City College of San Francisco is facing devastating layoffs. The San Francisco public schools are looking at laying off hundreds of teachers. The Oakland Unified School District is considering closing schools, mostly in Black neighborhoods.
And Gov. Gavin Newson is sitting on such a huge state budget surplus that he may be forced to return money to the taxpayers.
This, as they say, does not compute.
The looming issue is something called the Gann Limit, a terrible measure passed in 1979 in one of the lowest-turnout special elections in state history. It was written by the same folks who gave us Prop. 13.
Under the law, the amount state and local governments can spend is limited to 1978-1979 levels adjusted for state population and the cost of living.
If there is extra money, the state has to spend it on infrastructure projects, education—or give it back to the taxpayers.
Giving it back to the taxpayers means, in effect, a lot of people who don’t need the money right now (it’s not a progressive formula) will get a state check—and the public education system will continue to head toward collapse.
Yeah, there’s infrastructure we need (I would start with buying out PG&E and creating a modern public-power system and providing public broadband to every California household.)
But the absolutely critical need right now is education.
The pandemic devastated a lot of things, but K-12 schools and community colleges were among those hit the hardest. The state pays for public schools based on average daily attendance—and when public schools were shut down and operating only remotely, a lot of students left for private schools, became home-schooled, or dropped out altogether.
That means as we recover, it’s going to take a while, maybe several years, to rebuild the public education system.
Newsom has in the past been reluctant, as have some legislators, to fund one-time “bailouts” to public school and community college systems that have structural deficits.
But those deficits exist because of state funding issues. The ADA metric makes no sense at all as we recover from a global pandemic. The state has taken the fundamentally flawed position that community colleges should exist almost entirely as gateways to the California State University and University of California system. City College of San Francisco, like so many other community colleges, also provides lifelong education, job training, English as a Second Language, and so many other critical services that don’t fit the current state mold.
The state has a huge list of critical priorities, and the Gann Limit could restrict which of those the surplus can fund. But education makes the cut.
This ought to be a huge issue for everyone in the state, and school boards and college boards ought to be clamoring about it: There’s money, now, to save public education from a looming disaster.
