Starving The Schools

Every spring around this time, Gregory Gorbach gets fired. He currently teaches 10th-grade science at Folsom High School outside Sacramento, and he's good at his job. Last month, right on schedule, the principal called him in and handed him a pink slip. But sometime over the summer, once the school district figures out how much money it really has to spend, it may hire Gorbach again. This pattern doesn't do a lot for his morale. "I like teaching," he says, "but if I have to, I'll leave it. I don't feel teachers should have to carry society's burdens."

Here are some of the burdens Gorbach carries: in four of the past eight years, in schools in Ohio and New York as well as California, he has taught without any textbooks at all. Those that he absolutely needs, he pays for himself. "Homework is pretty well out of the question," he says. At one point he had an annual paper budget of 2,000 sheets for five classes of 28 children each. So if each student used one sheet a day, he would run out in three weeks. "If I want to give a test, I buy the paper myself." Most years he spends several hundred dollars of his own money on basic supplies. "And I've been in schools where the budget is a lot smaller."

There is nothing unusual about Gorbach, except that he may be luckier than many teachers. During this spring season of fiscal bloodletting, school ) districts are slicing budgets, and a sense of panic is spreading. One by one, districts are cutting foreign languages, art and music classes, even after- school sports. Class sizes are expanding, and the school year is getting shorter. And every one of these trends is about to get worse, as states are forced to choose between extra cops or extra classrooms, health care or welfare, higher taxes or less of everything else.

Back in election year 1990, when education was championed as the answer to everything from reducing poverty to increasing competitiveness, rare was the politician who proposed real cuts in school spending. But 1991, the year of recession, falling revenues and rising red ink, has changed all that. Governors are realizing that they cannot saw away at basic services while leaving education untouched. Republican William Weld in Massachusetts, Democrat Mario Cuomo in New York and Independent Lowell Weicker Jr. in Connecticut, hardly ideological bedfellows, have all decided to cut school budgets. Like other embattled Governors, they are also trying to shift resources from rich school districts to poor ones and encourage creative and cost-effective proposals for education reform.

In California, a rich state with weak public schools and a $12.6 billion budget shortfall, Republican Governor Pete Wilson has asked the legislature to suspend a law that guarantees education 40% of the state's outlays. Last week teachers, parents and politicians flooded the capital to protest his decision. "I'd give up a pay raise if they'd lower my class size," said fourth- grade teacher Melissa Stepanick of Fruit Ridge Elementary School. "I can't be effective with 33 kids." That is no wonder when 1 in 4 California children lives in poverty, 1 in 5 speaks English as a second language, and the school population is growing by 200,000 a year. Says Assemblywoman Delaine Eastin: "It is ridiculous to talk about the competitiveness of California in some global market overseas when we are tearing the heart out of our education system."