CA School And Prison Funding Demand Review, Advocates Say
Comments (0)
(School vs prison funding/Graphic by Jaclyn Wu, Neon Tommy)
Despite its dwindling prison population, the state's correctional system budget has grown inversely in recent years, saddling California with one of the nation's highest gaps between per-student and per-prisoner spending. Between the 1994-95 and 2013-14 fiscal years, spending for each of California's K-12 students rose just under 18 percent, according to research conducted by California Budget Bites.
The state's funding for public education, which has grown only marginally in the past two decades, has long frustrated parents, educators and lawmakers. But with California's 2013-14 per-prisoner spending projected to rise, despite the state's push to slim-down its overpopulated prisons, education advocates are more vocal than ever about addressing the increasing gap between California school system and prison system spending.
Though education advocacy groups have argued that the discrepancy between per-prisoner and per-student spending indicates that the California corrections system is draining funding from the education system, experts disagree. There is neither data to suggest that prisons deter state dollars from schools, nor any guarantee that reducing funding for prisons would increase funding for schools.
Currently, California's K-12 public education system is ranked among the worst in the nation per-student spending, in addition to student attendance, student-to-teacher ratios, standardized test scores. In January 2013, Education Week's annual Quality Counts Report ranked the state's 2010 per-pupil spending 49th out of 50 states and Washington, D.C.
However, California, has one of the highest number of students in the country, about 6.3 million, according to the California Department of Education.
“There is absolutely a discrepancy in funding and spending priorities,” said Elmer Roldan, Education Program Officer at United Way of Greater Los Angeles, which aims to improve public education and increase high school graduation rates.“California has a very low threshold of funding for students.”
This year, each California student is slated to receive about $8,219.
By comparison, spending for California prisoners has increased 82.3 percent in the same stretch of time. State prisoners get more than $60,032 each for 2013-14, according to the same report.
Despite the sluggish growth in California's per-student spending, this year's allocation is higher than the past five years. This school year, a new budget gives each student about $1,000 with a grand total of $70 billion for California's 10,000 K-12 schools. Of this, $55.3 billion is allocated by Proposition 98, which guarantees minimum funding for California schools and community colleges, with an expected increase of $20 billion by 2016-17.
“The state budget has definitely gone up this year,” said Roldan. “This is highly attributed to Proposition 30. There's about $2 billion coming back to California schools because of Proposition 30, and especially L.A. Unified, which is receiving $188 million this year.”
The November passage of Proposition 30, which increased both income and sales tax to offset education budget cuts over the next seven years, along with Proposition 98, have indicated a turning point in California's funding priorities.
“Proposition 30 is one way of addressing the issue,” said Roldan. “And it's already being implemented. Governor Brown has made it clear that he's interested in supporting education, but the bad news is that education funding in California has been cut so drastically over the past five years.”
Roldan notes that, despite positive projections of increased per-student spending in coming years, the state still has a long way to go in climbing out of second-to-last place. Especially when compared to New York, the largest school district in the nation, where per-student spending is twice as high than California's.
“LAUSD has lost $2 billion in funding over the past five years,” said Roldan. “When you do the math, how much is being restored compared to how much is being cut is not that significant.”
Though California's vastly disparate educational and correctional budgets have drawn fire from educators and parent advocacy groups across the state, Michael Stoll, Professor of Public Policy and Urban Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles and co-author of Do Prisons Make Us Safer: The Benefits and Costs of the Prison Boom, says that the numbers alone don't tell the whole story.
“Descriptively, if you look at the data, the prison budget has been going up and the education budget has been going down in California,” Stoll said, noting that annual per-prisoner spending can range anywhere from $47,000 to the $60,032 figure cited by California Budget Bites. “But what people don't see is that, even though the prison population is declining, there are still operating costs to be paid.”
In recent months, education advocacy groups have been increasingly insistent that the state's prison funding is detracting from school spending. According to Stoll, this is not necessarily the case.
“The best empirical work suggests that there's no crowdout, and even if there is, it's very small,” Stoll said, noting that, if anything, swelling prison budgets are likely cutting into other areas of state funding. “But this isn't to say that we shouldn't be concerned about education spending.”
Though California holds many of the nation's most undesirable educational rankings, it is certainly not facing such challenges alone: in May, the U.S. Census Bureau released 2011 data that confirmed public education spending in the United States decreased for the first time in more than 30 years. After adjusting for inflation, national per-pupil spending was down four percent from its all-time peak in 2009.
“For California's last budget, the legislature did increase California's education budget for the first time in five or six years, and we hope to see more money allocated to education in the future,” Stoll said. “From the state's perspective, that would certainly make more sense. For every dollar spent on education, there is a far higher return than for every dollar spent on the correctional system.”
According to Stoll, using state funding to incarcerate those who commit “marginal crimes” often has a diminishing effect, and a more productive use of California's spending would be to invest in diverting crime, rather than punishing it.
“As a society, we don't get benefits from extra money spent on prisons, especially when you're spending $60,000 a year to house people who might have only committed one or two crimes in their lifetime anyway,” said Stoll. “It's a pretty expensive way to fight crime.”
The return on the social investment in education, Stoll said, is far higher for education than corrections, and in allocating future spending, Stoll said, California should consider what is most beneficial to the long-term wellbeing of those in both the educational and correctional systems.
“Even the best studies aren't showing that spending on prisoners is crowding out educational spending,” Stoll said, adding that, even if funding was trimmed from the state's correctional budget, could be allocated to programs such as healthcare and social welfare rather than education.
“The right way to look at state spending is that funding invested in education turns over three times,” Stoll added. “One just can't make that argument about corrections.”
Reach Staff Reporter Olivia Niland here
Follow Olivia Niland on Twitter here
