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  • On California funding formula’s 10th anniversary, celebrate progress but double down on fairness

    On California funding formula’s 10th anniversary, celebrate progress but double down on fairness


    Credit: Allison Shelley / EDUimages

    Former governor Jerry Brown headlines a party next week toasting the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), California’s ten-year-old reshaping of school finance, the nation’s most ambitious effort to target public investment toward narrowing disparities in student achievement.

    In 2013, Brown and the Legislature recast state funding to shift dollars toward districts that serve greater shares of low-income and non-English-speaking children. The logic remains compelling: educators labor to bring all children over proficiency hurdles in reading and math, so greater resources must go to students who have the farthest to climb.

    Party goers in Sacramento do have cause to celebrate. The extra funding has worked to lift performance among students living in areas of concentrated poverty. Test scores, graduation rates, and college readiness have all seen increases stemming from the extra funding, according to research from the Learning Policy Institute and the Public Policy Institute of California.

    Education funding also soared under both Brown and Gov. Gavin Newsom, fueled by a robust economy, the voter-approved Proposition 98 set aside for schools, and pandemic-era aid from Washington. State funding for K–12 education has grown more than 40% since 2017.

    But California’s schools still produce grossly unequal results among racial and economic groups. While reading proficiency among fourth graders climbed from 40% to 49% between 2014 and 2019, with slightly greater gains for low-income students, racial disparities failed to budge. White children in California have continued to achieve at three grade levels above Latino peers over the past quarter century, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress — gaps were even larger for Black children. The picture is similar for math.

    The good news: Brown’s funding formula helped sustain progress made by educators and kids since 2002, continuing to boost average test scores, especially in districts with concentrated poverty. The sobering news: inequalities among students remained unmoved despite gains for all demographic groups in reading and math.

    So, what have we learned over the past decade that could inform more potent school finance policies?

    First, only a small slice of local control funding — just 7% — is dedicated specifically to districts serving the largest concentrations of low-income families. For some, the impact was eye-popping: districts in which nearly all students are from impoverished families enjoyed a 13% gain in the share meeting grade-level standards. But most low-income students do not attend schools in these districts and so receive much less targeted funding. And schools with concentrated poverty in economically mixed districts lose out on this additional funding.

    Policy makers and researchers remain in the dark over whether local boards mirror the spirit of the formula when allocating dollars between schools, and this holds consequences for kids. If districts spend dollars equally across all students, then low-income kids only partially benefit, even as the formula targets districts with more high-need students.

    Newsom did target fresh funding to low-performing schools this year, dubbed the equity multiplier. The dollar augmentation is modest, but the new mechanism recognizes “that we have not sufficiently structured the reform to get dollars to highest-needs schools in a consistent way,” Jessenia Reyes, a policy analyst at Catalyst California in Los Angeles, told us.

    Second, how districts choose to deploy their funding matters. Local control funding operates like a dump truck, unloading extra dollars to the district — it’s not a backpack, where targeted dollars follow the child. Districts do not always target extra funds to the students who generate them: for each dollar a school generates due to its socioeconomic “need,” spending goes up only by 63 cents in the average district; the rest is spread more equally across all other schools in the district. Data suggest this targeting, or lack thereof, varies considerably across districts.  

    Los Angeles Unified — pressed by equity advocates — has pioneered a Student Needs Equity Index that pinpoints the most challenged schools, then distributes $700 million in flexible dollars to their principals and teacher leaders. Despite equaling less than 5% of the district’s yearly budget, this progressivity among schools has helped to boost reading scores for English learners.

    When local boards award extra funding to their most hard-pressed schools, contentious politics may come to light. Spreading new dollars across all schools holds broad appeal to labor leaders and parents. But “if we are really trying to implement equity, some kids may not need the [additional] resources,” said Ana Teresa Dahan, managing director of GPSN, the nonprofit formerly known as Great Public Schools Now.  

    Third, as we learn more about how spending varies among schools, we arrive at the effects of something quite sacred: teacher seniority. More experienced and highly qualified teachers tend to migrate to more affluent schools. So, serious efforts to equalize school budgets require incenting the best teachers to remain committed to poor communities.

    Even when districts focus extra resources on their most challenged schools, principals often assign more senior teachers to high-achieving kids, as we found in Los Angeles. More robust targeting of funds among schools may fail to narrow gaps within schools until principals are better coached to weigh strategic options.

