Confronted with Los Angeles Unified School District’s declared “high risk” of insolvency amid shrinking enrollment and expanded hiring, the union rails against a “fake independent analysis” and advocates for two distinct wealth taxes.
Californians facing not one but two wealth-tax initiatives on next week’s ballot may well be asking themselves how all these tens of billions of forcibly extracted dollars will be spent.
The answer, according to new analyses and a growing sense of fatigue, is grim.
Consider the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the nation’s second-largest. In July, Debra Duardo, the L.A. County Superintendent of Schools, labeled the LAUSD a “lack of going concern” due to persistent operating deficits, worsened by fresh salary increases for unionized workers. The state’s long‑standing Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team (FCAMT) then released a scathing report in September, deeming the district to be at “high risk” of fiscal insolvency. The reason? Payroll was rising even as enrollment was collapsing.
“From 2019-20 through 2024-25,” the report found, “noncharter school enrollment declined from 440,365 to 369,830 students, a decrease of approximately 16.0%. Over the same period, total [full-time equivalent jobs] increased from 60,344 to 64,148, or approximately 6.3%. As a result, the number of students per total FTE declined from 7.3 to 5.8.”
This incongruent math is a feature, not a bug, of Californian education spending.
“From 2002 to 2023,” Reason Foundation Managing Director of Education Reform Aaron Garth Smith and Managing Director of Government Finance Jordan Campbell wrote in a study this June, “California led the nation in K-12 spending growth.” And when exactly did K-12 enrollment peak in the LAUSD? 2002!
Between fiscal years 2013 and 2023, Smith and Campbell found, LAUSD enrollment fell by 34.7%, yet “inflation-adjusted expenditure on employee compensation—including salaries, benefits, and other wages—grew by…27%.” In a city, county, and state dominated by public sector unions (the California Teachers Association has already spent more than $65.5 million this election cycle), collective bargainers sit across the table from the politicians they helped elect, leaving only taxpayers and public-school families on the outside looking in.
United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), one of the most radical teachers unions in the country, reacted to the FCAMT “high risk” report with an innumerate defiance redolent of President Donald Trump.
“This fake independent analysis disparages the school board for rightfully addressing the needs of working people who face some of the worst housing and childcare costs in the country,” UTLA Vice President Julie Van Winkle told the Los Angeles Times. The union’s website called the report “a so-called ‘analysis'” that used “a rigged scoring system with a predetermined outcome.”
The UTLA broke with the statewide California Teachers Association in backing Proposition 40, the retroactive 5 percent tax on billionaires’ paper wealth that would send 90 percent of the proceeds toward healthcare spending. (“California’s schools, hospitals, and clinics need funding. Billionaires do not,” Van Winkle explained.) But while the controversial Prop. 40 is looking wobbly at the polls, amid caterwauls over big money in politics, the much less ballyhooed Prop. 3, which makes permanent some wealth taxes that were sold as temporary in 2012, looks set to sail through without much resistance. Literally.
Spending on Prop. 3, L.A. Times education reporter Howard Blume concluded this week, “adds up to more than $81 million for and about $5,500 against.” For those keeping score at home, that’s a ratio of more than 14,700 to 1, brought to you primarily by teachers unions, who incidentally are lying about the initiative.
“Strict accountability [will] ensure every dollar gets to classrooms, not Sacramento politicians,” vows the Yes on 3 website. Nonsense: The higher income-tax brackets, which begin at $371,479 for individuals and $742,958 for couples filing jointly, just feed into California’s general fund, of which 40 percent goes to transitional kindergarten through community college.
Californians who routinely support such tax hikes and spending increases may flatter themselves that they’re taking the side of children over rapacious billionaires, as well as the odd hundred-thousandaire. But the results produced by these massive money transfers have stubbornly failed to adhere to the alleged beneficiaries.
In 2024–25, the California Policy Center noted in July, “approximately 54 percent of tested LAUSD students did not meet or exceed the state standard in English language arts, 63 percent did not meet it in mathematics, and 73 percent did not meet it in science.” With results deflation has come grade inflation, meaning that Los Angeles public schools are increasingly passing students who don’t meet grade-level standards.
Far from acting as a bulwark against heartless spending cuts, California’s never-ending won’t-you-think-of-the-children tax-and-spend cycles are blunting economic growth and creating hollowed-out monuments to the folly of central planning. Just as the LAUSD was beginning its dizzying enrollment descent, the district launched a $20 billion, eminent domain–abusing school-construction program that was routinely characterized as “the largest public works project in the western United States.”
More than a thousand homes, plus such landmarks as the Ambassador Hotel and Hollywood Star Lanes (from The Big Lebowski) were plowed over, only to create an overall building stock that now stands half-empty, incurring massive sunk costs.
As Blume detailed this week in the L.A. Times, “A modern, vacant and vandalized $34-million public school sits next to Los Angeles Unified School District headquarters — a campus paid for with taxpayer-financed bond money, but so burdened with debt and damage that it’s not clear that anyone can afford to move in. The compact, aesthetically striking campus is marred by widespread graffiti. Vandals have punched holes in floors, walls and ceilings over the last five years. Recent photos of the inside appear to show puddles and stains from water damage and char marks from fire. The district is paying at least $20,000 a month in security and maintenance, and last year calculated having spent more than $1 million to secure and maintain the building.”
Good luck, California!
