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California’s way of funding schools, the Local Control Funding Formula, was not designed to be perfect. That’s because most legislation requires a series of compromises necessary to minimize opposition, maximize support and win the necessary votes for passage.
In LCFF’s case, one of those compromises, the creation of the Local Control Accountability Plan, or LCAP, could eventually doom the reform.
To understand why, it’s important to revisit the initial rationale for LCFF
The old funding model was managed from Sacramento and included popular grants for the arts and music, English learners, career and technical education and more. Large and/or politically connected districts, nonprofits and statewide groups would lobby sympathetic lawmakers for their own grants. Over time, this model grew increasingly complex, limiting local discretion over spending and stifling innovation. Despite these problems, it had remarkable political resiliency. Lawmakers were incentivized to protect existing grants and got political credit for creating new ones. Very few stakeholders were interested in changing this dynamic and risk losing their favorite grants and programs.
So, it wasn’t enough for the Brown administration to argue that LCFF was better because it was simpler, more equitable and gave districts more control over their money. They had to prove that it would fund many of the same programs as the existing model.
Most education advocacy groups believed that this could be achieved by requiring districts to use the grants generated by high-need students to fund services that addressed their needs. But education groups representing labor and management wanted complete financial flexibility. To avoid this requirement, the education establishment collaborated with a few legal advocacy groups to create the Local Control Accountability Plan (LCAP), arguing that it would accurately document how they were spending money on programs and services.
The last decade has provided strong evidence that this decision was based on flawed assumptions, beginning with the presumption that school districts are the best recipients of funding for high-need students. While district bureaucracies are certainly closer to students than Sacramento policymakers, they aren’t as close as principals and teachers. Unlike schools, district leaders face powerful interest groups that lobby them for spending like higher salaries and districtwide programs. That’s why most targeted grants like federal Title I funding are sent to districts but then quickly distributed to high-poverty schools. Without similar requirements, it’s likely that billons in LCFF dollars that could have funded school-based services were spent on district-level costs such as salaries, benefits, pension obligations and more.
Second, policymakers assumed that districts would accurately document spending on services in the LCAP. But LCAPs were never formally connected to school district budgets, which include ongoing costs like salaries and benefits. In fact, the processes for developing LCAPs and budgets occur separately on different timelines. Almost every analysis of LCAPs has found that their financial and programmatic information cannot be verified and the documents themselves are largely incomprehensible.
Third, they believed that districts would focus on improving student outcomes without clear state-level goals and metrics to guide their decision-making. Instead of big, important goals
Finally, and most importantly, they assumed that all of this would improve outcomes for the most vulnerable students. Here, the evidence is limited, especially given the size of the funding increases. Given the persistently low academic performance of most high-poverty districts and the state’s sizable achievement gaps, today’s elected officials can fairly ask whether our state has seen a commensurate return on these massive education investments.
It’s no wonder that over the last several years, elements of the previous school finance regime have roared back. Elected officials who didn’t create LCFF and are suspicious of “local control” have created a whole new set of targeted grants like the governor’s community schools grant. Districts are now subject to far more onerous legalistic requirements for their LCAPs, which are intended to show that they’re using their funding for high-need students.
District leaders have bitterly complained about these shifts. On one level, they are right that the advocates and policymakers focused on the LCAP are just doubling down on a failed strategy. But they haven’t offered any alternative, other than “leave us alone.”
The danger for them is threefold. Increasing levels of scrutiny and regulation; ever more targeted grants that limit their discretion; and, as the years pass, the belief that local control has failed high-need students, requiring more aggressive state and county oversight. A few years from now, they could end up with the worst aspects of the old finance model and the new one.
There is another way.
A decade later, we have a lot of evidence on how to make the formula better. Perhaps a substantial portion of LCFF funding, such as concentration grants (for schools with more than 55% high-needs students) should flow directly to schools based on their poverty level, like Title I funds do. State leaders could establish a few measurable academic and social-emotional priorities that districts would address in strategic plans rather than LCAPs. Instead of a potpourri of grants that limit local discretion or new LCAP compliance requirements, lawmakers could create incentives, such as additional weighted funding for districts willing to create new programs such as language immersion schools. They could even establish financial rewards for districts based on student outcomes.
There are many possibilities, but for the Local Control Funding Formula to survive over the long term, it must always be able to answer a very basic question: What is it doing to improve the education of California’s highest-need students?
•••
Arun Ramanathan is the former CEO of Pivot Learning and the Education Trust—West.
The opinions expressed in this commentary represent those of the author. EdSource welcomes commentaries representing diverse points of view. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.
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Comments (9)
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John Affeldt 4 months ago4 months ago
Arun, as always, you raise some intriguing ideas, particularly around effective school-level uses of supplemental and concentration grants. That consideration should not, however, automatically rule out that the next best investment for high-need students may in fact be a districtwide investment over piecemeal school site ones, e.g., districtwide professional development for teachers of EL students. As to the complaints about the complexity and readability of the LCAP, I'd refer folks to a commentary I dropped … Read More
Arun, as always, you raise some intriguing ideas, particularly around effective school-level uses of supplemental and concentration grants. That consideration should not, however, automatically rule out that the next best investment for high-need students may in fact be a districtwide investment over piecemeal school site ones, e.g., districtwide professional development for teachers of EL students.
As to the complaints about the complexity and readability of the LCAP, I’d refer folks to a commentary I dropped on this site 8 years ago. https://edsource.org/2015/in-exchange-for-local-flexibility-accountability-plans-will-require-work/91073
I called for then what we have renewed a call for this year: a more readable, interactive, multi-layered web-based LCAP that interacts, as you suggest, more closely with district budgets.
