California’s 2014-2015 budget attacks education
By Theo Mclean
8 August 2014
California’s recently enacted 2014-2015 budget codifies the continuation of the attacks on education by the ruling class. Teachers and students are among those relegated to foot the bill of the economic crisis they did not create.
Over the past three decades, there has been significant disinvestment in California’s education. Funding for higher education has not ever recovered—despite the widely proclaimed economic “recovery” and recent state budgetary surplus—to 2007 levels, which had already represented the lowest level of funding in education for 30 years.
In California’s largest university systems, the California State Universities (CSU) and the Universities of California (UC), state funding in real dollars has fallen by just under 50 percent since 1980. (By contrast, funding for the state Correctional System has risen by approximately 200 percent over the same period.)
In K-12 education, California is the state that consistently has the largest class sizes, while having one of the lowest levels of funding per student.
In the arena of higher education, for example, as funding has decreased, the burden of paying for education has increasingly shifted to students, many of whom come from working class and impoverished backgrounds. Tuition and student fees pay for about 45 percent of the cost of UC and CSU education today, and graduates find themselves with an average of $18,000 of student loan debt. Many youths now consider college too expensive and forgo it altogether.
While tuition has increased sharply at nearly every university across the country, this increase is perhaps even more dramatic at the UC and CSU systems.
Between 1992 and 2012, inflation-adjusted tuition and fees have more than doubled at the CSU system and nearly tripled at the University of California.
California State University tuition fees. Image courtesy of KQED News.Highlighting the complete collapse of postwar liberal reform plans, students who attended a UC school in 1965 could expect to pay a maximum of $200 per year on tuition and fees.
University of California tuition fees. Image courtesy of KQED News.For K-12 education, as state funding has decreased, the burden has increasingly shifted to local governments and teachers, which are ill-equipped to support their own school systems—something historically handled by the state government. Instead, working class taxpayers are being made to foot the bill, most recently in the form of the Proposition 30 state sales tax increase.
Similarly, the state’s solution to keeping pensions funded under the new budget is to put a massive burden on local governments by having them California’s 2014-2015 budget attacks education - World Socialist Web Site: