Bob Blattner / commentary
February 10, 2013

Bob Blattner

Bob Blattner

Fresh on the heels of having saved – at least for now – California's public education system through passage of his Suggestion 30, Governor Jerry Brown is rededicating himself to the task of violent down and redesigning the twisted maze that currently serves as the Chiliad-12 funding organization. This is a wonderful goal, but enthusiasm for the general concept may unfortunately be blinding proponents to the specific, significant flaws in the administration'southward proposal.

Although the "Local Control Funding Formula" consumes the 165 pages of education budget trailer neb, the funding organization at its heart has only iii essential components:

  • A "base grant" funding level generated past every student, intended to comprehend the costs of a standard education;
  • A "supplemental grant" providing an additional 35 percent above base funding in response to the boosted needs of students who are from low-income or foster homes, or are English learners;
  • A "concentration grant" augmenting supplemental grant funding past upwards to l percent in schoolhouse districts where more half of the enrollment is eligible for supplemental grants.

And in that location are three major defects, also.

  • The funding levels being proposed have no relationship to what is actually needed to provide the education that the land demands and the people expect.
  • The proposal appropriately gives high-needs students additional funding, but information technology would exercise so unequally, creating new disparities that this reform was supposed to eliminate.
  • Finally, while many of the electric current system's flaws are eliminated nether the administration'south proposal, two of the most costly and indefensible inequities of the status quo are being grandfathered into the new model.

The most egregious flaw is the get-go – that the funding levels being proposed have nothing to practice with what it takes to actually deliver an adequate education. This would be less of a problem if the funding level erred on the high side. However, under this proposal, hundreds of districts barely brand information technology dorsum to their 2007-08 funding levels in real dollars, if they go in that location at all.

The proposal claims to be restoring basic school funding levels for cadre programs serving all students at 2007-08 levels, only information technology actually eliminates about $2 billion in funding for basic educational necessities: coin to buy textbooks, train teachers, repair buildings, stock libraries, hire counselors, hold smaller classes in high school. While some districts with large numbers of high-needs students will go this money back as supplemental aid, districts without those students will forever lose funding for central services to which all students are entitled. That is non fair. And it'due south not equally if 2007-08 funding levels were adequate; only from the vantage bespeak of the Great Recession do they appear generous. In fact, funding was so clearly deficient in 2007 that a lawsuit was already well under way challenging, on constitutional grounds, the adequacy of California's fiscal back up for public schools.

The target now being proposed by the administration for providing a core bookish program – the base grant – averages in the neighborhood of $7,000 per student, far below the sufficiency level suggested past empirical enquiry or past the practices of other economically advanced states, which routinely outspend California past l percent or more. Information technology makes no sense to design a new funding model from the basis up and incorporate from the start an inadequate funding target.

Some volition argue that it's irresponsible to target a level of funding beyond our current power to pay. But in that location isn't fifty-fifty enough money to fund the proposal the governor has put on the tabular array; information technology will take an estimated seven years of revenue growth before his plan is realized. So why not comprise a goal that at least targets an adequate funding level, instead of backing into a number that is indefensibly insufficient?

The second defect has to do with how funding for high-needs students is distributed because of the "concentration grant." No one disagrees with Dark-brown, when he quotes Aristotle – "Equal treatment of unequals is not justice" – and that some students require additional resources to meet the special challenges they face. The problem with this particular proposal, even so, is that information technology doesn't treat these high-needs children the same. Even if they come from identical backgrounds and nourish similar schools, some would get 50 percent more than others in "supplemental" funding – a gap of more than $1,200 per educatee – based on the school district they attend.

The rationale behind this unequal support for similar students is the supposition that the challenges facing at-risk students increase when they are grouped with higher proportions of similar students. Opinions and research findings vary as to the incidence and the magnitude of this issue. What is irrefutable, however, is that it is far more than costly to provide equivalent remedial services to low-income students who make up but a modest fraction of a school'south total student population. As an instance, providing specialized training and equipment for a classroom teacher costs far more per student when only 25 percent of the class qualifies for additional funding for that purpose, as compared to another in which every kid generates the additional funding.

If every child generated the same supplemental grant, the second classroom in this case, with four times as many eligible students, would receive four times as much equally the first. It is difficult to defend the assumption that each child in that second classroom would also require a 50 percentage crash-land in per-student funding levels. The governor ignores that the economies of scale well-nigh certainly outweigh whatever additional costs required for classes with high concentrations of at-run a risk students.

The administration has tacitly acknowledged there are no hard numbers behind its concentration grant proposal, inasmuch as each of the three iterations floated to date have differed markedly. The most contempo version, released last month, halves the effect of the concentration grant compared with prior versions. Merely just equally turning down the volume doesn't transform a bad song into a good song, reducing its impact doesn't turn a bad policy into a good one. Information technology but isn't fair to give identical students from identical backgrounds funding supplements that vary past as much every bit 50 percent simply because of the roll of the dice every bit to what schoolhouse district they happen to attend.

Finally, the proposal's choice to preserve two of the state's largest and most notoriously caitiff categorical programs belies any claim to real reform. Ane of these programs, the "Targeted Instructional Improvement Grant," sends out more than than $850 million a year. But while some districts receive hundreds or even thousands of dollars per student, nearly – including some of the most impoverished districts in the state – receive $x per student or less. Of the thousand or and so school districts in the state, four account for nigh 70 percent of the funding.

Domicile-to-school transportation funding (busing) is virtually as random, locked into funding levels  that predate Proposition 13 and that have never been adapted for enrollment growth since. Consequently, identical districts now accept state funding rates differing by x times or more. These two programs, totaling about $ane.5 billion in annual funding, have been called the "poster children" for everything wrong with the current system. Keeping them in place and withholding the revenue from redistribution on more than equitable lines is not only unfair, only besides counters the goal for any weighted pupil formula to be, in the words of Brown education adviser and State Board of Didactics President Michael Kirst, "simple, transparent, and hands understood."

There is fiddling dubiousness that these flaws – and others – in the governor'south proposal tin can be rectified, merely only through a thorough and thoughtful assay of what the proposal does, and doesn't do, to run into the legitimate needs of all of California's schoolchildren. While not necessarily easy, it is by no means impossible to quantify the costs of providing a cadre didactics programme for all students, and remedial services for at-risk students, and the impact that diverse concentrations of such students take to this cost. It isn't necessarily easy, but it is past no means impossible, to stand up to the political backfire from districts that profit under the status quo in gild to constitute an equitable new model free from the deficiencies of the old one.

All Californians owe information technology to today's students and tomorrow's to endeavor and get it right. Because if nosotros've learned annihilation from the electric current model, it's that the only thing harder than getting it right at the start is fixing it downward the road.

For the final 25 years, Bob Blattner has been actively involved in California public education policy, and is acknowledged as an good in K-12 schoolhouse finance. Before founding his own consulting and lobbying house in 2006, he served as vice president of Schoolhouse Services of California, and before that as a reporter at the Sacramento Union, Education Vanquish (where he was founding editor), and the Sacramento Bee, where he was awarded CTA's John Swett Award in 1989 for coverage of California teaching bug.

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