California may fancy itself as the fifth largest economy in the world, but when it comes to funding its school system it is a calamity.
Across the state, 25,000 primary and secondary school teachers – 20 per cent of the total – have just been notified that they will be out of work from September.
In each of the state's 1,000-odd school districts, administrators are contemplating, reluctantly, the wholesale dismemberment of programmes, from music to art to PE, as well as the dismissal of nurses, librarians and cleaners.
Class sizes, which were successfully reduced in the go-go 1990s to as low as 20 to 1 in the primary grades, look certain to expand again, with some scenarios suggesting 40 or 50 students per teacher in certain classes.
The reason for this is simple: the state is broke. Because of the depressed economy, the bursting of the dot-com bubble and a tax code that makes state revenues excessively reliant on personal incomes rather than property values or corporate profits, California is facing a $35bn (£22bn) budget shortfall this year. Education accounts for roughly half of state spending, so schools are where the pain is being felt first.
It would not be so calamitous if Californian schools were not woefully underfunded already, ranking 41st in spending per pupil out of the 50 states. New York state, for example, spends $4,000 more per child per year. There is simply no fat to cut, largely because of a statewide tax revolt in the 1970s that capped spending for social services, sabotaging America's former leading school system.
"Let's cut the rhetoric of 'Leave No Child Behind' [President Bush's campaign slogan on education] and 'fess up to the reality that all children will be left behind," said John Deasy, superintendent of the relatively successful Santa Monica-Malibu school district in southern California, which now faces the loss of more than 200 teachers.
States across the country are suffering their worst budget crisis for half a century, and few are receiving help from the federal government, which is pouring funds instead into counter-terrorism, the military and tax cuts for the wealthy. Anti-war activists like to call the education crisis in California an instance of "domestic collateral damage", holding the White House at least indirectly responsible.
But California's own political leadership is also to blame. Governor Gray Davis, a Democrat, is infuriating even his own party by refusing to contemplate substantial tax increases and handing out favours to campaign contributors, notably the prison guards' union. While the schools sink into oblivion, Governor Davis is insisting on building a new death row unit at San Quentin prison. The price tag: $220m.
6 April 2003 17:16
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