Proposition 1D: Kindergarten - University Public Education Facilities Bond Act of 2006. - recommend No (with caveat)
Proposition 1D is the fourth of five infrastructure propositions put onto this year's ballot by the legislature. As its title suggests, Prop 1D is a bond measure designed to raise money to modernize older and build new K-12 and university-level facilities. It would issue $10.4 billion in bonds, which would cost about $20.3 billion to pay back.
Money from Prop 1D would be split about 70:30 between K-12 and university education. At the K-12 level, $3.3 billion would go into modernization, $1.9 billion would go into new construction (with up to 10.5% of that for seismic retrofitting), $500 million would go to building of new charter schools facilities, another $500 milion would go to career technical education programs, $1 billion to new construction at severely crowded schools, and $100 million to grants to promote use of materials that "include the attributes of high-performance schools" (I was unable to find a definition for this term). At the university level, $1.51 billion would go to community colleges, $890 million would go to the UC system, and $690 million would go to the Cal State system.
Prop 1D is another straightforward bond measure, as its relative brevity shows. It shares the same problem the other bond measures share, that of building up substantial debt. At the moment, I can't support accruing that kind of debt to build new facilities.
This brings me to the caveat mentioned above. I have looked, extensively, into research that relates money spent up front on education to social and economic benefits downstream. There are clear correlations between having education at all and economic prosperity and social gain. For example, completion of a high-school-level education correlates with reduced rates of drug use and crime, and increased salary and economic output. Projections on "what would have happened if the U.S. hadn't funded as much education" suggest that we'd be at about 80% of our current economic output. The Rand study on universal preschool demonstrated that it would have been a net economic gain for California. With all that said, I have been unable to find anything that supports the idea that improving physical facilities leads to an improvement in graduation rates and educational success.
That may sound like an obvious connection, but after substantial searching I have not yet found supporting evidence. I encourage anyone who reads this and does know about such studies to please point me toward them. It might change my mind. In the meantime, I must go with my "no" recommendation on Prop 1D.
Prop 1D has received funding from groups that support various public education institutions (individual groups supporting each UC campus, each Cal State campus, and one group that represents community colleges as a whole) and from a plethora of construction firms.
You can examine financial support for Prop 1D here.
You can read the full text of the proposition here.
You can read my reviews and recommendations on the other propositions by clicking here.