Arianna Brown
October 9, 2012
English 2
Op-Ed: Proposition 30
On November 6, 2012, a very important Proposition will be
on this year’s California electoral ballot; Proposition 30 will be a monumental
landmark in determining the future of what California’s public education system
will either become or continue to be. Come this fiscal year, the state budget
will have to begin making either a continual $6 billion dollar cut that will
initiate the balancing of the state budget, or it will have to generate that
same amount through tax revenue increases, the current proposal of which, by
Governor Jerry Brown, is to instigate new tax increases that would take effect
almost immediately. The tax increases would include the raising of sales tax by
a quarter percent for the next four years until the end of the 2015-16 fiscal
year, and raising the personal income tax of people who earn over $250,000
annually for the next seven years, until the end of the fiscal year 2018-19(Attorney
General of CA). Combined, the public and higher education programs of
California make over half of the state’s budget, so it would, inevitably, be
the first system to see a decrease in funding, and at that, it would also see
the greatest decrease, hence making it absolutely for voter to come together
this election day and vote yes on Proposition 30 to save California’s educational
system.
In the Attorney
General summary of Proposition 30, the general spending reductions for 2012-13state
that if voters reject Prop 30 the cuts to be made will be as follows (in
millions): schools and community colleges will receive a $5, 354 cut, UC’s a
$250 cut, and CSU’s, also, a $250 cut. With these sorts of cuts, public
education, K-14, would be forced to make compensations for the lack of funding
by the state, which makes up about 60% of the budgets for community colleges in
California. These compensations would come in the form of acts such as
shortening the instructional school year, reducing the number of staff employed
at educational facilities, and reducing enrollment, like in the instance of San
Fransisco K-12 public schools, who, if Prop 30 doesn’t pass, will have to cut
10 days of their 2013-14instructional school year have already suffered a $500
decrease per student per year and will, inevitably suffer much more in coming years
with the potential of $6 billion dollars
missing from the budget(Garofoli). With these kinds of reductions the amount of
attention received by each child will decrease, opportunities for asking more
questions and receiving the necessary amount of help will, most definitely, deteriorate,
and the children who already struggle in school, and who’s families don’t have
the means of giving them an alternate education, or the appropriate kind of
help they need to succeed, will fall behind the scenes, and go unattended to,
and therefore they will be unable to get what they need to move up in the world
and know what it means to be well educated and possess the ability to
understand what it means to be an effective, participatory member of society, with
the ability to obtain a fulfilling and satisfying career or lifestyle. In a
system with minimal services, it will be the child who is already deprived the most
that will continue to be deprived and will find it most difficult to break the cycle
of poverty and never know what it means to have the power of enlightenment.
Mr. Lowenthal, a former professor at
CSU Long Beach, stated that, “… he too longs for the days when the quality and
affordability of California’s public colleges helped make our state ‘the West Coast
version of Ellis Island’…” and he stated that, “We don’t have unlimited resources…That
paradigm is gone” (Blumenstyk). It can be safe to assume that when someone with
this much insider knowledge of our educational system states that it’s facing a
time of crisis, that his opinion is one to be taken with the utmost amount of gravity
and severe amount of importance. The opposition would argue that government is
not to be fully trusted with more revenues of any sort, due to its poor
spending within recent years; spendings such as the funding of things like the
$68 billion bullet train that’s started being built, of which only $13 billion
dollars of its funding identified, and also things such as the $54 million
dollars that was held onto by the state parks system while in the position of many
their sites being shuttered (Skelton). The opposition to Proposition 30 would
also argue that is selective and unfair for the government to raise income
taxes on strictly the rich, stating that to do so would be a form of segregation,
preaching that old as time argument that the rich should not be punished for their success and, potentially,
hard work. Both of these arguments have elements of truth to them, but we’ve
moved past the time in which we have the choice to not take action to save the
best resource we have to offer our children and our future the reality is that
the state of California, because we, like the majority of the United States, are
in a severe economic crunch. For those who are better-off and have benefited
the most from California legislation, it would be in their best interest to
bear, and, hopefully, in their better nature, to give something back to the future
of California and help provide that that has clearly helped provide for them in
an abundant way. Likewise, it would be a
silly prospect to sacrifice public education under the pretense that the public
has not liked what has been done with government spending in the past and
therefore should see that as a good enough reason to disregard Prop 30 non-relating
benefits it will provide.
As
a student of the California public educational system myself, I know firsthand
that even the schooling that I partook in in my K-12 experience could’ve been much
more interactive and done much more outreach to children like me, who had a
hard time with getting distracted and staying motivated. Along with this, there’s
also the fact that in being an older sister of both a child who’s currently attending public high school
and who’s excelling incredibly, and of being an older sister to another who’s
finding hardly any motivation to do well and doing very poorly, I see even more
so how the need for outreach and benefit programs for students in need, are ever
increasing and necessary in our ever changing and fast paced world. I see how
it’s success that is acknowledged most in the class room, and how children who are
“failures”, that is to say in an academic and social meaning, are those who are
left the most unacknowledged and forgotten about, and are left as “failures”
before they’re given any sort of appropriate attention and/or assistance. I
know for a fact that if it wasn’t for my mother being as proactive and knowledgeable
as she is for the welling of my youngest brother and the prospect of his future,
the schools that he’s been attending, would absolutely let him go unacknowledged
and continue him through the system without so much as a second glance to helping
him find a way to succeed. It’s in stories like this that I begin to see what
would happen in the case of a child like my youngest brother, in which their
parent didn’t have the knowledge or the recourses to demand and get more out of
the system to see that said child would find a way to success the way my mother
is doing for my brother. It’s for children like those that the loss of so much
educational funding and backing would show its worst and most disappointing effects.
California
is no longer in a place in which the liberty to debate whether it’s right or
wrong to exclusively tax the rich, or
whether the state has done a good enough job with previous spending, is
something that we really possess. Gov. Jerry Brown, states, “This is not about
any other issue. It’s not about the environment it’s not about pensions, it’s
not about parks. It’s about one simple question: Shall those who’ve been
blessed beyond imagination give back 1 or 2 or 3 percent for the next seven
years, or shall we take billions out of our schools and colleges to the
detriment of the kids.” (Skelton) Gov. Jerry Brown realizes that it’s now come
to a time in which politics and our pride have to be set aside, and the only
question that we can really ask of ourselves is whether or not we’re ready to
sacrifice the educational system that’s been so successful and renowned here in
our state of California. He realizes that we can only ask ourselves if it’s
really come to the time at which the direction we choose to take at this fork in
the road is the one in which we either abandon our values of making sure that
each child in California has an optimal opportunity to move away from the
potential poverty or turmoil that they were either born into or that they
obtained through some series of unfortunate events that could never had been in
their control in the first place, or to let that opportunity demise. He realizes
that the question with which we are confronted with in the face of this November’s
ballot of propositions is not to do with the government’s past spending, or the
segregation of tax increases, but that it is strictly to do with our desire to
either save the future of California’s schools and the futures of our children
who attend them, or if we are to let them go short funded and demise in such a
way that only a small part of our population will be able to take part in the benefits
and well-beings of receiving a complete education and to allow only that few to
keep the future of California as bright and promising as we have the potential
to see it today.
