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Did CTA eat Arnold's lunch -- and the kids', too?By Peter Schrag -- Bee Columnist Published 2:15 a.m. PST Wednesday, January 28, 2004 Barbara Kerr is proving that you can be president of the CTA, the muscular California Teachers Association, and a nice person at the same time. But in her press conference earlier this month with the equally muscular Arnold Schwarzenegger, she looked less like the primary schoolteacher she used to be and a lot more like the cat that swallowed the canary. Her description of the deal her union made with the governor as "fair" immediately became a candidate for understatement of the year. To put the details of the agreement in the simplest terms, the schools will get roughly $2 billion less in the governor's proposed budget than the state constitution requires. The governor's Newspeak calls it "rebasing" -- it's actually a partial suspension of the constitutional minimum funding guarantee. But when all the figures are properly arranged, the governor's proposals -- assuming the Legislature accepts them -- would put $1.7 billion more on local districts' salary bargaining tables than for the current year. That's in addition to increases in the cost of living and enrollment. Kerr acknowledges that. The extra money comes mostly from the governor's decision to put some $2 billion in previously earmarked programs -- transportation, classroom materials, educational technology, teacher aides, school desegregation -- into the unrestricted part of the money going to local schools. That's consistent with the additional budgetary discretion the governor and Richard Riordan, his education secretary, want for local districts. If they had bundled it into block grants instead of throwing it on the bargaining table, it would be good policy. But this way, it's up for grabs, jeopardizes other programs and gets little back in the way of reform from the union. That's been a California pattern ever since the 1970s. In the years since, California's per-pupil spending has drifted down relative to other states from a high point (when it was among the top 10 in the nation) to the bottom third in the past decade. A few years ago, we were 41st among the states. Despite the complaint of the governor and Donna Arduin, his director of finance, that California under Gov. Gray Davis appropriated more money for schools than was constitutionally required, the state is still somewhere around 30th in the nation -- and below the national average -- in what it spends on schools and, once cost of living is calculated, near the very bottom. At the same time, however, California teachers' salaries have stayed among the two or three highest in the nation -- currently at an average of more than $52,000 a year. That means that other things have to give: music and art programs, equipment and materials, counselors, nurses, maintenance of facilities. California, despite class-size reduction in the primary grades, also has among the largest classes in the nation, especially in the middle and upper grades. The CTA wasn't alone in the deal with the governor. The union was joined by many other California education groups, many of which believe, ironically, that the $2 billion cut from the constitutional requirement that they agreed to (but still a $2 billion increase over last year) would be a better deal than they might get from the Democrats in the Legislature. Their worry, according to education leaders (who for obvious reasons don't want to be named), is that the Democrats, wishing to protect health and social services budgets from the slashing that they're likely to suffer, hoped to use the threat of sharp cuts in education, which has more popular support than other social services, as leverage to raise taxes. At issue particularly was a constitutionally mandated $4 billion increase that Proposition 98, approved by voters in 1988, called for. That increase could have been deferred if Proposition 98 had been suspended by a two-thirds legislative vote. So the coalition, in a half-loaf decision that generated both confusion and anger among its normal Democratic allies, made their separate peace with the governor. Kerr says, quite modestly, that the deal "doesn't hurt us." And since it also includes an administration promise not to make cuts in school funding for the current year, it's calmed "the layoff hysteria" in the districts. None of that, of course, may hold if voters don't approve the governor's $15 billion deficit bond, which the CTA has just endorsed. Nor does it mean that all, or even most, of that extra $1.7 billion will go into increased salaries. The California School Boards Association is already issuing warnings to districts not to give away the store in the next round of negotiations, as some did in the flush times. And as one education leader said, "Schwarzenegger didn't issue a press release saying all this money was for teachers, like Gray Davis did." The governor was still a winner, both in shaving $2 billion from next year's budget and in the heartburn the deal is giving Democrats. But Kerr still has good reasons for that satisfied cat smile.
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