Turning point for schools.

Byline: The Register-Guard

This year's Oregon high school graduates have never experienced anything other than contracting education budgets. They've seen their classes get bigger and their textbooks get older, while courses available to students who came before were dropped from the curriculum. Oregon must break that dispiriting trend, and rebuild what was once one of the nation's finest public school systems.

The Oregon House has made a good start by approving a budget for the next two years that includes an 18 percent increase in general-fund spending for education. Approval by the Senate and governor are all but assured. School boards around the state are having discussions that are new to most of their members - whether to add programs, reduce class sizes or both; how additional money should be distributed among elementary, middle and high schools; how much should be added to long-depleted reserves.

The 18 percent increase brings state spending for public education to $6.245 billion in the 2007-09 biennium. That's still more than $1 billion short of the amount that would be needed to meet the state-approved standards of the Quality Education Model. But after increases of 6.6 percent in the current biennium, 1 percent in 2003-05 and 3 percent in 2001-03, the budget for the next two years marks a dramatic turnaround. Pro-education organizations, long accustomed to fighting rear-guard actions to prevent cuts in school spending, will celebrate - once they remember how to do it.

Attention can now shift to ensuring that the record state appropriation for schools is spent in the most effective possible manner, and protecting the education system against losing ground in the next economic downturn. The 2007 Legislature promises to end with good results on both fronts. A budgetary reserve, mainly funded with money that would have been rebated to corporate income tax payers, has been established. A bill to require performance audits of school districts is expected to move forward, and a study of the efficiency of school transportation programs has been approved.

Those steps should become part of an effort to take stock of a public school system that has suffered severe shocks for nearly two decades. The first big one came in 1990, when voters approved a property tax limitation measure that shifted primary responsibility for education funding to the state. In 1990, the state general fund provided only 28 percent of school districts' budgets. By the end of the decade, the state's percentage had climbed to 72 percent. Total property taxes for schools fell from $1.6 billion in 1990-91 to a low of $900 million in 1997-98.

Oregon shouldered this massive burden without new taxes, aided by the advent of an unexpectedly lucrative state lottery and an expanding economy that generated additional billions in income tax revenue. As local property tax support for schools fell, state income tax support for education rose - 35 percent in 1995-97, and 23 percent in 1997-99. As one consequence, growth in state spending for most other programs, ranging from higher education to the state police, was tightly restrained.

Just as Oregon government finished absorbing the blow of the 1990 property tax limitation, it was hit by the deepest economic downturn since the Depression. State revenues, mostly from the income tax, declined for an unprecedented eight consecutive quarters. For most of the current decade the Legislature has increased school spending at or below the rate of inflation, leaving school districts to deal with the cost of rising enrollments, health insurance premiums, pension contributions and other items.

But now the state is able to afford to spend 18 percent more for education at a time when school districts' property tax income is not being reduced. Having survived the back-to-back traumas of a tax limitation measure and a recession, Oregonians can take advantage of a period of relative stability to examine questions presented by the new school finance system that has evolved.

Many questions are worth examining: Now that the state pays more than two-thirds of the bill for education, should schools be more accountable to the Legislature than to local school boards? Should the state assume more responsibility for school districts' capital costs, such as building construction and maintenance? How can Oregon schools make progress toward benchmarks set by the Quality Education Model and the federal No Child Left Behind Act?

Talking about how to improve school quality and accountability rather than scrambling to keep the education system from deteriorating feels like a luxury to Oregonians. But such an emphasis should be the common condition for the next generation of school children.