Expert: School funding is flawed Expert: School funding is flawed (November 28, 2003)

City's educators gather for finance forum

By Katie Vaughn

California's education system has become such a financial mess that the state would do best to recreate the entire system, Stanford University education professor Michael Kirst told a group of Mountain View educators, businesspeople and citizens last Friday.

"California's K-12 education finance system is broken in every way. It has no underlying rationale, is incredibly complex, fails to deliver an equal or adequate education to all children and is a nonsensical historical accretion," he said. "Pouring more money into the same labyrinth would not translate into a high quality education for children. What would? Throwing out the current finance system and starting over."

Kirst was the keynote speaker at the Mountain View Business and Education Forum, an event created to generate a dialogue on how to fund schools with business support. It was held at the Mountain View software company Synopsys.

Kirst said California's history of controlling school funding has contributed to current financial issues. He said decades ago the state put revenue limits on districts and lowered them when enrollment declined, but failed to raise them as enrollment increased.

"People say 'why is the revenue limit so low in Mountain View-Whisman?' The answer: it goes back to what they were spending around here in the 1960s. What the hell that has to do with 2003, I'm not sure," said Kirst.

Proposition 13 has also played a role in districts' economic problems, he added. After local property taxes and school funding were cut, the state took over the education system's finances. The state didn't have enough money to help all districts, so it equalized spending throughout the state at a level lower than the national average.

Because local property taxes cannot be raised to offset the state's decreased funding, Kirst said "we're hostages to the state's cycles."

An additional problem is that districts have categorical programs for which they are allotted certain amounts of money that cannot be spent outside of each specific program, he said.

"They just got the thing so over-controlled now that there's not enough wiggle room locally to do much that would really change things," he said.

Kirst said despite their limitations, parcel taxes could be a partial solution to funding problems. He also said districts' finances should be reassigned based on academic standards in key subjects and not remain in restricted budgets.

The Mountain View-Whisman school board's proposed parcel tax, called Measure E, narrowly failed at the polls in June. The five-cent-per-square-foot tax was unpopular with businesses because they would have on average paid five times as much as homeowners and up to $50,000.

Many local businesses also criticized the school board for not seeking their input when they created the plan. Last week's forum was held in part to prevent the conflict from reoccurring.

Leon Beauchman, of SBC and the Santa Clara County Board of Education, said whenever a school funding measure is proposed, businesses have to look at how they would be impacted.

"Taxes have different effects on different companies," he said. "The first thing we look at is what might be the unintended consequences."

A main concern is whether a local tax measure will come in addition to county or state taxes and whether a company could handle such a combination.

Mountain View-Whisman Superintendent Jim Negri said he expects businesses to be more supportive of a new plan unveiled at the Nov. 20 school board meeting.

The proposed plan would use parcel size bands to determine how much a building would be taxed. Negri said the plan would keep tax rates within limits and businesses said they would approve.

Many of the forum attendees, most of whom were educators, said a parcel tax is a short-term solution to school funding problems, but probably the best one for now.

Mountain View City Council member and assistant principal at Mountain View High School Matt Neely, who served as the forum's moderator, said the new tax plan is good both for businesses and citizens.

"Conceptually, it is really a deft compromise," he said. "It moves even more to the middle."

While local businesses were not heavily represented at the forum, Carol Olson, president of the Mountain View Chamber of Commerce, stressed the importance of making discussions of educational funding open to businesses.

"We need to garner the perception that business was involved," she said. "We also need to garner the perception that the ballot is fair."