California still lacks school-spending transparency
California still lacks an adequate accountability system to ensure money intended to help vulnerable student groups is actually reaching their schools.
We should be able to answer a simple question: Did money for low-income students, English learners and foster youth systematically result in increased and improved services for those students?
At stake are billions of dollars from California’s Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), passed by state lawmakers in 2013. The state does not require school districts to effectively report on how the money is spent.
In his proposed budget this year, Gov. Jerry Brown acknowledged the call from legislators and hundreds of groups across the state for greater fiscal transparency. And last month state Senate leaders put forward a proposal to prioritize this issue.
Now that there is a willingness to seriously tackle this problem and ensure transparency in K-12 schools, we have to make sure to get it right.
Right now, the question of how the LCFF money is spent cannot be answered, or at least not accessed easily and quickly by the public as the state law intended. This is also despite federal law requiring school districts to track funding from one year to the next and make comparisons across school districts.
As it stands, clear insight into what is happening with this funding can only be obtained through extraordinary efforts such as reports produced by Bruce Fuller, professor of education and public policy at UC Berkeley, on the Los Angeles Unified School District and Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab and a research professor at Georgetown University, on eight California school districts.
What they found, unfortunately, is that the results are mixed on whether additional funding intended for vulnerable student populations is getting to their schools and actually resulting in increased and improved services.
To be successful, the LCFF approach relies on local stakeholders engaging and providing oversight in the local decision-making process. However, to play this critical role, those community members must be able to easily understand the financial trade-offs their school boards are facing and the decisions the districts are making.
To do this effectively, California must adopt a system that clearly shows districts’ funding directions and decisions, especially how money for the state’s most-disadvantaged students is allocated to each school.
Moreover, if investments were planned and the funding was ultimately not spent, it is critical that it be accounted for and then used to support vulnerable student populations in future years.
All of this information should be summed up and presented in a way that allows parents, students, local communities and lawmakers to understand how those investments translate into actual programs and services for kids.
Without these specific elements, local stakeholders will not have the tools necessary to effectively engage and California’s most-disadvantaged students will miss out on the programs, services and opportunities that will support their success.
LCFF, Gov. Brown’s signature education reform, with its investment in vulnerable students and ability for local decisionmaking, is absolutely the right approach for California.
That said, the promise of increased funding for vulnerable students and fiscal transparency was a key reason why many supported its passage. To make that promise a reality, the state, under Brown’s leadership, must adopt solutions that are actually meaningful for community members, policymakers and the broader public.