On Friday, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and other state officials signed California’s grand, ambitious, 550-page application for federal Race to the Top (RTTT) education funding. It came just a week after the governor submitted a budget plan for the coming year that’s so riddled with holes, misrepresentations and improbabilities that you’d never know they applied to the same state.The application for RTTT funding boasted that despite the California’s fiscal crisis, the “State has made education funding a priority over the last several years.” But it does not tell the federal reviewers that California is among the lowest three or four states in the nation in what spends per pupil in school funding, and perhaps the lowest and that it’s done almost nothing to change it. .
And while the application insists that California had made education a top spending priority, its own application shows the steep decline in spending for K-12 schools and higher education from roughly $48 billion in 2007-8 to roughly $40 billion in succeeding years. But it uses those numbers to show that as a percentage of the total state budget (from $105 billion to $85 billion) it’s slightly up
What it doesn’t tell the feds is that despite the scandalously low funding of its schools and colleges, California has resolutely refused to increase revenues, even in good times. On the contrary, the same governor who signed that application on Friday and put out a press release boasting of intentions to achieve “historic education reforms to empower parents and transform under-performing schools,” cut taxes on his first day in office, at a cost of $6 billion annually and with one small desperation-driven exception has stoutly resisted all tax increases in the years since.
It does not tell the officials at the U.S. Department of Education who’ll pick winners and losers among state applicants for a piece of the $4.3 billion in federal RTTT funds that his budget – and the education funding it does provide -- rests on blue-sky expectations of revenue, including $6.9 billion from Washington, that it’s unlikely ever to get.
Those expectations represent far and away the biggest chunk of the governor’s “solution” in closing the state’s $20 billion deficit. The governor vows that if he doesn’t get all the money he wants from Washington, he’ll totally wipe out some of the health, welfare and other social services programs that he’d already cutting to the bone. But those cuts – plus his proposed raid on a major state program for young children – would affect the chances of closing the state’s achievement gaps almost as much, if not more, than cutting school spending.