Defining Core Services

by Dennis Green

As government and schools at every level suffer deficits and budget crises, they have limited options. They can raise taxes, apply across-the- board cuts, or identify and strengthen only core services. Defining core services in the wake of runaway growth takes real imagination.

Should mail be delivered on Saturdays? Should public libraries be open only on weekends? Should there be fewer fire houses open? What about the aging storm and sewer systems?

Courtney Ruby and Anne-Marie Hogan, city auditors for, respectively, Oakland and Berkeley, both cities facing enormous deficits, recently outlined in a piece in the San Francisco Chronicle, the sorts of questions that citizens need to ask their legislators to consider when making budget cuts. These include:

“1) To what extent is the city required by law to provide the service?

2) To what extent do residents expect the service to be provided?

3) What are the service’s direct and indirect impacts on the residents?”

Those same kinds of questions, I propose, need to be asked of our public schools before we approve new and additional taxes.

In the City of Alameda, for example, most residents would agree that providing streets and parking infrastructure is a critical city service. But many would disagree whether “Economic Development” and the hundreds of thousands of taxpayers dollars spent on this activity provides any real benefit to the residents or existing businesses of Alameda.

What are the core services of the public school district? It would seem on the face of it obvious. Teach the kids, make them literate in reading, writing, science and math, so that after 13 years of education they can qualify for entrance to the finest universities. And yet, in America, between 1/4 and 1/3 drop out before graduating high school.

At the university where I taught freshman English, fully 60% of entering freshmen — the top 12% of public school graduates — failed the entrance exam for writing standard English, and had to take remedial English composition, “Bonehead English” or “Subject A.” You can just imagine how poorly the other 88% express themselves in English prose.

So what’s going on? Well, in the Alameda Unified School District’s new “Master Plan,” a service for “intra-campus student mail delivery” is being eliminated, saving thousands of dollars. But most of the proposals for cost increases are for keeping or providing services that are questionable at best — such as hiring special art, music and P.E. teachers for elementary school students, keeping under-enrolled schools open, etc.!

Over the years, special interest groups have taken our governments and our schools captive, have layered onto the core services they provide a host of “enrichments” and peripheral services that benefit the few at the expense of the many. While that formula is basic to the very nature of public services, when the narrow entitlements outnumber the core services, the taxpayers will revolt.

©2010 Dennis Green