    Yes, policy leaders deserve to pause and party on, celebrating a decade of high hopes and discernible progress in elevating disadvantaged students. But avoid the hangover. Fresh policy options and sober attention to school-level spending and staffing are urgently needed.

    •••

    Bruce Fuller, professor of education and public policy at UC Berkeley, is the author of When Schools Work.
    Julien Lafortune, an education economist, is a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California.

    The opinions in this commentary are those of the authors. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.





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  • Early literacy funding raises reading scores of California’s lowest performing schools

    Early literacy funding raises reading scores of California’s lowest performing schools


    An elementary student reads on his own in class.

    Credit: Allison Shelley for American Education

    Research by Stanford University found that 75 of the lowest-performing California elementary schools that received funding from an out-of-court settlement made significant progress on third-grade state Smarter Balanced tests this year.

    The results indicate that the $50 million the schools received for effective reading instruction in the primary grades carried over to third grade after two years of funding. 

    “The fact that we were able to budge third grade comprehension assessments with a grant that was focused on TK, kindergarten, first grade, second grade, with a light touch on third grade, is amazing,” said Margaret Goldberg, literacy coach at Nystrom Elementary in West Contra Costa Unified, one of the schools that received the Early Literacy Support Block Grants, or ELSBs.

    The 75 schools had the lowest scores in the state in 2019 on the third-grade Smarter Balanced test. They received the money, averaging $1,144 per year for the 15,541 K-three students, under the settlement in the lawsuit, Ella T. v. the State of California, brought by the public interest law firm Public Counsel. It argued that the state violated the students’ constitutional right to an education by failing to teach them how to read adequately.

    Eligible schools were chosen from various districts, including Los Angeles Unified, San Francisco Unified, West Contra Costa Unified and others. The funding promoted the literacy instruction known as the “science of reading,” which includes explicit phonics instruction in kindergarten and first grade, along with the development of vocabulary, oral language, comprehension and writing.

    Schools had the flexibility to choose to fund literacy coaches and bilingual reading specialists, new curriculum and instructional materials, expanded access to libraries and literacy training for parents. Schools were encouraged to participate in professional development in the science of reading and seek guidance on their literacy plans from the Sacramento County Office of Education, which oversaw the grants.

    Released Monday, the study concluded that the block grants “generated significant (and cost-effective) improvements in English language arts achievement in its first two years of implementation as well as smaller, spillover improvements in math achievement,” wrote researchers Thomas Dee, a professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, and Sarah Novicoff, a Stanford doctoral candidate in educational policy.

    Students in the funded schools were scoring at the bottom of the scale in 2019, and, despite significant progress, few had achieved reading at grade level in 2023. Dee and Novicoff credited the early education grant for increasing third graders’ achievement by 0.14 standard deviation, the equivalent of a 25% increase in a year of learning, compared with demographically similar students who did not receive the funding. Researchers also found a similar gain by comparing the scores of third graders in the schools with the grants with third-grade scores of fifth graders from the same schools who had not benefited from the funding.

    The Smarter Balanced reports results in four performance bands: standard not met, standard nearly met, standard met and standard exceeded. The schools with the grants succeeded in raising scores by 6 percentage points from the lowest category to standard nearly met, significantly reducing the number of students requiring intensive help. Still, after two years of funding, only 13.5% of students are proficient in reading, having met or exceeded standard. That’s 3 percentage points higher than in 2018, and 1 percentage point above pre-pandemic 2019. Schools with similar students not receiving the grants remain below where they were before Covid, according to the research.

    Dee and Novicoff were unable to analyze why some schools performed better than others, which could be useful in shaping the state’s policy on early literacy. Unlike some states with comprehensive literacy plans, California does not collect any assessment data that school districts collect from TK to second grade. And, under the rules that the state negotiated in the settlement, participating schools were not required to submit their assessment data to the California Department of Education; most voluntarily did in the second year, but many did not in the first year. It’s also unclear how many schools adhered to their literacy plans or focused on less effective or ineffective strategies for improvement. 

    Researchers used the only complete set of state-level data to which they had access — third-grade reading comprehension assessments. Those scores may have understated the progress in reading that many schools made on district assessments in the first and second grades.

    Public Counsel filed the Ella T. v. the State of California lawsuit in 2017, and the settlement went into effect during the height of the pandemic. Dee said the early success of the program during Covid, amid teacher shortages and extremely high chronic absences, made the results even more striking. 

