Inadequate Resources Jeopardize Education in California

In January, 2005, the RAND Corporation issued a study entitled “California’s K-12 Public Schools: How Are They Doing?” that offers a comprehensive look at the fiscal, physical, academic, and social conditions of California’s public schools. The study reaches the well-supported conclusion that test scores in California are well below what they should be, and that California schools are foundering in the absence of concerted effort to provide sufficient funding. The researchers speculate that,

… there has been little attention paid to the yawning gap between our high curriculum standards and the inadequate resources we provide to schools, in part because state leaders have been divided about the scope of the problem or about the proper solution when the problem is acknowledged.

Never has this been more evident than now, as state leaders struggle to formulate the 2005-2006 budget. Despite the recent settlement of Williams v. State of California, which has affirmed that many California students are being educated in substandard schools, state leaders seem unlikely to meaningfully increase the education budget. As the study reported, California voters pay a very low rate of education tax relative to their average income.

Demographic Challenges

A primary finding of RAND researchers is that California’s demographics make adequately funding and operating its schools a challenge. California is the most diverse state in the nation, and, as in many other states, its school-age children are even more diverse than the general population. This diversity is also reflected in the very high numbers of English Language Learners, who are in greater need of quality education and often come from families that are linguistically isolated from their schools and teachers. California, like most states, also has a higher proportion of its children living in poverty. Most of these demographic challenges are only becoming more severe, as population projections predict the inflow of immigrants will continue, further concentrating people in rapidly growing regions of the state.

State of the Schools

Much of the report analyzes the realities of education in California over recent years, using both input variables, such as experienced teachers, class sizes, and facilities, and output variables, such as standardized test scores and graduation rates. Wherever possible, these figures were compared with national averages, and more specifically with figures from Texas, New York, Florida, and Illinois, which along with California comprise the five most populous states in the nation.

California’s teaching force is on the whole a well-qualified group. However, as the state’s population has grown rapidly, very high demand for teachers has led to an increase in the percentage of teachers that are inexperienced or have incomplete teacher credentials. This shift has been exacerbated by California’s class size reduction program, which beginning in 1997 provided fiscal rewards to K-3 classrooms with fewer than 20 students. This served to increase the demand for teachers while clustering experienced and qualified teachers in communities with the resources to pay more teachers and the facilities to support more K-3 classrooms. And, despite these measures, the average student-teacher ratio in California is still 20.9-to-1, the second-highest such ratio in the country.

California’s teacher salaries are, in actual dollars, amongst the highest in the country. However, when adjusted according to a geographical cost-of-living index, the number actually drops below the national average. Salaries have remained steady over three decades, increasing only along with inflation during that time. Programs to recruit and train new teachers and professional development programs had increased over the past decade, but have lost funding in recent years.

The need for facilities upgrades has become marked in California over the past decade, as it has in many states. Facilities present a particular challenge, because these needs become more expensive and more critical the longer they are ignored. Though Californians have passed an increasing number of substantial bonds for facilities construction and maintenance since the mid-1990s, the capital needs of the state’s school districts remain severe. This is partially attributable to rapid population growth in areas that were not previously population centers, and to the uneven results of district-level bond initiatives.

One of the most politically powerful reflections on the quality of a school system is its students’ test scores. RAND researchers considered several tests in the study, but focused at length on results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which, as a consistent and national test, provides perhaps the best basis for comparison to other states. During the 13 years of NAEP testing examined in the study, California students consistently achieved some of the lowest scores in the country, lower than all four of the other most populous states. This was the case also when results were broken down by race/ethnicity; students in each of the four largest categories scored lower than their counterparts in other states.

Perhaps the most telling analysis, amongst several performed by researchers, compares the scores of students from similar families (with “similar backgrounds and characteristics”) across the country. California receives the lowest score amongst all 50 states. In other words, California students perform worse than would be predicted by those background factors that might reasonably be thought to impact their performance: these results suggest that any given student, removed from California to Texas, would likely score, on average, approximately 12 points higher on the NAEP. Nonetheless, California’s scores have begun to rise over the past few years.

The researchers also found graduation rates in California that were comparable to the national average, but the state had a lower rate of continuation to college than most. Other factors, such as teen pregnancy, juvenile delinquency, and substance abuse, showed mixed trends.

Funding the Schools

Much of the current state of California schools can be explained by examining education financing in the state during the past three decades. In 1978, voters took the lead in redesigning the funding system when they passed Proposition 13, which removed the power of setting property tax rates from local governments and school districts, and set a firm local property tax cap. Termed a “taxpayer revolt” at the time, Proposition 13 has kept California’s property taxes down, even though property values have grown dramatically, and forced school districts to rely more heavily on state funding for their schools. State funding was insufficient, and voters attempted to moderate the Proposition 13 impact with the passage of Proposition 98 in 1988, which guaranteed schools a minimum percentage of the state’s budget each year.

The trend towards an increased state share of school funding has occurred across the country, but is especially pronounced in California. Proposition 13 has, amongst other effects, served to remove the agency to fund schools from district-level voters, who tend to be willing to sacrifice for their neighborhood schools. This reality was underlined in 1984, when voters restored the districts’ ability to issue bonds, recognizing that statewide bonds for school construction and maintenance were proving entirely insufficient. The state seems to be poised for another similar upheaval, as the governor’s much publicized refusal to hold up his end of a deal made with the state’s education organizations, which in 2003 gave up funding guaranteed schools by Proposition 98 with the understanding that the funding would be returned to schools in 2005, has upset many voters.

Conclusion

“We found reason to be concerned about California’s K-12 public schools,” the researchers conclude. Helping state lawmakers to share that concern is likely to become an increasingly pressing agenda for many Californians.

Prepared by Nelly Ward, January 28, 2005