The squeeze on school funding

Six years ago, California instituted a new and unusual funding strategy for K12 education. The Local Control Funding Formula, which overhauled the previous four decades’ worth of education funding policy, was designed to send more resources to schools with larger numbers of “high needs” students — English learners, lowincome kids and foster youth. The idea behind the new formula was to increase pathways to both income and opportunity for the increasing number of California students who lack both.

But the LCFF has always been controversial, and a new report from the Public Policy Institute of California is only likely to make it more so.

Julien Lafortune, an institute research fellow, found that the formula has been successful in some big ways.

One of the formula’s opponents’ greatest fears has not come true, in the sense that spending increases on highneeds districts has not led to spending reductions in districts with wealthier children.

In fact, spending on all school districts has risen. (That’s due, at least in part, to the state’s strong economy.)

But student spending did rise more in districts with greater needs, just as the formula was designed — by an average of $500 more per student. The big catch? That extra money is struggling to get to all of the students with the greatest needs.

“Many highneed students reside in higherincome districts that do not receive as much LCFF funding,” Lafortune wrote in the report. “Unless these districts allocate additional resources to their highestneed students, the progressivity of (the formula’s) funding is attenuated by hundreds of dollars per student.”

In addition to this unintended consequence, the formula has also failed to shift one critical component of improving education at districts with large numbers of highneeds students: the quality of their teachers.

Highpoverty schools are still more likely to rely on inexperienced teachers, with lower salaries, than wealthier schools are. In 201718, the share of novice teachers in districts with higher needs actually increased relative to wealthier districts.

Studies have consistently found that more experienced teachers lead to more student achievement as well as student success on other metrics, like school attendance. This seems like a relevant part of the reason for why California continues to struggle to both increase educational achievement and close the achievement gap between demographic groups.

Funding incentives could help, but the truth is that there are few easy solutions to the problem of hiring and retaining experienced and effective teachers — especially for schools with the largest numbers of vulnerable students. Unfortunately, fixing this problem may prove to be the most important — and difficult — way to improve student achievement.

Still, there are ways policymakers can improve the funding formula.

Highneed students at wealthier schools may not need the same amount of funding as those at schools with a high concentration of poverty — there’s plenty of evidence suggesting that highpoverty schools require more of the state’s resources, focus and attention. But this means that wealthier schools must be pushed to distribute their resources to the students that need them most.

Right now, there’s not enough district accountability for their spending choices via the formula. The state needs to create standards and, if necessary, impose regulation to ensure that resources are being used effectively.