Flickr: Velveeta Fog
California school districts are paring back on the number of school days they offer and squeezing more kids into every classroom, California Watch's Louis Freedberg reports today after analyzing a new survey from the state Legislative Analyst's Office.
The state last year gave district officials flexibility to deal with budget cuts by allowing them to abandon the state's popular class size reduction program and to spend a total of $4.5 billion for state-mandated "categorical" programs as they see fit. But district adminstrators are hoping for even more local control that would allow them to manage another $6.7 billion for 20 remaining categoricals. That's a survival strategy, but, as Freedberg notes, it threatens a range of school programs -- from art and music to adult ed -- that state legislators considered valuable.
Examining that same LAO survey, my colleague John Myers, The California Report's Sacramento Bureau Chief, found that almost $1 out of every $5 the state spends on K-12 education is actually money being "borrowed" from next year's schools budget. Not exactly a long-term strategy... and seemingly the kind of "smoke and mirrors" budgeting our new governor vowed to eliminate. Not only that, money is so tight that school districts are doing plenty of borrowing on their own, Myers reports.
And the picture gets worse for schools because one-time federal stimulus money -- more that $7 billion -- is about to dry up, the LAO report shows. In fact, California is now 47th in per pupil spending of all the 50 states, according to the California Budget Project's read of a recent report by the National Education Association. The numbers could get worse if legislators refuse to put Gov. Jerry Brown's tax extension measures on a June special election ballot or if voters reject them.
Though other states are also facing hard times, the policy analysis group EdSource recently explained why California's crisis is more severe. In a nutshell: 80 percent of our school funding comes from the volatile state budget., and the amount of revenue that school districts themselves can raise is severely restricted.
Where does that leave our children -- 22 percent of whom drop out before graduating high school? Where does it leave the future of our Golden State? And what do YOU think we should be doing?
Meanwhile, what do you make of this vague but kinda cool, inspirational little video from Bing (via Microsoft) for a project called "Redu: Rethink/Reform/Rebuild Education?"
