Pick One on Education: Equity or Excellence

Commentary

I remember a news story from three decades ago about a rural parochial school in Mexico. It had a dirt floor and the priest taught three subjects: the Spanish language, mathematics, and religion. All his students went to a university.

In America, public schools can’t have religion, but they can have ethical training, which varies in content. But there’s no reason why every school, regardless of funding level, can’t teach excellence in English and math.

Certainly, there are other subjects to learn. But most science uses math—and learning English can be accomplished by reading about history, politics, etc.

I bring this up because there’s a new study out pushing for even more funding for children’s education in California: “Making the Grade 2022: How Fair Is School Funding in Your State?” It’s produced by the Education Law Center, which says of itself, “ELC is at the forefront of state-based efforts to improve school funding equity and secure essential resources for all students. Our strategies include litigation, policy development, capacity building, communications, data analysis and research. Our work is based on the belief that all children deserve the opportunity to learn.”

There’s that socialist word “equity” again, which I keep decrying. The report itself uses “equity” four times.

Adjusted for inflation, it says California’s funding level was $12,132 per pupil in 2008, rising to $13,686 in 2020. But it doesn’t account for the fiscal year 2022-23 enacted budget, which began last July 1, boasting the spending of $22,983 per student for TK-12 students. What more could they possibly want?

And although the Legislative Analyst is warning of a $24 billion deficit for the fiscal year beginning July 1, down from last year’s $100 billion surplus, education funding likely will remain at that high level. Past budget battles show education comes out on top. Proposition 98 guarantees 40 percent of state general-fund revenues must go to K-12 education.

That $13,686 number from 2020 earned California only a “D” grade on the ELC grading scale for “adequacy of funding.” The state also garnered an “F” for “Funding Effort – funding allocated to support PK-12 public education as a percentage of the state’s economic activity (GDP).” That’s because it supposedly spent only 3 percent of state GDP on school funding, well below the national average of 3.6 percent.

Let’s look again at the enacted budget for fiscal 2022-23. The total overall funding for TK-12 education programs is $128.6 billion. California’s current GDP is: $3.6 trillion. That comes to 3.6 percent.

But there’s one area where California excelled on the ELC grading: You guessed it, “equity,” on which it earned a “B” grade. ELC defines this as “Difference (%) in Per-Pupil Funding in High-Poverty Districts Relative to Low-Poverty Districts, by State (2020).”

The highest is Utah, ironically one of the most conservative states politically, with 92 percent more spent per pupil in “high-poverty districts” than in “low-poverty districts.” California ranks ninth, with 20 percent more spent.

This is amusing: The four most “regressive” states, according to ELC, all are “Blue” states that voted Democratic in the 2020 presidential election: Pennsylvania, 21 percent “regressive,” meaning spending in high-poverty schools was that much less than in low-poverty schools. Connecticut: 24 percent less. New Hampshire and Nevada: 27 percent less.

Let’s get back to that poor Mexican school I mentioned at the top. I’ve been writing about California education now for 36 years. The teachers unions resist meaningful reforms. Sometimes reforms get through anyway, as when in 1992 the late state Sen. Gary Hart, a liberal Democrat, pushed through a law establishing charter schools, over the loud objections of the unions.

But other major reforms, such as merit pay for the best teachers and comprehensive school choice, such as the reform that went into effect in Arizona last year, have been stymied.

Meanwhile, California’s school test scores dropped sharply during the pandemic, due largely to the state’s excessive lockdowns that kept kids out of the classroom. Reported EdSource:

While California’s literacy crisis certainly predates the pandemic, with less than half of California children reading at grade level back in 2019, the fallout of the pandemic, the devastating impact of school closures and remote learning, has sent test scores plummeting further.

Only 42.1 percent of third-graders can read at grade level on the state’s latest Smarter Balanced test, down from 48.5 percent in 2019, a more than 6 percent percentage point decline. Disadvantaged third-graders fared even worse. The number who met the standard fell 7 percent percentage points from almost 37 percent in 2019 to 30 percent in 2022. Also troubling is the fact that the children who were in third grade in 2019 are now in sixth grade, and only 45.1 percent of them can read at grade level, suggesting that they’re not catching up.

It’s obvious the problem isn’t the lack of funding, let alone a lack of “equity,” but terrible pedagogy. California’s K-12 education system, once considered a jewel among the nation’s public-schools, has dropped sharply since Gov. Jerry Brown allowed collective bargaining for teachers unions in 1975 with the Rodda Act. As the California Federation of Teachers (CFT) recently gloated, “When the Rodda Act went into effect on January 1, 1976, an explosion of representational elections followed. Teachers and classified employees across the state could finally choose their union.”

And what they effectively did was dominate both sides of the bargaining table. On one side the union sat as the “employee”; on the other side sat the “employer”—the politicians elected by the union using funds from their dues derived tax-paid salaries. Ever since, the CFT and its more powerful sister union, the California Teachers Association, have run state politics—and run education into the ground.

That’s why school-funding “equity” is a red herring. The real problem is and remains the unions’ power to prevent innovation that would raise the kids’s math and English up to the level of a dirt-floored Mexican schoolroom. Pick one: Equity or excellence.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.