LATimes Warns State Schools Face Serious Funding Crisis

The Los Angeles Times (12/20) says in an editorial that California public schools "have been backed into a corner. Until Gov.-elect Jerry Brown spoke last week about how shocking the state's budget crisis is, and how yet more of the financial pain might fall on schools, the state had been pretending that education was going on as usual, with some snips and some trims and some new freedom to spend sums previously earmarked for specific programs. But that is a gross understatement of the severe problems facing California's schools, and we're no longer at the point where they can make their finances whole by cutting extraneous items and putting the administrative budget on a diet." The public "must be made aware that there is a yawning gap between what it thinks schools can deliver and what schools can pay for with current funding."