Rearranging the deck chairs

Russell Sadler

You recall the old slogan: When the going gets tough, the tough... rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. Oregon’s legislative Republicans are masters at rearranging deck chairs.

Education is Oregon’s Titanic. Taxpayers spend more on education -- Kindergarten through grad school -- that any other item in the state budget. Until this year, Oregon Republicans functionally controlled both the Oregon House and Senate and, with them, the state’s purse strings for 15 years.

During this period, Oregon’s spending on public schools -- K-12 -- dropped from above the national average to below the national average and classes grew overcrowded in many school districts. The drop below the national average occurred in 1999-2000. Oregon was in 20th place among the states, spending just a bit below the national average, according to U.S. Census figures.

By 2002-2003, Oregon's school spending had tumbled to 31st place, nearly $1,000 below the national average. Oregon spent $8,285 per student, according to recently released U.S. Census figures. The national average spending was $9,244 per student, driven up by spending in states like California desperately trying to recover from their Proposition 13 disaster. Oregon voters rejected a surtax to balance the state budget and Oregon schools closed early that spring.

School spending rose slightly in 2003-2004, only to plunge again after Republicans urged voters to defeat Measure 30, another surtax proposal. The Republican leadership then quietly borrowed $450 million against future income tax collections to keep Oregon’s ship of state afloat.

That was the Republicans’ Secret Plan -- borrowing to pay operating expenses and passing the bill along to future generations.

Education’s financial instability is still Oregon’s most urgent political problem. But Republican legislative leaders act as if they bear no responsibility for causing the problem, much less fixing it.

When revised revenue estimates this winter increased the amount of money the Legislature had to work with, Republican House members of the budget-writing Joint Ways and Means Committee had a tantrum and refused to meet with the Senate members until there was an advance agreement that Oregon’s public schools would get no more than $5.4 billion in the next two-year budget period, even if more money was available to reduce class size or prevent further teacher layoffs.

In the darkest recess of Republican hearts is the fantasy that if they just starve the school of enough money, the teachers’ union will simply disappear and teachers will work for less money like so many private industry employees. But reducing the standard of living of Oregon’s workforce -- private or public -- is a game of diminishing returns.

Oregon’s post-World War II prosperity was built on the GI Bill that sent an unusually large number of Oregonians to college -- many for the first time in their family history. Population growth and the postwar Baby Boom compelled the construction of new public schools and the hiring of teachers to staff them. It changed teaching from a calling to a profession. It is futile to try and turn back the clock to an era when school teachers were single women who quit teaching when they got married and often lived in rooms provided by school board member to keep costs down.

Yet that is an image some self-styled “conservatives” nostalgically evoke when they are confronted with the consequences of their increasingly miserly budgets for the education of Oregon’s workforce. We now send a smaller percentage of students to college that at anytime since World War II and we force students to borrow the money to do it. Two-thirds of all the Oregon high school students who graduate with a B+ average or better now go out of state to college. That is a serious brain drain. And no one in the legislative leadership is talking about stopping it.

So what are our legislative worthies working on? No longer in control of the Oregon Senate, the Republicans’ aspirations lie with the House Education Committee. Its chair, State Rep. Linda Flores, R-Oregon City, assures us, “I am interested in addressing the dynamic that has been affecting money available for the classroom.” Translated? She wants to see more money in the classroom, not in administration. Admirable. How does she plan to do this?

Flores is considering bills reducing the number of educational service districts, repealing the annual state report card on education, eliminating bilingual education, replacing district collective bargaining with statewide collective bargaining, paying teachers based on their students’ test scores, prohibiting bargaining over class size, etc.

Deck chairs. Every one of them. Deck chairs.

If more money should be going to the classroom -- and it should -- what have the Legislature’s Republicans been doing for the last 15 years they controlled the purse strings? They were rearranging the same old deck chairs instead of coming to grips with the politically charged issue of stabilizing Oregon school finance.

By Russell Sadler March 27, 2005