LOCAL VIEW : JUDGING IMPOVERISHED SCHOOLS STATE SUPREME COURT OF '71 WANTED TO DIVIDE WEALTH EQUALLY, AND NOW KIDS SHARE THE CONSEQUENCES.

Byline: Gideon Kanner

CALIFORNIA'S public education has been weighed on the scales by the august New York Times - and found wanting. In a recent editorial signed by Brent Staples, The New York Times delivers the judgment that Californians have betrayed their public schools by depriving them of needed funding. To be sure, the Times also rightly assails the assorted touchy-feely quackeries that pass for education theory these days, as implicated in this education disaster. But as you might expect from the grande dame of the liberal press, the Times trains its heavy guns on California's penurious school funding. It was the tax revolt of the 1970s, goes the charge, that ``fractured the civic structure and savaged support for California's universities, libraries, children's programs and, most tragically, its public schools.'' California now ranks 43rd nationally in education spending, and spends about $30,000 less per classroom per year than the national average.

That public education in the once Golden State is in an appalling state is not denied. For years, I have been stunned by the fact that we now have to offer writing courses in law schools. Think about it: Professional schools have to teach writing skills to college graduates. And not just any college graduates, mind you, but those seeking to become lawyers who are supposed to make their living by skillful use of language, mostly in written form.

So how did it happen? It's clear that when the education establishment abandoned traditional basic education and opted for ``new math,'' ``creative spelling'' and other such intellectual atrocities, it delivered a body blow to public education. Sure, the pared-down funding hurt, though we should recall that, in the past, much less affluent American schools somehow managed to turn out young people with a working command of reading, writing and basic arithmetic under physical conditions that today would likely bring an injunction from the health authorities. But that was then, and this is now. Today, money does matter, if only because our expectations are different, and neither parents nor children would find it acceptable to study under the trying physical conditions of yore. Nor, truth to tell, do they have the self-discipline to do so.

The issue of the moment, however, is: How did Californians seemingly sell quality education for their kids in exchange for the mess of pottage represented by the promise of lower taxes? If you believe The New York Times, we were stupid and short-sighted. Maybe. Then again, maybe not. There is much more to this story, according to Professor William A. Fischel, a Dartmouth economist who has studied California extensively.

Fischel argues that the real source of this problem was not taxpayers' greed dressed up in a tax-cutter's costume, but rather the voters' rational response to what he calls the ``share the wealth'' decision of the California Supreme Court in 1971 in Serrano vs. Priest. In the Serrano case, the court held that it was constitutionally impermissible to fund public education solely out of property tax revenues because that gave kids in wealthy school districts a better deal than kids in poor ones, and thus denied equal treatment under the law. So, after the Serrano decision, the tax revenues collected in affluent school districts would have to be shared and no longer would benefit only the local schools.

It didn't take long for parents in the more affluent areas - in other words, ``taxpayers'' - to receive Serrano's more subtle message: The beneficiaries of the rapidly rising property taxes would be someone else's kids. Kids of many of the better-off parents would get less than they had been receiving from local public schools.

The Serrano case thus laid in a supply of social dynamite waiting to go off. Eventually, Howard Jarvis and his tax-cutting campaign provided the inevitable spark in the form of Proposition 13. Upscale, influential voters who otherwise might have campaigned and voted against Proposition 13, to keep their kids' schools well funded, instead embraced it because it held out a promise of substantial property tax savings at a time when home values and taxes were soaring, and yet it would not cause any significant loss to local school budgets. After Serrano, it wouldn't much matter.

We know the rest. Despite pious hopes, in the long run neither the state nor the Lord provided. The growing suburbs got an infusion of school funds through impact fees imposed on new development, but that couldn't do much for older, built-up communities. The new school-financing scheme, like the old one, turned out to be a conduit, not a cornucopia: Someone had to put the money in before it could come out. Before too long, we found ourselves faced with the familiar outcome of share-the-wealth schemes. The vaunted school-financing revolution, like other revolutions, failed to bring the foreshadowed mandatory strawberries for everybody, as promised by the revolutionaries, but more or less evenly distributed shabbiness. As I write this, the Los Angeles Times had just run a series of short columns by high school students, vividly describing the dismally decrepit conditions of their schools. That now seems to be par for the course.

Fischel's conclusion, voiced in a letter in response to Staples' editorial, bears pondering: ``What is sad about California's plight is not just the poor education offered one-eighth of the nation's public school students. It's that Serrano vs. Priest continues to be emulated by state courts. The resulting reforms have invariably led to loss of local fiscal control over education. Let's stop impugning Californians as shortsighted hedonists and look at the more likely cause of their problems: judges who think they know better than voters.''

Is Fischel right? Judge for yourself.