“This is the moment when districts should be placing bets on where they want to be in 2020 to do the most good for their students,” said David Plank, executive director of Policy Analysis for California Education, or PACE, a research center based at Stanford University.
A projected big infusion of state revenue next year will inject much more money into the new K-12 education finance system than school districts and state officials expected at this point.
For the budget year starting July 1, Gov. Jerry Brown is proposing an additional $6.1 billion for the Local Control Funding Formula, the funding system that shifts more authority over operating budgets to local school boards. It also steers more dollars to “high-needs” students – English learners, low-income children and foster youth. The new dollars will take districts much closer, after only three years, to what the Legislature set as full funding when it passed the funding law in 2013.
The Legislature defined full funding as the end of a transition period from the old revenue distribution system, where districts were funded unequally, based often on outdated formulas and a grab bag of earmarked funds, called categoricals, to one where, with few exceptions, funding would be uniform. All districts would receive the same base funding per student, with supplemental dollars flowing to districts according to the proportion of their high-needs students.
Brown’s proposed increase will bring the total for the Local Control Funding Formula to $53.1 billion. That’s about $6 billion ahead of schedule, according to the state Department of Finance.
Read the entire story. To learn more about California education policy, visit the PACE website.
