Rick Simpson didn’t write Proposition 98, the complex formula that determines how much money in the state budget goes to K-12 schools and community colleges each year. But for three decades after its inception in 1988, Simpson was an expert in its implementation as a senior adviser on education for nine Assembly Speakers.
Now recently retired, he’s pitching a tax proposal that would liberate schools from Prop. 98’s constraints. He says the only realistic way for schools to raise significantly more revenue is to give districts more authority to tax themselves. It will take a constitutional amendment, which he hopes that either the Legislature or voters, through an initiative, will place on the 2020 ballot. At this point, though, it’s just talk. No leaders or groups have stepped forward to embrace it.
Simpson is selling the concept at a time when the school districts are projected to head into a period of rising expenses and slow revenue growth. Within the next year or two, the Local Control Funding Formula, the 2013 law that Gov. Brown championed, will reach full funding, which means that all districts will have revenues restored to pre-2008 recession levels, plus the cost of inflation. Districts with high proportions of low-income students, English learners, homeless and foster youths, who benefit from the local control formula, are already above that minimum level.
“All we did with LCFF was redistribute money, not raise more of it or deal with the question, Are we investing adequate resources in education?” Simpson said.
California, Simpson said, remains in the bottom tier of states in education funding — the exact ranking varies by methodology — and Proposition 98 won’t change that. Prop. 98 has provided an average of about 42 percent of General Fund revenue, though the percentage has varied from year to year, subject to California’s boom and bust revenue cycle, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office.
“One could make the argument that Prop 98 had a goal — getting to the average of top 10 states in student spending,” Simpson said. One section of Prop. 98 indirectly refers to that aspiration. But the formula itself wasn’t created to actually achieve it, he said.
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