Senator George Runner
Serving the 17th District which incorporates portions of the Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Ventura and Kern counties.

While there are many groups clamoring for a piece of the state’s budget pie, one of the most persistent is the education bloc. Indeed, districts, unions, and faculty associations are constantly decrying cuts to education. For all their crowing, the budget cuts to education pale in comparison to the massive increases in education spending over the past decade—increases that took place despite a large decrease in student enrollment. In fact, education funding has increased by $15 billion over the last decade even though there were 74,000 fewer students over that same period.

What is most astonishing is that test scores remain abysmally low, dropout rates—especially among low-income minority groups—are unacceptably high, and schools suffer from disrepair. Surely this is not due to a lack of resources, not given the fact that roughly half of the state’s budget is allocated to education. Policymakers (and taxpayers) should not be asking how much more to spend, but rather how our money is being spent.

One area open for potential savings involves giving administrators more flexibility in firing teachers. The current process for firing incompetent and ineffective teachers is so burdensome and biased in favor of teachers that administrators keep them on staff to avoid the high cost of firing them. At a time when districts are laying off teachers, cutting back on programs, and increasing class sizes, administrators cannot even fire those teachers who deserve to be.

The lengthy process to fire teachers costs a district real money. For example, In the Los Angeles Unified School District, about 160 teachers are receiving salaries while their ability to do the job is under review. Rather than simply being fired, tenured teachers are being paid to do nothing as their case slowly winds its way through district bureaucracy. This advantageous arrangement has developed over the years through agreements between the district and teacher’s union, and doesn’t factor in the students or the taxpayers.

While teachers should be protected from unfair treatment at the hands of administrators, the current system is weighted too heavily in favor of teachers against administrators. For instance, the LAUSD has spent more than $2 million on salary and legal fees over seven years for Matthew Kim, a 41-year-old teacher who is accused of sexually harassing teenage students and co-workers. This is money that could have been used much more effectively in the classroom.

There is no reason to grant teachers this absurd level of protection because doing so benefits the bad teachers at the expense of students. Only in government can such a policy be practiced without risk of losing funds—a company with ineffective employees risks losing customers and profit. It is time we started questioning how our tax dollars are being spent on education, how we can better spend the dollars we do have, and whether the education system itself needs to be fundamentally restructured. It is ridiculous to continue throwing money into the education pot and assume that this alone will solve the state’s educational woes, especially when it is so easy to find examples, such as this, of wasted education dollars.