Published
5 years agoon
There’s bitter irony in the loud complaints from California school officials and unions – particularly in large urban districts – about not having enough money.
The school board called for a moratorium on new charters – ignoring the simple fact that parents turned to charters because their children were not succeeding in LA Unified’s schools. Civil rights groups, meanwhile, warned the board not to finance the new contract with funds specified to raise the academic performances of poor and other “high-needs” students.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, who enjoyed strong support from school unions last year, immediately asked state schools Supt. Tony Thurmond, also strongly tied to the unions, to study the financial impact of charter school diversions.
Los Angeles’ school officials also cited rising pension costs for their financial woes. However, as the Legislature’s budget analyst pointed out last week, in analyzing Newsom’s plan to pump more state money into the teachers’ retirement fund, “School funding … has grown by nearly $22 billion (37 percent) over the past six years, significantly outpacing growth in pension costs.” In other words, the complaints about pension costs are something of a red herring.
As mentioned above, LA Unified is not an isolated example. In 2017, when Sacramento Unified’s teachers were threatening to strike, Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg mediated a new contract that gave teachers an 11 percent raise. Later, it emerged that the salary increases would come from a reserve set aside for pension fund payments.
Sacramento County schools superintendent David Gordon warned Sacramento Unified several times that its budget was faulty and he eventually disapproved it. The district now is one of four districts on the “negative certification” list maintained by the state’s Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team for budgetary mismanagement.
Dan Walters has been a journalist for nearly 60 years, spending all but a few of those years working for California newspapers. He has written more than 9,000 columns about the state and its politics and is the founding editor of the “California Political Almanac.” Dan has also been a frequent guest on national television news shows, commenting on California issues and policies.
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