Twenty years ago, with just under 51% of the vote, California voters approved Proposition 98, a constitutional amendment establishing a minimum funding guarantee for education. For years afterward, officials at the California Teachers Assn. (the initiative's main backer) and other proponents made a habit of describing Proposition 98 as having receiving "overwhelming support" from voters.
Today, the education funding guarantee is as popular as the teachers union has long wished -- a true third rail of California government that zaps politicians who dare to suggest altering it. So they rarely dare. Although Proposition 98 has much to do with the state's current $15-billion-plus shortfall, it is not talked about much in the public debate over hiking sales taxes and borrowing against the lottery and finding other ways to boost the state's revenues.
If anything, Proposition 98 appears to be the clear winner of the budget season. Even as the budget picture darkened this spring, the Schwarzenegger administration added $1.1 billion to its budget proposal to meet the guarantee. And buried in the fine print of the governor's plan for a rainy-day fund and spending limit is a provision that would protect Proposition 98 still further by eliminating the Legislature's ability to suspend it, as has been done in bad budget years.
What accounts for the respect given to the education funding guarantee? For one thing, Proposition 98, despite all its problems, has served the useful purpose of enshrining the most important public policy issue -- education -- as the state government's top priority. Second, there's widespread fear on the part of state politicians of challenging the teachers union and the rest of the education lobby.
But there's still another story behind the silence: The multiple formulas of Proposition 98 are so complex that they're difficult to understand, even more difficult to explain -- and, for those who want to know how much education money will go where, next to impossible to predict. Silence, it seems, is safer than wading into the thicket.
This widespread ignorance of Proposition 98's details is most apparent when interest groups make claims about education spending and budget cuts. This spring, for instance, teachers and education advocates protested the governor's budget proposal by claiming that he was proposing to cut education. Conservatives countered that year-over-year spending would go up under the governor's budget. But, in fact, neither side was correct because neither side knows.
No one -- not the governor, not legislators and certainly not journalists -- has any clear idea what Proposition 98's education guarantee will be in the new budget year, what size the cuts will be or whether education spending will be cut at all. And because Proposition 98 typically accounts for about 75% of education spending, and education is roughly half of the state's overall budget, the rule of thumb when it comes to claims about the California budget is this: No one knows anything. Why?
Please be careful before reading on. I promise your head will hurt. Explaining Proposition 98 in a concise, accurate way does not make for easy reading, and even budget experts throw up their hands when Proposition 98 is the subject.
The Legislative Analyst's Office, which employs some of the smartest people in the Capitol, concluded its official "primer" on Proposition 98 with the following surrender: "It involves complex calculations that few fully understand and generates funding results that are often unintuitive or -- even worse -- counterintuitive." Newspapers often report that Proposition 98 guarantees that 40% of the budget should be spent on education. That is at once not entirely false -- there is a provision of Proposition 98 that says that -- and, at the same time, not really to the point, because that provision of Proposition 98 has not been triggered in 19 years.
So what can you reliably know about Proposition 98? The most important thing to understand is that Proposition 98's funding guarantee is an ever-moving target. And because any estimates of cuts or increases in education funding are based on Proposition 98, such estimates are wrong almost as soon as they are calculated. With Proposition 98 spending projected to be about $57 billion in the next budget year, a 1% mistake in a Proposition 98 estimate represents more than $500 million.
