California Schools Are Going Broke – No Surprise There!

 

California schools are going bust.

Is it any surprise? California government faces routine rounds of boom-bust deficits. The political class squeezes the rich for their money, and the high-end earners are expected to pick up the tab for most of the government’s services.

Tired of being fleeced, the rich are fleeing the state, and with that come the deeper cuts.

And they are deep.

Bay Area schools are closing, facing budget shortfalls. LAUSD schools are looking at insolvency, and fast. The wealthier suburban enclave of Manhattan Beach, CA issued notice for 60 layoffs to balance the district’s budget. Redlands Unified School District also approved another round of layoffs earlier this year.

Couldn’t the local governments take the helm and fix the budget problems?

In California, financing for schools does not go from the taxpayer right to the school district. All the money goes up to Sacramento, and then the politicians divvy up the money across all the school districts depending on need, diversity, reading scores, and other considerations. As expected, the schools in the bluer, more left-wing and that's failing schools tend to get most of the money.

It’s not about achievement. There’s nothing fair about the process at all. Schools that fare poorly—and have poorer students, too—get more money. 

Hermosa Beach, California, is one of the highest-performing school districts in the state, and they get so little money in comparison to other regions. True, Hermosa Beach is also one of the richest cities in the state, so Ed foundations routinely fundraise to fill up the funding gaps for the school district.

Why should a rich area get punished just because it's rich? How is that fair? Should a rich district, where the students do well academically, be punished by receiving less money just because they're doing well? The whole system is perverse in its incentives.

And what do we find happening to school districts across the state, even as they're getting as much funding as they can claw into their coffers? Major school districts like Los Angeles Unified are losing students drastically. At the height of its enrollment in the mid-2000s, Los Angeles Unified School District had 700,000 students. Those numbers have plummeted by half. 

Where did all the kids go? They go where their parents are going, of course!

And the parents are moving away, for starters, because they can't afford to live in the LA area (or just about anywhere else in California’s urban areas). The housing prices and cost of living stem from a whole host of other left-wing problems, and that would require another three articles to detail!

Parents are also fed up with the crappy education that their children are expected to endure. I know parents in Bell Gardens (another suburb of Los Angeles), who are expected to enroll their children in LAUSD schools. No matter the background or status, parents know what is best for their kids. If they see local public school failure and they can do something about it, they will make the change. They pull every string, including false addresses, so that they can enroll their children in better schools.

I can attest to this.

My parents did the same thing for me! We lived in the LA strip, now known as Harbor City. My assigned elementary school was Myler Street School in Carson, California. That school didn't accommodate English-speaking students very well. This is all based on what my parents told me, by the way. To them, I wasn't getting the education I needed, and most of the students were English language learners. My parents filed a false address so that I could enroll in Torrance Unified schools, starting with my second-grade year.

I know: I’m writing about forty years ago. Student populations were much larger at the time in Southern California. Today, enrollment has plummeted, and understandably so. In fact, across the state of California, schools are dealing with serious cash flow problems. Hemorrhaging staff, declining enrollment, and a growing awareness from parents that the best education they can get for their kids is just not going to be found in the public school system. 

California’s educational collapse has become the norm, which the political class in Sacramento has no interest in rectifying. Politicians do what the teachers unions tell them to do. From the state senators I spoke to face to face (and they were democrats), to the pundits and pollsters who follow all the politics in the state capital, it's the teachers unions that aggravate and act out as the 800 lbs gorilla in the room 

They want their money—actually, yours and my money. They want more teachers with smaller classes. They want funding for their left-wing causes. They want their unrelenting, never-ending dominance in the state legislature. They don't care about kids, because kids don't pay dues! They care about their power, and they only care about unions. 

One has to wonder what unions are going to do when the very Golden goose that feathered their financial nest has been killed by their own rapacious greed? Where do they think they're going to get the money from? Do they really think that Sacramento's Democratic politicians will just keep shoveling money at a school district where there are fewer and fewer students? 

 

No matter how lunatic, woke, and left-wing the voter electorate has become in California, voters have signaled an increasing distaste for bond measures; they have shown consistent, credible outrage against bullying teachers unions, enough that former Democrat Senate majority leader turned Republican lieutenant governor candidate Gloria Romero dedicated herself to school choice in educational opportunities for all California students. 

And even with money going in, no student enrollment or engagement is going out. 

A few years ago, I was discussing education policy with a state legislator in Idaho. She shared what I perceived to be a very radical notion: public education cannot be saved or redeemed, so let it die. I thought that was giving up the fight too quickly. Don't we owe it to every generation to have access to the most qualified and quality education possible? Shouldn't we take every step possible to ensure, reform, and restore public education to the greatness it had enjoyed fifty, sixty, even seventy years ago? 

Improving education is a noble cause, but parents don't have the time, energy, or the patience to hack away at the corruption and incompetence of their local government schools. Your kid only has one chance at a solid second-grade education, as well as for all subsequent grades. Should parents have to wait for any improvement in their child's scholastic opportunities? 

Parents should not have to wait; so, parents are voting with their feet, taking their kids to charter schools, to private schools, or setting up homeschool programs. Technology has made it all too easy, and it's no surprise that public education faces nothing but economic collapse as a result. 

California funding for public schools depends on attendance. If the kids don't show up, then there's no money. If the teachers don't have any students to teach, then they're going to be out of a job. Perhaps in the long term this is the best outcome to hope for.