Wall Street really is not interested in funding these "Temporary Bonds" California has floated. So Arnold is going to have no choice but to cut the hell out of Public Employees. Either that or raise taxes, and he can't do that.
These programs this article talks about are a good example of how special interests take over budgets.
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Schwarzenegger targets tangled web of programs
By Daniel Weintraub -- Bee Columnist - (Published October 23, 2003)
Gov.-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger has promised to exempt public education from the tough spending reductions required to balance California's budget without tax increases.
But the new governor hasn't defined "spending reduction" -- and it's certainly possible that he will ask the schools to live with less spending in the years ahead than they believe they need. Even if school budgets are not cut, they might grow more slowly than education officials demand to keep pace with increasing enrollments and inflation and adding new programs.
If that's the case, local districts are going to need as much flexibility as possible to manage their money according to locally set priorities.
Schwarzenegger recognizes this, and has proposed going after a herd of sacred cows known to Capitol insiders as "categoricals" -- more than 100 special programs that divide money into categories and that require local managers to spend it the way Sacramento sees fit. These programs collectively absorb more than one-third of all state education spending, about $11 billion in the last fiscal year alone.
Earlier this year, Bee education reporter Deb Kollars authored an exhaustive investigation of the categoricals and concluded that they had evolved into what she said was now "a complex web short on accountability but filled with inequities, red tape, politics and ancient funding formulas."
She found, for instance, that the state had spent $242 million since 1985 on a dropout prevention program that is now in place in about 300 schools, absent in 9,000 others and doing little, if anything, to reduce the dropout rate.
Kollars also discovered that the state regularly sends out $11 million a year to high schools to pay for 10th-grade counseling even though many of the schools do not provide it.
And a $700 million program that began years ago as a desegregation fund and now targets low achievers is distributed according to a politically driven formula that sends the money to just 68 of more than 1,000 California school districts in amounts that range from $1,778 per student to 51 cents.
Recognizing what a mess this had all become, Gov. Gray Davis in January proposed eliminating 64 of the special programs and combining the money into one grant that school districts could spend pretty much as they chose.
The nonpartisan legislative analyst offered a competing proposal that would have created five groupings for the programs and then held the schools accountable for achieving the goals behind the money.
In the end, both versions died under a flurry of criticism from the narrow interests served by each of the dozens of special programs. There was little support from the broader public that would benefit from the change but doesn't even know the debate exists.
This is a classic example of why it is so difficult to reform government spending, because for every nickel in the budget there is a lobbyist or interest group willing to fight to the death to preserve it, and it's not worth anyone else's energy to launch the battle necessary to overcome that resistance.
One complicating political factor in this case is that even those who should be fighting the good fight sometimes duck it. The same school administrators who say they want flexibility also agree, with a wink at policy-makers, to have their hands tied because they fear their local school boards would use any new money to raise teacher salaries without considering other needs that might be on the table.
That sentiment, in fact, was one of the driving forces behind the mid-1990s' creation of what has become one of the largest categoricals, a $1.6 billion fund to reduce class size to no more than 20 in kindergarten through third grade.
At the time, then-Gov. Pete Wilson was presented with a sudden surplus that, by law, had to be spent on schools. Rather than put it into general-purpose spending, Wilson embraced class-size reduction, a politically popular idea but one about which he had expressed much skepticism in the past.
Since then, teachers and parents have come to love the program because those smaller classes seem more peaceful and productive. But there is little hard data to show that the change has helped kids learn better. And it's clear that the spike in demand for new teachers forced many schools to hire instructors who otherwise would have been left in the unemployment lines.
Even so, class-size reduction is now one of those budget bovines that can't be touched. Proposals to give all that money to local districts with no strings attached are routinely laughed out of the Legislature. Even suggestions for minor changes that would give administrators the flexibility to manage the program more effectively have been rejected.
The Bee's series on these programs, and the proposals from Davis and the legislative analyst, did prompt lawmakers to ask the state auditor to review them, and that report is due to be published next month.
If it's on the mark, the audit will probably give Schwarzenegger all the ammunition he needs to make a long overdue reform that has been fought at every step by the special interests he promised to sweep from the Capitol.
sacbee.com |
