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By Timm Herdt (Contact)
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
One of the last agreements that sealed the budget-balancing deal agreed to late Monday by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders was a provision to repay schools over time for the money they will be shorted in this calamitous year.
That’s no doubt a good thing, but it doesn’t address some of the hard realities of growing up:
You’re only in the sixth grade once. You only take Algebra I once. You only get one run through high school and if at that time there’s no band, no school play, no baseball team, no AP calculus class, no remedial summer school — well, that means those opportunities are forever lost.
Restoring lost education money later might help another generation, but it will do this one no good.
The same is true — and particularly acute — with the steep cuts in higher education funding. Those cuts have resulted in double-digit fee increases at the University of California and California State University. In addition, CSU will be accepting 40,000 fewer freshmen over the next two years and UC already cut freshman enrollment this year by 2,300 students.
The timing for California and its future couldn’t be worse, as those enrollment cutbacks come at precisely the time that the biggest demographic bubble in the history of the state is coming of college age.
The year 1990 was the record year for births in California, with 611,666. The next two highest years were 1991 and 1992. Those are the only three years in state history in which there were more than 600,000 babies born. Those children this year will turn 17, 18 and 19, and many will find college doors closed at precisely the time they will be knocking.
This also comes at a time when, according to a Public Policy Institute of California study released earlier this year, California will be facing a shortfall of 1 million college-educated workers by 2025.
Finally, it comes at a time when those on the leading edge of the baby-boom generation are turning 62 and will be retiring precisely when today’s college freshmen and sophomores will be getting their diplomas. Nurses, college professors, engineers, teachers — all are among professions with graying workers and not enough reinforcements on the way.
It has become an ideological code word to call government spending “investments” — the terminology tags the speaker as liberal — but looking at the skin-and-bones California budget in this year of severe recession, it is hard to imagine that in a decade or so the current cutbacks in state spending on its schools and universities won’t be widely seen as lost investment opportunities that shortchanged California’s future.
Those who crafted the budget deal that is expected to be voted on Thursday in the Legislature offer two justifications for education spending cuts.
Republicans, including Schwarzenegger, say the budget-cutting allowed for a resolution of an unprecedented fiscal crisis that did not include tax increases. Democrats say they did the best that they could do, given the state’s two-thirds vote requirement for tax increases and the Republicans’ unanimous and resolute opposition.
Because of the two-thirds requirement, Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg said he and fellow Democrats went into budget negotiations “with one hand tied behind our backs.”
As a result, a $26 billion shortfall is about to be filled with $15 billion in spending cuts, $11 billion in assorted gimmicks and zero in new revenues.
“It could have been much worse,” Steinberg said Tuesday. “Given the magnitude of the problem we were dealing with, I think we did pretty darn good.”
He said it was vital to save the safety net at a time when 8,000 families on CalWORKS in Los Angeles County last year became homeless and when applications for public assistance are soaring from the growing ranks of the unemployed.
“I’m proud of the fact that we saved the safety net,” Steinberg said.
As for education, he added, “I think we did the best we could under the circumstances.”
Time will tell, but the problem is that time passes much too quickly in the development of a 12-year-old, or a 15-year-old, or an 18-year-old.
Opportunities lost now will be difficult to make up, regardless of when and how robustly the economy recovers.
At some point in the not-too-distant future some of today’s youngsters are sure to ask whether it might not have been smarter for California to have charged people more for a pack of cigarettes or to have withheld income taxes from independent contractors than to have sold out their futures because the economy happened to be very bad at precisely the wrong time.
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Source: Ventura County Star
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