Is California’s big investment in needy students paying off?

California’s new system for funding public education has pumped tens of billions of extra dollars into struggling schools, but there’s little evidence yet that the investment is helping the most disadvantaged students.

A CAL matters analysis of the biggest districts with the greatest clusters of needy children found limited success with the policy’s goal: to close the achievement gap between these students and their more privileged peers. Instead, test scores in most of those districts show the gap is growing.

The test scores echo a broader and growing concern about the Local Control Funding Formula from civil rights groups, researchers and legislators.

That formula sends more money to schools with higher concentrations of foster youth, kids learning English and students from low-income families.

But four years after it was adopted, there are few signs the program is working, and questions have arisen about whether the $31 billion invested so far is being spent effectively.

The concern has created a high-stakes confrontation with Gov. Jerry Brown, the formula’s architect, because his goal of shifting more responsibility to the local level means the state does not track basic information, such as how much grant money each district gets for needy students and how they spend it.

“The state has spent tens of billions of dollars trying to lift poor kids and not one penny evaluating whether any of it is working,” said Bruce Fuller, an education policy professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “That’s outrageous. We’re heading into year five. It’s time to discern what’s effective and where we’re just wasting money.”

Brown, who once championed the new system as “revolutionary,” declined to grant an interview, and his office did not address many of the questions posed to them about the formula’s performance.

Last month, however, speaking at a Capitol news conference, the governor defended the state’s limited role in monitoring the formula’s impact.

“We want the activists, the parents, the teachers to go to their local boards and put pressure on them,” he said.

“They can drive their own cars, park in the local parking lots and argue there.”

“But if there is something that we need to handle, we will,” he added.