California Prop 98

California Prop 98

Proposition 98

Education has always been a priority for many Californians. Making sure each student is getting sufficient attention, facilities, materials, and teachers to help them succeed in their education and invest in their future. To ensure these things for each child and future generations, Californians in 1988 passed Proposition 98. In this essay, I will discuss proposition 98, what it does and how it works. Who benefits from it and who is hindered by it and how proposition 98 changed the budget process.
Proposition 98 passed in 1988, guaranteed schools grade K ' 12 and community colleges a considerable part of the states revenue. For every one dollar paid to the state, these select schools would take forty cents, 40 percent, from each dollar. The proposition also gauges the economy in three different tests to ensure a minimum amount of money still goes to the schools even during a recession. If the economy cannot budget out the money to the schools, written in the prop is a way to suspend, through a two-thirds vote by the state legislators, payment until the economy is back to normal. When the state suspends or misses payments to the schools these payments are backlogged into a “maintenance factor”. The maintenance factor is all the money owed to the schools from prop 98 that is to be paid later at a future time (1).
Proposition 98 benefits the California Teachers Association the most. Although a good amount of money is being mitigated to schools in California for student materials and activities, California ranks in the bottom ten in many categories for per student spending (3). One may ask where forty percent of the states revenue, $170 billion in 2007 (2), is going then if not to the students. The answer is to the teachers. Teacher salaries in California remain among the top 10 in the nation (3). Although this is not all the teacher’s fault, the high cost of living in California makes it necessary for most of the money gathered from prop 98...

Similar Essays