by Lance T. Izumi, Fellow in California Studies
Pacific Research Institute
February 1997

Last month, Education Week, the school trade publication, issued a much-publicized report that gave California low grades in several education categories, including student achievement. For example, on the latest national assessment test, only 18 percent of California fourth graders read at a "proficient" level.

Unfortunately, the report came to the tired conclusion that poor student performance is due to inadequate government spending on education. Trouble is, the empirical data tell a different story. Using constant inflation-adjusted dollars, California spent nearly $4,800 per pupil in 1993 versus just over $2,000 per pupil in 1960. That's a real increase of more than 130 percent.

If California has increased its real per pupil spending, why the low student achievement? According to an upcoming study by the Pacific Research Institute, blame can be laid to poor decisionmaking by state lawmakers and government education officials. For instance, billions of state tax dollars are funnelled into approximately 50 special interest categorical programs that benefit only a relatively few students. The Legislature's own analyst has criticized these programs for their high cost, Byzantine rules, stifling of innovation, and lack of benchmarks for success.

Further, government education officials now admit that their decision a decade ago to deemphasize phonics reading instruction was a disaster. The California Journal, the Sacramento public policy magazine, has observed that this decision "left huge numbers of children unable to read proficiently."

Similarly, education officials decided to shelve basic math computational skill-building in favor of "new math" where kids, according to one angry parent, "talk about math a lot but they don't actually do it." Last year, the San Francisco school district admitted that its "new math" curriculum was a significant factor in the drop in math test scores of minority students.

The bottom line: California's education fiasco is the result not of a lack of tax dollars, but of a lack of wisdom on the part of government policymakers.

With a perspective, I'm Lance Izumi.