If you had the Triangle of Light (from Tomb Raider), you could just go back in time to 1998, the year of the Claremont II decision. You don’t have that, but you have something almost as good — a filing cabinet.
Related: The Two-Budget Solution to the School Funding Problem
If you drag out your school district’s line-item budget for 1998, you could use it to go back to pre-Claremont levels of spending, and pre-Claremont levels of achievement.
On average, you were spending about $10,000 less per student per year, adjusted for inflation. And your students were doing just as well as they are now, according to standard measures like NAEP.
You could retrieve that budget, adjust it for inflation, and do what you were doing before… while you figure out what you should be doing instead. (This would prevent unscrupulous superintendents from claiming that budget cuts would have to eliminate things like sports and the arts.)
Whatever you were doing then worked as well as what you’re doing now, and cost a lot less. What do you have to lose, except half your tax bill?
