State Education Shouldn't Hold Its Breath
Confronted with growing public opposition, Gov. Schwarzenegger has done what every smart politician does: He has pretended to change by decrying the fact that California now spends more on prisons than higher education and called for a constitutional amendment to reverse this situation and commit at least 10 percent of the state budget to higher education (the UC and CSU systems) and limit prison funding to 7 percent. This is just the kind of "ballot box budgeting" that the governor used to condemn. Moreover, since the governor makes the budget, Schwarzenegger could just have proposed these allocations in the budget he produced a few days later. He didn’t. The fine print is even more cynical: The provisions would not take effect until 2014, long after he left office. The amendment could be suspended by the governor by declaring a "fiscal emergency." The amendment could be waived by a 2/3 vote of the Legislature, the same vote it takes to pass the budget. And there is more: The amendment is tied to privatizing prisons…
Read full article [here].
by Stanton Glantz, The Daily Californian.