So all our per-taxpayer spending patterns have been very consistent, year in and year out, which brings us back to the initial question: Why has spending per student taken a nosedive since the passage of Proposition 13? The answer is actually fairly straightforward. If you look at the relative size of the tax base in California, that is, our real per-capita income compared to the rest of the country, we used to be quite rich, as shown bottom left. In 1968, per-capita income in California was 21 percent higher than that in the rest of the country. Today, it's about 4 percent higher. It would be easy to blame bad policy choices by the people who run California, but I don't think that's the problem. It's really part of a very long-term convergence in state incomes nationwide. In 1965, for example, the states of the former Confederacy had, believe it or not, per-capita incomes of about 75 percent of the national level. Now they're up to about 90 percent. And you see similar dramatic convergences across all the states. Per-capita incomes in the rich states are growing, too, but incomes in the poor states have grown faster. And obviously if we grow, say, half a percent less quickly per year over a long period of time, we'll lose ground, in relative terms, as the poor states catch up. So the rich states are still rich, in absolute terms, but they just aren't as rich as they used to be in comparison to the poor states. What this means for us is that the affluent California of 1968 could devote a relatively small share of its resources to public schools and still outspend the rest of the country on a per-pupil basis. The more-average California of 1997 has not changed its spending habits and so falls short. Our history of chintzing out has caught up with us, and we can no longer get more while spending less.

Is anything in these data connected with Proposition 13? There's that hiccup around 1980, but that's about it. I think any effect attributable to the loss of revenue associated with Proposition 13 was small and transitory.

Well, what about the third whammy I mentioned at the beginning—the Serrano decisions? Have they had an effect? To refresh your memory, the Serrano decisions basically mandated equal per-student expenditures, to within $100 or so (it's now to within about $300, because of inflation), in all California school districts. As usual, California led the way with this, but by now there have been 24 other states that have had Serrano-like decisions. These things have to wend their way through the courts, so about 11 states—it depends on how you count—have actually implemented Serrano-like equalization schemes and by now have had some experience with them. I had Jamie Bishop, a SURF (Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship) student from Purdue, look at them last summer, and most of those states, if anything, had actually shifted more money into education. In 1998, for example, the people in New Hampshire had their local-property-tax basis of funding public education declared unconstitutional, and they came that close to going with a state income tax. They somehow managed to avoid it, but they raised another $100 million—which is a lot for a little state like that!—to come up with the additional monies they needed. (They have less than four percent of our school population, so this is roughly comparable to us raising over $2.5 billion.) Furthermore, over the last 30 years virtually every state in the country has seen a substantial shift in public support from local to state-level sources. These days, about two-thirds of public elementary- and secondary-education money comes from the state. So local property taxes are becoming less tightly linked to educational spending.

To sum up, I think Mr. Schrag and the conventional wisdom are wrong. In the greater scheme of things, the effects of Proposition 13 and its companions on educational spending today are negligible. Instead, I see amazing patterns of continuity, both in the extent to which we're willing to tax ourselves, and the budget shares that various functions of state and local government receive. Budgetary data from many different areas have this quality. There's a lot of weeping and gnashing of teeth every year as the budget battles occur, but when the smoke settles, everybody gets about what they got the year before plus a little more. A friend of mine, the late Aaron Wildavsky, invented a theory about it he called incrementalism. It happens every time—look at what Governor Gray Davis proposed to do with the additional four billion dollars that the accountants say have miraculously accumulated in California's treasury as a result of the strong economy. Guess what? Education's going to get about $1.3 billion of it, which is right in line with the proportion it's always received. So even today, at the margin, when you give the state government an additional four billion dollars and watch 'em spend it, it gets divided up in very much the same manner that the budget always has been. I'm not saying that California's public schools don't have problems, but I can't trace their plight to Proposition 13, or really see Proposition 13 as all that significant an event in the long term of California history.

As the economy improves, we will catch up somewhat with the rest of the nation, but we will never see significant gains until we start spending a larger share of the budget on education. We may be moving that way—education went up a little this last year—but there's no guarantee that that will continue to happen. There are some specific things we can try that might improve students proformance. [For more thoughts on this]

Professor of Political Science D. Roderick Kiewiet got his BA at the University of Iowa in 1974. He came to Caltech as an assistant professor in 1979 while still working on his PhD, which he got from Yale in 1980. He has written numerous papers on Californian and Russian politics, both of which many observers find to be inscrutably Byzantine. He has written one book, Macroeconomics and Micropolitics: The Electoral Effects of Economic Issues, and coauthored another, The Logic of Delegation: Congressional Parties and the Appropriations Process, (with Mathew McCubbins of UC San Diego) for which they shared the American Political Science Association's Kammerer Award for the best book on U.S. national policy. Despite his assertion that he is a latecomer to the study of education, he has long been interested in student welfare. He's served as dean of students (1992-96) and on half a dozen student-related committees, including his current stint on the Core Curriculum Steering Committee. This research is supported by the Haynes Foundation and the Public Policy Institute of California.
His son goes to a private school.