    The third graders who took the Smarter Balanced test in 2023 “were the hardest hit by the pandemic. They were in kindergarten when it was interrupted by Covid,” Goldberg said. “They attended first grade remotely. In second grade, in schools like mine, which chose to adopt new curriculum, their teachers had never taught the curriculum before.”

    Dee noted the academic gains from the grant were relatively large compared with the cost, making the program quite cost-effective — an effect size that is 13 times higher than general, untargeted spending.

    Goldberg said the grant was efficient “because early intervention is cheaper and it’s more effective than waiting until third grade or later grades to provide reading support.”

    The grant funding ends in June 2024. Dee said whether schools can sustain improved scores without specific funding support is an open question. Novicoff mentioned that the grant schools may be able to continue receiving support for literacy coaches and reading specialists if they receive funding from the new Literacy Coach and Reading Specialist Grant program. 

    Instead of being based on performance, the literacy coach grants are awarded to schools with high unduplicated pupil percentages, or the number of students who are eligible for free or reduced meals, are English language learners or are foster youth. Schools eligible for an early literacy grant may also qualify for a literacy coach grant. 

    Dee said design and implementation are key if the state hopes to continue or scale this success. This means paying close attention to school-based literacy action plans, oversight and resources with some flexibility. “This is a story about how schools that get money tend to do better — money does matter in schools, and this is another piece of evidence into that bucket,” Novicoff said, “but it also shows that what we can do with the money and how you structure that funding really does matter.”





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  • It’s time to fix the fatal flaw in California education funding formula

    It’s time to fix the fatal flaw in California education funding formula


    Credit: Allison Shelley for American Education

    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 — replacing a complex, inequitable funding model with a simpler model that targeted grants based on student need and concentrated poverty.

    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 — like grade-level math achievement — policymakers created a mishmash of state priority areas (many of which can’t be measured) and told districts to include them in their LCAPs. Predictably, most districts paid lip service to these priorities in their LCAPs and then wrote separate strategic plans. At this point, most district leaders probably can’t remember what the state priorities are. If everything is a priority, nothing is.

    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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  • Jan Resseger: Administration Cancels Federal Funding on Short Notice

    Jan Resseger: Administration Cancels Federal Funding on Short Notice


    Jan Resseger reports on an unprecedented stoppage in federal funding of Congressionally authorized school programs. School districts across the nation were informed on June 30 that the funding for five important programs would be withheld on July 1 pending further review. The administration really would like to terminate the programs but since they can’t do that under current law, they decided to withhold funding for undetermined reasons for an indeterminate length of time.

    She writes:

    Last week, this blog reported, “Chaos and Confusion at U.S. Department of Education May Threaten School Programming this Fall.”  This week the situation intensified.

    “The U.S. Department of Education told states in a three-sentence memo on Monday afternoon (June 30) that when federal funding for the next school year arrived July 1, as it typically does and is supposed to under federal law, funding for five key programs would not be there.”  Education Week‘s Mark Lieberman published that explanation on Tuesday, July 1, 2025, the day the federal funding failed to arrive.  Lieberman adds: “Those formula programs—worth $6.8 billion in total—are under review, the memo said, without specifying when the review would wrap up, what the review is aiming to determine, or whether the funds will go out once it’s finished.”

    The problem is that the funds aren’t merely late; the Trump administration is trying to cancel the programs altogether.  The NY Times‘ Sarah Mervosh and Michael Bender explain: “The administration has suggested that it may seek to eliminate the nearly $7 billion in frozen funding. Russell Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, said during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing last week that the administration was considering ways to claw back the funding through a process known as rescission. The administration would formally ask lawmakers to claw back a set of funds it has targeted for cuts. Even if Congress fails to vote on the request, the president’s timing would trigger a law that freezes the money until it ultimately expires. ‘No decision has been made,’ Mr. Vought said.”

    In an article published on Monday afternoon, right after states received the memo declaring that funding would not arrive as scheduled, Education Week‘s Lieberman provides some background: “(I)n an unsigned email message sent after 2 p.m. Monday… the Education Department informed states that the agency won’t be sending states any money tomorrow from the following programs:

    • “Title I-C for migrant education ($375 million),
    • “Title II-A for professional development ($2.2 billion),
    • “Title III-A for English-learner services ($890 million),
    • “Title IV-A for academic enrichment ($1.3 billion),
    • “Title IV-B for before-and after-school programs ($1.4 billion.).”

