By Chris Reed

The news that Gov. Jerry Brown appears to have mostly gotten his way on school funding changes is likely to be presented as a dramatic victory for the people who believe helping struggling English learners is the key challenge facing California education.

But it’s one thing to believe that this is the key challenge, as I do, and another thing entirely to think that what’s being done in response will work or result in significant change. Why the skepticism? Here goes:

Combine unproven theory and confused governor …

1. The proposal builds off the belief that school quality is a function of school spending. If that were true, than schools would have gotten much better in the last 30 years. The 1983 “Nation at Risk” report triggered the modern education reform movement and yielded a big boost in per-pupil, inflation-adjusted spending.  It hasn’t led to the broad gains this simplistic theory would yield, and often hasn’t resulted in any progress at all.

2. Even if school officials come up with promising ways to bring improved instruction to struggling English learners, they could be undercut by Gov. Jerry Brown’s incoherent, ad hoc education policies — policies that are painful in their naiveté about what happens when school boards are “empowered.” As noted here before, the governor believes …

“… more money and ‘subsidiarity’ — essentially, smart and thoughtful local control — are the keys to improving schools. The governor was asked why he thought local control would work better than it did before the reforms triggered by the “Nation at Risk” report in the 1980s and No Child Left Behind in the 2000s, given that a key factor driving those reforms was that local control often led to a focus on adult employees instead of on students.

“Brown responded by ridiculing ‘top down’ policies that presumed people in Washington or Sacramento are wiser than ‘the teacher, the principal, the superintendent and the school board.’

“This is a talking point, not a policy. … When unions run school districts, ‘top down’ education policies are often the only way to protect the interests of students.”

… with intransigent unions and you don’t have a encouraging picture

3. Even if school officials come up with promising ways to bring improved instruction to struggling English learners, they could be undercut by the union power that Jerry Brown either ignores or is oblivious to.

The example of the Stull Act can’t be brought up enough. A 1971 state law requires that student performance be part of teacher evaluations. It doesn’t say it may be. It says it must be. Yet the law was simply ignored in most California districts until 2012, when a successful lawsuit forced Los Angeles Unified to begin, yunno, following state law.

You’ve heard of jury nullification. The is local teacher union nullification. Instead of honoring a clearly written state law, school district after school district has adopted teacher evaluation processes that routinely result in 99 percent of second-year teachers getting tenure and that conclude nearly all teachers are above average or downright great.

So when the state budget is passed on Friday, and the back-slapping begins about the new era in California education, feel free to groan. The success of the new funding formula depends on a simpleminded theory about school quality that has 30 years of history going against it. It depends on the follow-through of a governor who offers incoherent and contradictory comments about education. And it depends on the cooperation of teacher unions who have a history of not giving a damn about struggling students — at least if it means teachers will be judged on how much they actually help those struggling students.

CalWatchdog contributor Chris Reed was on “Which Way, L.A.?” on KCRW on Thursday to talk about why Propositions 30 and 38 deserve to fail.  KCRW is one of the most popular NPR stations in the nation.

Reed was in a broad discussion with journalists and some prominent defenders of the education status quo — and he got a faintly sympathetic treatment from Evan Halper of The Los Angeles Times, who requoted one of his potshots at Prop. 30.

Listen here.

By Katy Grimes

Like a woman with a shopping addiction, California politicians are going to bankrupt the Golden State. California has a $16 billion deficit, a $4.6 billion budget spending increase since January, a credit rating which will probably be lowered and a big fat $10 billion debt owed to the K-14 public schools.

It doesn’t look good. Someone needs to cut up the state’s credit cards and put the Legislature on a Weight Watchers plan for big spenders.

May Budget Revision

With nothing but bad news to deliver, on Monday Gov. Jerry Brown gave his May Budget Revision. By Tuesday, the Assembly Budget Committee was dissecting the budget with the help of Legislative Analyst Mac Taylor and the Department of Finance’s Michael Cohen.

And while the budget talk was wonky and dry, one issue kept resurfacing: On top of our $16 billion state debt, the State of California also owes $10 billion to its K-14 public schools.

‘Deferrals’

The Legislature has avoided making actual cuts to programs by using education funding every year to shore up the gaps. But the money taken from education is still owed to the K-14 schools. Robbing Peter to pay Paul, this “deferral” has accumulated to $10 billion. The law states that it must be paid back.

The Legislative Analyst’s Office has warned about the ongoing deferral to education as the state has increasingly relied on education funding to pretend the budget is balanced and avoid unpopular cuts to programs.

But when the Legislature defers funding to schools in order to keep the money for other state programs, it also has to approve additional borrowing.

That’s like paying only the minimum on your MasterCard, and then opening a new credit card for additional spending.

Assemblyman Brian Nestande, R-Palm Desert, took Cohen and Taylor to task on Tuesday after both indicated the need for Gov. Brown’s tax initiative to pass in order to meet the spending in his budget.

Brown’s tax increase initiative would increase the state income tax on those making more than $250,000, for five years, and raise sales and use tax by 1/2-cent for four years, and allocate 89 percent of the tax revenues to K-12 schools, and 11 percent to community colleges.

“What are you doing differently with the budget this time?” Nestande asked Cohen. “You were way off last time.”

Cohen explained that the finance department was taking a conservative approach with ongoing litigation, Medi-Cal payments and “using our best judgment.”

“But revenue projections–how were you so far off?” Nestande asked. “What are you doing now?”

Cohen said that. when they prepared the January budget, they still didn’t have all of the spending data needed from the previous June.

“It doesn’t sound like you are learning from last year,” Nestande said.

“You keep hoping the economy will bail you out,” Assemblywoman Diane Harkey, R-Dana Point, added. “82 percent of the general fund goes to Health and Human Services and education.”

But the budget talks with Cohen and Taylor were rather unusual. In the past, they often have disagreed about budget issues. On Tuesday, they appeared to be working for the same department.

Spend, spend, spend

Parroting Brown during the May Revision press conference, Assemblyman Bob Blumenfield, D-Los Angeles, the committee chairman, began the meeting on Tuesday by speaking of the importance of working with the governor to balance the budget. Fortunately, the committee vice chairman, Assemblyman Jim Nielsen, R-Gerber, ended the rhetoric. “I rather doubt what we can agree on is funding what’s broken,” Nielsen said about the budget revision. “We cannot fix the budget without pension reform.”

There was no pension reform in Brown’s budget. In fact, there were no spending reforms at all.

Cohen explained  the wonky financial issues and procedures to the committee, and how the finance department didn’t have enough data with the last budget. They overshot revenue estimates in January, ultimately having to adjust revenues down again with the May Budget Revision.

However, Cohen said that even with revenues down, Proposition 98 costs–school funding–were up by $2.4 billion.

Ironically, it was only in January during budget talks that Brown said he wanted to pay down the Proposition 98 deferral debt by $2.4 billion.

In the February, LAO Proposition 98 analysis said, “Paying Down Deferrals Makes Sense. The largest component of the Governor’s basic plan is to pay down $2.4 billion in K-14 payment deferrals. If the state has additional Proposition 98 resources to spend in 2012-13, we think paying down these deferrals is reasonable. This would not only help reduce the significant cash management challenges now facing districts but also would be less disruptive than programmatic cuts were the tax measure to fail.”

Corporate profits ‘up’

Cohen insisted that “corporate profits are way up” in California, based on corporations claiming state tax credits.

And Cohen said that, before Brown does any pension reform, he wants a balanced budget.

This is where Nestande jumped in. He said, “We have a legal mechanism in this budget to pay back $10 billion of deferrals. Do we have a repayment plan?”