Another highlight from that piece:”Districts and other local educational agencies have just been relieved of a slew of bureaucratic compliance mandates tied to dozens of old state categorical programs. Those mandates required hours of accounting, tracking, reporting and general “bean-counting” of dollars spent. They limited district spending to the multiple, mostly narrow confines of the various categoricals and carried, as well, the threat of losing funds because someone bean-counted wrongly. Now districts can meld the old pots together to spend the funds much more flexibly, free from the strict and multiple prerogatives of Sacramento. . . .
“The deal – that many folks now seem to be conveniently forgetting – was that in exchange for dropping all of that work and for having all this new flexibility districts would be fully transparent around their spending and engage community stakeholders in spending decisions.
“Guess what? That is going to take some real work, people.”
Kim Kenne 4 months ago4 months ago
Arun,
I wanted to clarify on Title 1 – while there are rules about how much should be spent on services to students, that is different than sending the funds to the school site to be budgeted by the principal and the School Site Council. In our district, only about 35% of our district’s Title 1 funds are sent directly to the school sites for their decision-making.
Robert Koller 5 months ago5 months ago
Prop 13 is the real issue. Most commercial property has not had a rate increase since 1977…think Disneyland. Well Fargo is the largest commercial land owner. I think they could afford a bit more.
Replies
Arun Ramanathan 5 months ago5 months ago
We’ll see if there is an elected official in California willing to take on Prop 13 in the coming years. It’s really the source of our state’s boom and bust cycles
Eric Premack 4 months ago4 months ago
Robert: It's true that many commercial properties have not undergone a recent change in ownership and their assessed value is low. It's false, however, to imply that education funding in California has been cut or hasn't increased. The fact is that per-pupil funding for K-12 education has increased dramatically in California, even after Proposition 13, and even after adjusting for inflation. To the extent that we have problems in our K-12 system … Read More
Robert: It’s true that many commercial properties have not undergone a recent change in ownership and their assessed value is low. It’s false, however, to imply that education funding in California has been cut or hasn’t increased. The fact is that per-pupil funding for K-12 education has increased dramatically in California, even after Proposition 13, and even after adjusting for inflation. To the extent that we have problems in our K-12 system currently, it’s not due to an absence of increases in funding.
Boraxo 5 months ago5 months ago
The premise is flawed. All students deserve equal funding under the 14th Amendment. LCAP needs to be replaced by the old per student formula with no adjustments. We should not penalize students based on their location. In fact that was the basis for the Serrano decision which took school funding away from local districts.
Eric Premack 5 months ago5 months ago
While Arun has correctly identified a significant problem, his proposed solution won't fix it. If the state did "target" the supplemental and/or concentration funding on specific sites, most districts likely would respond by simply swapping-out other general-purpose funds in order to meet whatever the spending levels are across their school sites. The real culprit here is a combination of (1) collective bargaining, (2) salary schedules driven by seniority rather than actual competence, and (3) … Read More
While Arun has correctly identified a significant problem, his proposed solution won’t fix it. If the state did “target” the supplemental and/or concentration funding on specific sites, most districts likely would respond by simply swapping-out other general-purpose funds in order to meet whatever the spending levels are across their school sites.
The real culprit here is a combination of (1) collective bargaining, (2) salary schedules driven by seniority rather than actual competence, and (3) the fact that most local teacher contracts call for site assignment based on seniority. These three factors lead to large spending discrepancies because the more senior, higher-paid teachers opt to teach at schools serving the most affluent students. Until these three factors are addressed, there always will be disproportionate spending at schools serving more affluent students.
Unfortunately, the influential school labor and governance lobbies protect this inequitable system with a phalanx of lobbyists and self-described “equity” advocacy organizations. If the self-described equity advocates actually care about equity, they would lobby for (1) excluding school site assignment as a subject of bargaining, (2) mandating that all funds, not just supplemental/concentration funds, be directed to the schools that generated them, and (3) linking the collective bargaining process and the local control planning (“LCAP”) process into a single, transparent process with public participation and transparency rather than secrecy at the labor negotiating table.
Real equity advocates also support providing more public education choices to parents/families, including mandatory inter-district attendance laws, chartered schools, etc.
Replies
Arun Ramanathan 5 months ago5 months ago
Eric. I don't think districts swap out Title I. It goes directly to the schools. I believe it is in the realm of the possible to shift a part of LCFF funding to the school level - the concentration funding being the most likely. Right now, that model leaves out a lot of the highest poverty schools in CA because it ignores districts with two sides of the track. The ones with wealthy and high … Read More
Eric. I don’t think districts swap out Title I. It goes directly to the schools. I believe it is in the realm of the possible to shift a part of LCFF funding to the school level – the concentration funding being the most likely. Right now, that model leaves out a lot of the highest poverty schools in CA because it ignores districts with two sides of the track. The ones with wealthy and high poverty schools. They don’t meet the poverty level required for concentration funding but their high poverty schools should. A truly cruel flaw in the model.
John Perryman 4 months ago4 months ago
The Every Student Succeeds Act eliminated the Federal Requirement that 85% of Title I moneys flow to the school site for additional services. It contained a loophole that allows Title I money to be used for district level "curriculum" administrators." Sacramento City Unified School District responded by adding "Curriculum" to the job titles of scores of administrators, and very little Title I money flows to the school site for actual services that help … Read More
The Every Student Succeeds Act eliminated the Federal Requirement that 85% of Title I moneys flow to the school site for additional services. It contained a loophole that allows Title I money to be used for district level “curriculum” administrators.” Sacramento City Unified School District responded by adding “Curriculum” to the job titles of scores of administrators, and very little Title I money flows to the school site for actual services that help children.
California law still requires that Title I money flow to the school site, but the State Dept of Education has ruled that the LCFF intent of local control supersedes state accountability laws and will not enforce the existing CA state law that specified the pre-ESSA Title I regulations.