Governor’s proposal has merit

JOHN CAMPBELL

Living in Newport Beach or Costa Mesa, we are fortunate to have a

good public school district. Other parts of the state, notably

Oakland, Fresno and parts of Los Angeles, are not so lucky.

In many parts of the state, schools are failing to educate and

graduate kids. Whether you live in an area with good public schools,

or troubled public schools, improvement is possible and necessary in

an increasingly competitive world.

If you listen to the rhetoric from the “education establishment”

(which is dominated and funded by the state employees and teachers

unions) you would think that there is one thing standing in the way

of better schools -- more money. But let’s look at how they would

spend this money.

The California School Employee Association, one of the largest

unions, has recently pushed Assembly Bill 310, a bill by Assemblyman

Tom Umberg (D-Santa Ana) which would raise the pensions of nonteacher

school union members by 25%. This would add hundreds of millions of

dollars in new costs to an already bloated state pension system. They

also want to raise your taxes to fund all of this. And for what?

Explain to me how giving better pensions than almost anyone in the

private sector will help our kids learn? Will that improve classroom

instruction? Will it advance curriculum? The answer is a resounding

“no.”

It is obvious. The unions want more money to line their pockets,

not to help our kids.

That’s why substantial increases in education funding in the past

have failed to produce better schools. But Gov. Schwarzenegger has

proposed some wide-ranging reforms that don’t mean higher taxes but

will help our kids. The major tenets of the Governor’s proposal are:

* Performance-based pay for teachers: It’s simple. Reward our best

teachers with more pay to provide incentives for performance. It’s

called capitalism. It’s the way you are probably paid in your job,

and it works.

* More charter schools: Capistrano Unified School District has

been trying to become a charter district for years. But it cannot do

so without approval of the legislature, and the unions don’t want it

so it doesn’t happen.

Why does it want to be a charter district? Because it would allow

school officials to control more decisions and more money locally,

freed from the Sacramento “educrats,” education bureaucrats. The

governor’s proposal would allow them to do that. You may be

interested in this for Newport-Mesa or for a school within

Newport-Mesa. As parents and taxpayers, you should have that option.

* Vocational education: Not every kid is cut out to be, or wants

to be, a software designer. Yet our education system says that if you

don’t go to college, you have failed. That is wrong.

Lots of people are better at, will be happier with, and want to be

in some vocation that may not require a liberal arts degree from a

four-year university. The governor’s proposal would set up equal

career paths for those who want to be nurses or aircraft technicians.

* Fiscal reforms: The governor’s fiscal reforms are not about

higher taxes and more spending for the union bosses. They are about

making our education dollars go farther and having them spent in the

right places.

The proposal includes allowing schools to contract services, such

as landscape maintenance, rather than requiring that they are done

in-house by full-time employees (did you know that they can’t do this

now?); more dollars in the classroom and less on distant

administration; and annual disclosure to parents of exactly where

their education dollars are being spent.

You may have seen the union advertisements on TV saying that the

governor has proposed to cut education spending. That is patently

false.

These union bosses need to retake third-grade math. The governor

has proposed a 7.1% increase in education spending, which brings the

average spent per child to over $10,000 statewide.

That’s way more than many of the outstanding private schools in

our area spend. If you ask a parent at any excellent school why they

perform so well, they will not say “because we spend more money.”

More than likely, they will say because they have a combination of

excellent teachers, a demanding principal and involved parents.

Governor Schwarzenegger’s reforms will allow locally driven, real

improvement to happen in our schools, without raising taxes.

If you would like to join the chorus of voices of parents (of

which I am one) and teachers supporting this, please go to

https://www.citizenstosaveca.com.

* STATE SEN. JOHN CAMPBELL (R-Irvine) represents the 35th Senate

District in Orange County. He is vice chairman of the Senate

Committees on Labor and Business and Professions and is a CPA. He is

the author of the California Deficit Prevention Act. He represents

all or part of 15 cities in coastal Orange County.