California, as well as the cost of healthcare, caused a need for major increases in teacher salaries and benefits.
The result of Prop 13 is ironically opposite of what was intended. Now, all the public schools are starved for money, but it’s the ones with resources—i.e. involved parents—who are able to offer a well-rounded educational environment.
Parents and staff at Linscott Charter School in Watsonville sign up for hard, unpaid work at their school which offers a well-rounded curriculum. “Selling cookie dough is not a long term solution to our budget problems,” says parent Karen Lowell.
Parents at many schools run auctions where the bulk of the proceeds come from parents as buyers. And parents in more affluent communities see it as commonplace that they are asked for classroom materials, fieldtrip fees, and donations. Parents in Scotts Valley were asked to reimburse their school for ADA funds lost when families went on ski vacations.
The result is obvious: In Santa Cruz, some schools bring in enough money to reinstate cancelled programs; at many neighborhood schools in Watsonville, where the parent population is less affluent, a school fundraiser is lucky to make a few thousand to supplement what they get from the state. In any case, parents are doing unpaid work to reinstate funding for programs like art and P.E. that used to be part of the curriculum. In the Pajaro Valley District, teachers spend their own money and use unpaid time just to make their classrooms functional.
“Everything of material value in my classroom is something I purchased with my own money,” says Vinnie Hansen, a longtime English teacher at Watsonville High. “Here are examples of things I have purchased: industrial fan, space heater, (my room has no heat or ventilation without these), two padded folding chairs, office chair, all the posters and display borders, prizes for students, stamps/stickers for students, many books for the classroom library, sticky stuff for displays, and on and on.”
Hansen says she hauls along her desks when she gets a new room assignment. Though “the Goodwill wouldn’t want them,” they’re better than the desks she finds elsewhere at the school. “The programs that benefit my students are the ‘hands on’ electives. Those were cut several years ago,” points out Cathy Atwood, a Special Education teacher at Watsonville High.
Cuts in “non-essential” curriculum came hand-in-hand with the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) imposed on states by the federal government. Suddenly schools were being threatened with loss of funds if they didn’t comply, and the educational environment changed dramatically. On a Community Television program, Freedom Elementary teacher Susana Brown described life at her school: “We’ve gotten rid of science, art, PE. We’re really just doing 3 hours of language arts in the morning preparing for these tests every six weeks, and we’re doing math.” By omitting such basics as science and social studies from tests, NCLB has declared them “non-essential” as well.
Atwood points out that laws like NCLB shortchange students who are not college-bound. “It's too bad that schools judge their success by the number of graduates that go to college. I don't believe the same shoe fits everyone,” she says. Her husband, a shop teacher, saw his job go down to part-time even as he had to add unpaid hours to fix broken, outdated machinery. “When the students leave his class, they feel proud and accomplished. They take their projects home. They are also skilled enough to land a pretty good, well paying job.”
Many believe in an idealistic past in which schools taught the “3 R’s” and not much more. But this vision is based largely on ignorance of how schools have always adapted to current needs. Before typewriters and then computers were available, for example, schools taught an hour a day of penmanship. Most would argue that this would be a waste of our resources today. However, physical education – unnecessary in the days when exercise was a part of life – is a major priority now that our children eat calorie-heavy diets, spend their free time in front of screens, and are driven to school.
Similarly, in the past many families spent their quiet, candlelit evenings playing music together and reading to each other. Now most students are not getting even the most basic music education, which has proven to increase students’ math and reasoning abilities, as well as their test scores.
Proposition 13’s goal to level the educational playing field and NCLB’s attempt to raise up poorly performing schools have created even bigger obstacles. Now, it’s becoming common that in “poor” school districts, only well-off parents are able to offer their children a well-rounded education, by pursuing enriching activities outside of school or by moving their children to private schools. Many of our public schools are focused on pushing children harder and harder to learn skills with no context.
“I think what it creates is an imbalance between the children who come from families who have the resources to provide a broader experience and those who can’t,” Karen Lowell says.
“It concerns me that we’re underfunding our children’s education and we’re not thinking about what that means for the future of the state and the nation,” Lowell continues. “You need well educated people to think creatively about the problems we’ll be facing in the coming years.”
But she’s proud that her school has been able to keep their hands-on curriculum intact this year. “We’re doing a better job running our budget than the federal or state government!” she points out.
Our publicly funded schools are running on a subsistence diet, and the successful ones depend on parent fundraising, foundation grants, overworked teachers, and wily principals to offer anything close to the sort of educational environment that we used to take for granted. It’s a backward, and unbalanced, way of educating tomorrow’s adults.
ResourcesCommunity Television: www.communitytv.org Education Data Partnership: www.ed-data.k12.ca.us Great Schools: www.GreatSchools.net California School Finance: www.californiaschoolfinance.org
Suki Wessling is a local writer, publisher, and the mother of two children.
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Most are aware that Proposition 13, which limited the ability of the state to raise property taxes, has something to do with our funding situation. But surprisingly, many of the people who supported Prop 13 at the time wanted to create a fairer public school funding mechanism. In a county like Santa Cruz, with a relatively wealthy population in the northern half and a poorer population in the south, the schools showed marked differences in funding. With the passage of Prop 13, most of the funding of public schools was shifted to the state, eliminating the effect of local wealth on state funding.