L.A. Daily News, May 21, 2005

"There are three kinds of lies: Lies, damn lies, and statistics."
What Mark Twain did not say, when he quoted British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli in the 19th century, was how often statistics are used to bolster the second kind of lie.

Teachers' unions continue running TV commercials that portray Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger as having "shortchanged" the schools and "broken his promise" on education spending. The ads say Schwarzenegger slashed school funding by $2 billion.

This claim is rather hard to reconcile with a proposed budget that actually contains $3 billion more for education in fiscal year 2006 than was spent this year. And Schwarzenegger wants to throw in an additional $175 million from an unexpected revenue windfall.

But then, the figures routinely used to show how little California spends per-pupil in K-12 public schools are impossible to reconcile with reality.

The state Department of Education and lobbyists for the teachers' union never miss an opportunity to say that per-pupil spending in California lags far behind the national average. What they conveniently forget to mention is that their numbers are derived from general-revenue funds and property-tax spending only, and do not count huge federal subsidies and other sources of school funding, such as the lottery.

For example, the Pacific Research Institute found that, between 1990 and 2000, California schools received nearly $4.5 billion in federal money. None of that was counted in arriving at a per-pupil spending estimate for fiscal year 2000 of $6,025 -- far below the national average of just under $7,600.

But when all sources of school funding are taken into account, even allowing for adult education and other non-K-12 spending, California's actual per-pupil outlay is roughly $7,300. That's just a few hundred short of the national average, and 20 percent more than the official numbers.

And by law, that funding has increased every year since.

Another remarkable figure never alluded to when education special interests are massaging statistics to validate damn lies is the huge disparity of per-pupil spending among the various school districts. In 2000, the Los Angeles Unified School District spent more than $9,000 per student, almost $2,000 more than the national average. And for what? High dropout and illiteracy rates, and test scores consistently far below the median level.

The most amazing example of high spending and low test scores was in Sausalito, where the school district had a mind-boggling $16,500 to spend on every K-12 student. Again, the result was that large majorities of pupils scored below the 50th percentile on elementary and high school tests.

Beginning to get the message?: There is no direct relationship between per-pupil spending and quality education.

There is, however, a major correlation between test scores and how school money is spent. We can throw dollars at public education until doomsday, and it will all be for naught until taxpayers insist their hard-earned money be funneled into programs that work.

PRI's Center for School Reform targets teacher training that emphasizes subject-matter competence, implementation of the state's own academic content standards and school choice as areas where spending has paid dividends in higher test scores and student proficiency in other states. California now has begun testing teachers using higher standards, but only for new hires. This is one reason our state received an F grade from the National Council for Teacher Quality in 2004: The good teachers get tarred with the same brush as the bad.

You would never argue that someone who spends $100 on potato chips at the grocery store is getting better nutrition than someone who spends $70 on healthful food. Why should our schools get away with such inverted logic?

You would also never skate by with telling state tax collectors that your income is only what your job pays you, when in fact you have many other reportable sources of money. Yet the state's Department of Education should be able to use the same smoke-and-mirror tactics?

Don't blindly believe ads trying to scare you into thinking our schools are being shortchanged. They're not.

Per-pupil revenue increased by nearly 30 percent during the 10 years ending in 2003. More federal money has been made available. Our students, however, are being cheated, as are the taxpayers who fund a wasteful and failing system.

Accountability is something we try to teach our kids. Is it too much to expect from those who purport to educate them?