California is facing a budget crisis, with an estimated $14 billion deficit for the current year. Obviously, cuts need to be made. The governor has proposed to suspend proposition 98, part of the funding system for public education, as one of the first steps to a balanced budget. Such a suspension would endanger our schools, especially poorer ones, and we cannot afford to let the proposed changes pass in the legislature.

Prop 98 mandates that a minimum amount of the California budget is to be spent on education, and governor Schwarzenegger seeks to eliminate this mandate in order to make cuts to education. During this budget crisis, a minimum spending level is of utmost importance, however, in order to ensure public education doesn’t bear the brunt of the cuts.

Another objective of prop 98 is to make education spending rise with the rest of the economy. The procedure used to allocate funds often contradicts this goal, however. The prop 98 formula is overly complex and has often given very low funding in years of financial success, and very high funding in years of financial crisis.

The governor’s actions to try to regulate this problem through changes to prop 98 are responsible and well intentioned from a fiscal perspective, but give little thought to the impact on California public education. Education funding should be last on the list for budget cuts, and should under no circumstances fall beneath the minimum amounts from prop 98.

While proposition 98 does need reform, the governor’s proposals aren’t the correct approach to fixing the problem. We need to maintain minimum spending for education during hard financial times and streamline the spending formula to better mirror economic growth. Prop 98 needs to be simplified, not suspended.