Teachers: Governor breaking promises

"Our folks feel he declared war," she said.

Schwarzenegger said in his state of the state speech Wednesday night hundreds of schools are failing and 30 percent of students are not graduating from high school.

The state spends $50 billion on education and was expected to spend 14 percent more this year, said Tom Campbell, the state's director of finance. With the new plan school funding will be raised 7 percent, he said.

"That's one way to look at it, but the other way is that we're at the bottom of states," said Ted Lempert, a trustee on the San Mateo County Board of Education.

Lempert indicated a RAND Corp. study released Monday ranking California 31st in per-pupil spending and, when factored for cost of living, 45th.

Schwarzenegger said if he could not pass some of his proposals through the legislature he would turn to voter initiatives, but Lempert said education is already heeled in a voter mandate — Proposition 98.

The 1988 proposition guaranteed 40 percent of the general fund be spent on schools and community colleges. The governor is now poised to break that promise, which San Mateo school districts said this fall the state had broken already with fewer dollars coming in.

"I never had a lot of faith in that in the first place," Bergan said, adding that class sizes could grow and there could be a lack of school materials.

Jack O'Connell, the state superintendent of public instruction, rebutted on Thursday the governor's proposal to base teachers' pay on merit. The move, O'Connell said in a statement, "would make the challenging profession of teaching less desirable at a time when we know that collaboration is the key to improving student achievement."

Lempert refuted the assumption merit-based pay would save money, and said the quality of teachers is so high in San Mateo County it could actually cost the state more in salaries.

Teachers' pay has been scaled using administrative, peer and student evaluations elsewhere in the country, Bergan said, and often have been marred by favoritism.

The RAND Corp. reported the real average annual teacher salary in California during the 2001-2002 school year was about the same as it was in 1969-1970 when adjusted for inflation.

She said basing teacher's pay on test scores is also dicey.

"Teachers are very resistant to test scores here," Bergan said. "The point is that one year you've got a really good class and the next year you've got a class from hell — it's just not fair."

Stephen Baxter can be reached by e-mail at stephen@smdailyjournal.com or by phone: (650) 344-5200 ext. 109. What do you think of this story? Send a letter to the editor: letters@smdailyjournal.com.