POSSIBLE FALLOUT
The defeat of Proposition 30 would trigger budget cuts that could force Los Angeles Unified and other school districts to shorten this year's calendar by three weeks.
Here is a sampling of the topics that would be truncated or eliminated:
• First-grade English:Mastery of phonics, spelling patterns and high-frequency words
• Seventh-grade history: All of the Age of Exploration and most of the Scientific Revolution
• Algebra I: Understanding radical expressions
• High-school chemistry:Amino acids, isotopes and Einstein's E=mc2
Second-graders would miss lessons on prefixes and suffixes.
U.S. history students would gloss over the civil rights movement.
Parents would have to find three extra weeks of day care for their kids.
Standardized state tests and Advanced Placement exams would be disrupted.
And hundreds of thousands of Los Angeles Unified students would miss out on nearly 10 million healthful meals.
With polls showing support slipping for Proposition 30, Los Angeles Unified is bracing for the budget cuts that would be triggered if the tax-increase measure fails on Tuesday. To offset the cuts, the state is