Through quiet negotiation with the state's largest teachers union and other education groups, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has managed to shave $2 billion off the amount the schools would have been entitled to next year.

Score him a strategic victory: He's a little closer to closing a gargantuan budget gap, and he has neutralized, at least for now, a lobby that could have become an outsized thorn in his backside. Score the K-12 schools a near-miss: They skate by with a guarantee of some increased funding -- though less than they normally have had under their constitutional guarantee -- and will be wounded relatively less by this fiscal crisis than other interests, such as higher education and social services.

But as long as we're keeping score, let's look at the bigger picture on K-12 school funding. It was captured in illuminating detail yesterday by an Education Week publication called "Quality Counts," which for the past eight years has compared the states to each other on various measures of school quality.

California remains stuck pretty much where it has been since Education Week started keeping track: just a few Southern states from being dead last. Our $6,258 annual expenditure per student, by the report's tally of 2001 expenditures, put us seventh from the bottom. Only Mississippi, Tennessee, Florida, Nevada, Arizona and Utah spent less. The national average was $7,376. High-spending states such as New York and Connecticut devoted closer to $10,000 per student each year. The comparisons adjust for regional cost differences.

There's never any guarantee, of course, that by spending more on schools, the taxpayers will automatically get higher achievement in return. Education Week reports, in fact, that California spent more than most states on special education -- $7,526 vs. $7,194 -- while its students test below the national average in English and math.

But it's safe to say that if the system starves long enough, the effects will show. Research by the Public Policy Institute of California has shown that this state devotes a smaller proportion of state and local government spending to schools (22 percent) than does the average of states in the rest of the country (25 percent). We do that even while our student population is larger -- 8 percent more students per capita -- than the rest of the nation.

What does that mean for schools and schoolchildren? When you combine that lean schools budget with relatively high teacher salaries, the result is bigger class sizes, worse facilities and skimpier programs. California schools have 25 percent fewer teachers per pupil than the rest of the country. Anybody with a kid in school can attest to what else a lot of them don't have -- art, music, decent science labs, crossing guards, the list goes on.

Are we surprised, then, that our academic performance lags behind the national average, with only a quarter or fewer of our fourth-and eighth-graders showing proficiency on national tests of English and math? Nobody who has watched the state's fiscal free fall would have expected 2004 to be the year California made strides toward adequate education funding. But the governor's deal to cut just $2 billion from the schools' entitlement won't do anything to help us gain ground.