Schwarzenegger’s Budget Gets a Pink Slip from Californians: We Want More for Our Schools

By Lisa Schiff

The Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) recently released its annual survey of California residents and their attitudes towards public education. While Californians are most worried about jobs and the overall state of the economy, public education still ranks high on the list of important issues, coming in second. In fact, education is the area that our fellow residents are most concerned with shielding from the Governor's budget cuts.

The PPIC finding of the high placement of public education among the list of priorities, however, is not a simple show of support. Rather, the study has identified the types of serious concerns residents have about our public education, concerns that are all the more significant in light of how important those same residents feel public education is to our state. In other words, because public schools are critical, the problems we see facing them are critical too. People are concerned with the quality of schools, the drop-out rate, funding levels, how well current funds are being used, and the lack of leadership at all levels in Sacramento.

One of the most interesting aspects of the PPIC studies, and this one is no exception, is the way in which they disaggregate their survey respondents, creating cohorts along a variety of socio-economic, political and regional factors. A refreshing marker of the quality of this study is that parents of children enrolled in public schools are also identified as a discrete group.

This is significant, because presumably respondents who are directly involved in the public schools system have additional, different experiences and information upon which their opinions are based. For instance, while there is consistency across all respondents calling for improvement in the overall quality of the system, public school parents tend rate the schools their own children attend more favorably than the entire system than general respondents rate their local schools.

The ability to go back and forth between these vantage points, as well as having an overall agglomerated view, is incredibly valuable in understanding how different segments of the states view our public education system as a whole and what the different specific issues are that various groups are concerned with. This kind of data lets us clearly see how people can have such contrasting experiences and expectations of similar public systems. For instance, African-Americans, Latinos, and people living in the Los Angeles region all see the high-school drop-out rate as more significant than other groupings. (p. 11)

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