It got almost no media attention at the time, but when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger unveiled an array of new taxes and spending cuts to deal with a severe budget crisis, he also proposed a revolution in how schools are financed.
Schwarzenegger's proposal to remove almost all constraints on how local school officials spend billions of dollars in so-called "categorical aids" didn't go unnoticed in education circles, however, and it touched off an internal debate that could divide the politically powerful "education coalition" of unions, school boards and administrators.
The coalition – with the California Teachers Association its chief source of political muscle – was formed in the 1980s to press Sacramento for more state school aid in the wake of Proposition 13, the iconic property tax limit measure. In 1988, the coalition won voter approval of Proposition 98, which lodged in the state constitution a complex school finance guarantee that has been the centerpiece of every budget conflict since.
A tenet of the education coalition's success is that its members stand together to protect state education funds while vying among themselves over how the pot is divvied up.
Starting before passage of Propositions 13 and 98 but accelerating after their enactment, many of those school dollars have been set aside for special purposes, sometimes at the behest of advocates for affected groups, such as gifted children or those not proficient in English, sometimes to skirt the equalization of aid among districts, sometimes to establish a governor's education credentials, and sometimes via ballot measure, such as Schwarzenegger's own $547 million after-school program.
They total nearly $16 billion this year, almost a third of what the state spends on schools. And each one of the 69 programs comes with a set of rules and procedures, many of them horrendously out of date. Nevertheless, each has a political constituency of some kind – often with a lobbying presence – and that has blocked efforts to give local educators more flexibility to meet the state's overall education "accountability" standards, measured by academic testing.
Schwarzenegger doesn't propose to do away with categoricals, but his budget crisis proposal includes "dramatic flexibility" that would remove almost all restrictions on redirecting their money to other purposes as an offset to a $2.2 billion reduction in K-12 aid.
Local school boards and administrators, who have long struggled with categorical aid restrictions, would probably take that deal in a nanosecond, and that threatens solidarity in the education coalition, which has adopted a just-say-no position on school aid cuts. Some statewide groups now face something of a revolt in their ranks, and that dissonance discomfits Democrats who pretty much parrot the education coalition position.
It may not come to anything, but in any event, a major overhaul of categorical aids is long overdue.
Call The Bee's Dan Walters, (916) 321-1195. Back columns, www.sacbee.com/walters.
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