"What we really spend on education
- Jill Stewart
Friday, June 10, 2005
A RECENT poll from the Public Policy Institute of California shows that while Californians have strong opinions on what to do about public education, they have no idea what's going on.
I give the public an "F" in education.
As a wonderfully sneaky test of awareness, PPIC asked Californians in a recent survey how much of the state budget is spent on public schools. They were clueless. Only 1 in 3 knew that public education is by far the biggest item, sucking up half the budget -- very roughly, $50 billion of $100 billion.
Ignorant voters insist more money pour into the schools, not knowing California spends more on schools than the entire operating budgets of each of the 49 other states, including New York.
Here's reality: The National Education Association and National Center for Education Statistics rank California in the middle on per-pupil spending. We're at the comfy median. We do not "underfund" our schools, despite our many troubles.
Why doesn't everybody know this?
The PPIC poll shows how misconceptions are driven by partisanship in California. Democrats tend to believe (ridiculously) that California's prisons get the most state money. Republicans tend to believe (absurdly) that social welfare gets the most state money.
People are ignorant in part because our crisis-driven media often lazily push the myth that California is near "the bottom" in school funding. That myth is a product of the education lobby, led by the California Teachers Association, which makes sure California teachers earn the highest salaries in the nation, yet constantly whines that schools are underfunded. The myth was furthered in January when Rand Corp. released a just-plain-wrong study showing California wallowing near the bottom. State Department of Finance spokesman H. D. Palmer notes that Rand included "all children who had excused absences" in California but didn't attend school. The 49 other states did not inflate attendance in this way. Rand has acknowledged that by dividing spending by an inflated student count, it probably affected California's outcome.
Eric Hanushek, at the Hoover Institution, notes, "We're not even close to eighth from the bottom -- nowhere near that. We are at or near the middle in the nation." Frank Johnson, a respected statistician for the National Center for Education Statistics, adds, "California per-pupil funding is near the middle. Some people are presenting data in a way that supports their (political) views."
According to the NCES, California spent $7,552 per student in 2002-03. The national median was $7,574. We're $22 short, so no wonder our kids are near the bottom in math and reading! Fresher NEA data mirrors the NCES data, showing in its "Rankings & Estimates" report that California in 2003-04 was in the exact middle, ranked 25th, and spending $7,692 per pupil. California voters imagine themselves to be well-informed. The PPIC poll says, "72 percent believe voters should make decisions about the budget and governmental reforms rather than abdicate that responsibility to the governor and Legislature ... But when it comes to the budget, how much knowledge do residents bring to the table? Only 29 percent of Californians can identify the top category for state spending (K-12 education)."
Palmer, of the Department of Finance, explains: "People just do not get that when California adds billions each year to the schools -- which we do - - adding another $1 billion means you multiply $1 million by 1,000."
The education lobby loves to cite a 2002-03 national average per-pupil spending of $8,041, in order to make California seem $489 behind other states. That "average" is badly distorted by three states and Washington, D.C., which spend $11,057 to $12,568 per pupil -- far more than any of the other 47 states. Washington, D.C. spends princely sums to no effect on schools so infamously bad that National Assessment of Educational Progress tests for 2003 showed L.A. kids beating D.C. kids in English. That's remarkable, because 43.2 percent of L.A.'s kids were struggling to learn English as a second language; only 12.5 percent of D.C. kids were learning English as their second language. New York City's kids beat L.A. kids in English by a modest margin (yet only 17 percent of N.Y. kids were struggling to learn English), but their victory was fake, because sly New York officials painted over their achievement disaster by preventing huge numbers of low-achieving and immigrant kids from taking the test. So much for the power of money to change the schools.
The more typical states in 2002-03 spent $6,000 to $8,000 per child -- including median California. The lowest-spending state, Utah, spent less than $5,000 to no apparent ill effect. Recently, California's fair-minded and nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office questioned the constant whining. "The analytic basis for pursuing the national average as a spending goal is unclear, " it said. California "should be concerned more with how its students perform. " Quite a concept. But instead, we hear again and again from the overwrought adult lobbying groups who previously brought us "whole language" and "bilingual" education. Now they're insisting that "smaller class size" is the extremely costly way to fix the schools.
Studies have failed to show that kids achieve better when they're around 20 instead of 30 students. Yet California is foolishly pouring billions into the fantasy because it "sounds right." Today, Proposition 98 guarantees that huge sums are diverted to schools each year -- with no guarantee we spend it any better than the terrible schools in Washington, D.C.
Even though Prop. 98 sucks up so much money that our freeways cannot be maintained and our health programs must be curtailed, California voters say education is a topmost worry -- with many convinced funding is the issue.
If only California voters put less energy into mere fretting about education and more energy into actually becoming educated."
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