    Lieberman adds: “In a separate email sent (Monday) at 4:27 p.m., the department told congressional staffers that it’s holding back funds from all the programs listed above, as well as grants for adult basic and literacy education ($729 million nationwide). Questions about the changes, the letter says, must go to the Office of Management and Budget, not the Education Department.”

    The elimination of these programs had been proposed in the Trump administration’s formal FY 2026 budget proposal for next fiscal year—which, if passed by Congress, would fund public schools beginning in fall 2026. In proposing to cancel the programs this fall, the Trump administration is attempting to eliminate programs already promised under an FY 2025 continuing budget resolution. (To make things even more complicated, it’s important to remember that the “One Big Beautiful” bill is a tax and reconciliation bill and not, in fact, the current year’s FY 2025 federal budget—which remains unaddressed by Congress.)

    Last week Mark Lieberman clarified the schedule by which federal public school funding is supposed to be delivered: “The federal fiscal year begins Oct. 1, but for most education programs, half the upcoming year’s allocated funding flows to states each year on July 1. Congress still hasn’t agreed on a final budget for the current fiscal year, even though it’s almost over.  Instead, lawmakers in March approved a continuing resolution bill that broadly carries over funding levels from the previous fiscal year. That means states and schools have been expecting for months that funding levels for key federal programs would closely mirror last year’s numbers. Thousands of school districts and nearly 30 states have already locked in their own budgets for the upcoming fiscal year.”

    In his coverage on Monday, June 30, of the complex wrangling behind the holdup of funds for the current school year, Lieberman places responsibility not on Linda McMahon or staff at the Department of Education, but instead on Russell Vought, who was the co-author of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and who now heads the Office for Management and Budget:

    “Lawsuits are likely to follow, as they have for similar funding changes the administration implemented earlier this year. Federal law prohibits the executive branch from withholding congressionally appropriated funds unless it gives federal lawmakers an opportunity to approve or reject the move within 45 days. The U.S. Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the power of the purse—but top administration official Russell Vought, whom Trump appointed to lead the Office of Management and Budget, has said he believes restrictions on impoundment are unconstitutional. On Capitol Hill last week, Vought said the administration hadn’t decided whether to ask Congress for permission to impound education funding.”

    Last week, the Washington Post‘s Jeff Stein, Hannah Natanson, Carolyn Johnson, and Dan Diamond predicted that Russell Vought will attempt to interfere with spending as the year continues: “Though billionaire Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service drew significant attention for its speedy cuts, Russell Vought, Trump’s budget director, is expected to be key to the coming fight over spending. Vought has spearheaded the administration’s campaign to assert sweeping executive power over spending, arguing that the Impoundment Control Act, the law at issue now, is unconstitutional. The Trump administration has justified its cost-cutting measures by pointing out that the United States is $36 trillion in debt, although the type of funding that officials have targeted represents a small fraction of the overall budget.”

    Although costs for federally funded 21st Century Learning Center after-school programs, federally funded professional development programs for teachers, federally funded classes for English language learners in public schools, federally funded programs for the education of the children of migrant workers, and federally funded academic enrichment programs make up only a minute percentage of the federal budget, the abrupt obliteration of these programs will cause enormous disruption right now as public school leaders are getting crucial programming for their schools in place for fall. Public schools are incredibly complex institutions. In addition to providing special services for disabled students, school boards and school leaders patch together local, state, and federal dollars for programming to serve the specific needs of their students, which differ by region, by the income level of a school district’s families, by the primary languages of the families in their communities, and by enormous inequity in states’ investment in public education.

    Clearly Russell Vought neither understands nor cares how the programs he is is cutting will affect students. Clearly he fails to grasp how these cuts will interfere with hiring already underway for the upcoming school year or how the absence of these funding streams will undermine the stability of public school operations come September.

    On the other hand, say I, maybe Russell Vought knew exactly what it mean to freeze funds at the last minute. Maybe his intent was to sow chaos and disruption. Maybe he wanted to send a message to Congress: we can withhold funds Congress appropriated without regard to the law. Maybe he wanted to send a message to states and school districts: If the program is important to you, pay for it yourself. Stop expecting the federal government to send you money.



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  • Trump freezes grant funding, upending school budgets

    Trump freezes grant funding, upending school budgets


    California State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond speaks at a press conference Tuesday, July 1, 2025.

