RAND'S STUDY OFF TARGET PROP. 13 HURT SCHOOLS THROUGH POWER SHIFT, NOT THE IMAGINED CUTBACKS.

Byline: Dr. Alan Bonsteel

ON Monday, Santa Monica's Rand group released a widely publicized study summarizing what they characterized as the crisis of California's failed public schools - academic achievement among the lowest in the nation, poorly prepared teachers, and the nation's worst teenage pregnancy rate.

They also pointed out that California's graduation rate of about 70 percent was among the lowest in the nation, a fact that seems to be obvious to all except for a few people in the California Department of Education who have concocted a story about how we are graduating 89 percent of our high school students.

Unfortunately, this otherwise excellent study simply accepted as a given one of the most pervasive falsehoods in California's mythology - that the passage of 1978's Proposition 13 resulted in cutbacks in public school spending.

For those who are willing to look, the facts aren't hard to find. The federal Digest of Educational Statistics shows that California's K-12 per student spending increased 38 percent in constant, inflation-adjusted dollars from 1979 to 2000, a nugget viewable at www.nces.ed.gov. Our own nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office points out that per-student spending increased 25 percent in constant dollars from 1991 to 2001 alone, a fact that can be mined at www.lao.ca.gov.

It's tempting to say that Proposition 13 had nothing to do with the meltdown of California's public schools. However, due to the Law of Unintended Consequences, the truth is murkier.

Until 1978, California's public schools were funded by property taxes and governed primarily by locally elected school boards. However, after the passage of Proposition 13, the funding shifted so rapidly from local property taxes to state income and sales taxes that even by 1979, per- student spending in constant dollars had already increased. Unfortunately, this funding shift also tilted the balance of power from local school boards to the state.

Simultaneously, the California Teachers Association was transforming itself from an organization of educators to a militant labor union dedicated to shielding California's public school teachers from accountability.

The CTA has used forced union dues extracted from its members to buy majorities in both houses of California's Legislature. The influence of the CTA is so all-pervasive that ex-Governor Davis appointed a CTA operative to the State Board of Education despite the obvious conflict of interest.

The federal government had no role in K-12 public schools until 1965, when Lyndon Johnson founded the Title I program, a scheme that financially rewards public schools for the continued academic failure of disadvantaged children. By 1978, the year of the Proposition 13 taxpayers revolt, the role of the federal government in public schools remained small.

However, the feds are now vying with the states for control of our public schools. Further muddying the waters are the county offices of education, which issue their own decrees to local school districts.

Thus, while nobody is any longer really in control of our public schools, a disproportionate share of the power is held by the kind of people most of us wouldn't want our own children emulating - namely, labor union bosses.

What is striking is that, while hardly anybody who knows California's public schools would dispute that the above cynical analysis is pretty close to how the system really works, almost nobody has championed any fundamental reform that goes beyond mere tinkering at the edges of a system in meltdown.

Almost nobody, that is, except a few revolutionaries who have the quaint notion that back in 1978, what made our public schools work was the intelligent choices of parents. Those parents made excellent selections of school board members, who, in turn, made thoughtful choices of teacher hiring and dismissals.

The shining lights in a system otherwise in meltdown are California's charter schools, human-scale institutions that are locally and democratically run. We might yet rediscover our path by returning power to the parents, and giving families once again a voice in the education of their own children.