A handful of recession-ravaged states have kicked off a new fiscal year without balanced budgets, leaving public school educators in limbo as they struggled to manage spending amid dwindling resources and political bickering over unprecedented budget gaps. The crisis remains most severe in California, which, as of last week, faced a $26.3 billion deficit that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, and the Democratic-controlled legislature have been tussling over. The standoff came to a head over education spending when the governor proposed that lawmakers suspend Proposition 98, the minimum-funding guarantee for public schools that has largely been sacrosanct since voters approved it in 1988. But California is hardly alone in its fiscal woes. From North Carolina, which remained in budget deadlock last week, to Arizona, where leaders finally sweated out a compromise that preserved K-12 spending, the forecast remains grim, according to Todd Haggerty, a research analyst for the National Conference of State Legislatures, based in Denver.