A California Republican

The California Teacher’s Association (CTA) has gone to bat for another tax - again. The CTA wants to raise the sales tax by 1 cent for every dollar and put that money directly towards education.

The bigest single item in the California state budget is the K-12 educaiton spending. It comes in around 40+% of the budget, and has the largest and most powerful lobbying groups you can imagine involved in the budget.

Prop. 98 was passed by these lobbying groups in order to “assure” a minimum funding from the state to local schools. Afterall, when Prop 13 was passed, local funding to the schools went down because propoerty taxes couldn’t be raised as fast. So Prop. 98 was passed in order to enurse funding to educaiton without the education lobby having to fight for it every year.

Amid the current budget deficit closure talks is some ideas about cutting the current level of education funding under Prop. 98. The education lobby would have you believe that the Legislature wants to cut education funding below mandatory constitutional limits. But they don’t. The truth is that we are overfunding K-12 educaiton by $10 billion. So the Legislature is considering cutting that $10 billion from schools. Seems fair to me.

But the educaiton lobby says no - and makes the further claim that the current budget process for funding public education (they mean K-12) in California is failing our schools.  Which is so ironic.

The process currently in place was proposed and lobbyed for by the CTA. They said that this would adequately finance public education without new taxes. The current process is the child of the CTA. They don’t like it now, but they are the ones who put it in place. Time to live in the bed you made.