    Credit: Kindra Britt/California County Superintendents

    Top Takeaways
    • The Trump administration announced it would withhold $811 million in grant funding the day before the money was to be released.
    • The grants fund teacher training, migrant education, school enrichment courses, summer school and after-school programs, and support English learners.
    • California education leaders call the funding freeze a political move that hurts the neediest children.

    The Trump administration’s decision to withhold $811 million in grants to California schools is a political move that weaponizes federal funding, California education leaders said at a press conference Tuesday.

    California isn’t the only state in President Donald Trump’s crosshairs. The White House has frozen a total of $6.2 billion in grants that Congress allocated to support English learners, teacher training, after-school programs and migrant education in schools in every state.

    State departments of education were notified of the funding freeze in an email sent on Monday, just a day before the money was scheduled to be released to school districts. The 84-word message said that the federal grants weren’t “in accordance with the President’s priorities,” said California State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond at the press conference.

    The president intends to withhold the funding approved in the 2024-25 federal budget while the grants are reviewed, according to Politico. In the meantime, Congress is set to approve a budget for 2025-26 that could eliminate the grants altogether or lump them into a block grant.

    “The president and his administration continue to pick on and bully those who are the least among us — students, those who rely on health care, those who rely on the federal government to have a chance at a great education and a great life,” said Thurmond, flanked by the leaders of various state education organizations. “And we won’t stand for it. It will not happen on our watch.”

    The loss of grant funding will impact students across the state, “in red and blue counties, in rural and urban areas,” said David Goldberg, president of the California Teachers Association.

    Among the programs at risk are Supporting Effective Instruction grants to improve the quality of the nation’s educators; 21st Century Community Learning Centers, which fund high school extended-learning programs; English language acquisition; migrant education; and Student Support and Academic Enrichment, which funds music, technology and other programs schools can not afford on their own. 

    Although the federal grant funds are only a small portion of the $8 billion in federal funding California receives for education, their sudden loss is a major disruption for school districts that have already budgeted funds for the upcoming school year.

    Freeze unravels school funding plans

    The U.S. Department of Education action will withhold $110 million from Los Angeles Unified, the state’s largest school district, said Superintendent Alberto Carvalho on Tuesday.

    “The majority of funds are targeting student populations that have some degree of association with fragile communities, and certainly, immigrant communities,” Carvalho said. “And, all this is happening today, as summer school continues, and (we) have immigration enforcement actions around our schools, spreading fear and intimidation.”

    LAUSD serves the country’s largest population of immigrant children and English learners, including through federally funded programs like the Migrant Education Program, which provides additional support for children of migrant agricultural workers.

    LAUSD recently approved an $18.8 billion budget that includes state and federal funding for the upcoming school year. 

    “The vast majority of districts across the state have already approved budgets, and the (Trump) administration knows very well what they’re doing,” Carvalho said. “They’re creating a disruption to the orderly operation of school districts by imposing a potential reduction after the approval, which would force us to reopen the books.”

    Carvalho said the district has “the reserves necessary to fill the gap in the short term,” caused by the $110 million rescission, and will not make immediate reductions to personnel or programs.

    To prevent long-term cuts, he said the district will join the expected legal action by California Attorney General Rob Bonta in hopes of an injunction and the release of withheld funds. 

    Other districts, such as West Contra Costa Unified in the Bay Area, will have a more difficult time managing without the federal funds. The district was able to approve a balanced budget for the upcoming school year, but only by spending down its reserves, said board President Leslie Reckler.

    The district has relied on the funding provided by the grants for years for a range of services, Reckler said.

    The announcement comes as the district is still digesting the fallout from being informed by the U.S. Department of Education that a five-year $4.2 million federal grant it had been awarded to place mental health interns in several schools would be cut to only one year for $600,000. The department told the district that the grant was no longer “aligned with the current goals” of the administration.

    Migrant education at risk

    The Monterey County Office of Education operates several migrant education programs during the summer break. The programs are for students whose parent or guardian is a migratory worker in the agricultural, dairy, lumber or fishing industries and whose family has moved during the past three years for work.

    The programs include academic intervention programs and tutoring to help students catch up with English, math, or other subjects; health services; family literacy programs for parents and guardians; and exchange programs for teachers from Mexico to support students who travel back and forth between Mexico and the U.S.

    The Trump administration is withholding $121 million in grants for migrant education in California.

    Constantino Silva, senior director of migrant education in Monterey County, said the county superintendent has said these programs will continue through July, even if federal funding does not come through. The county will either use leftover funds from the previous fiscal year or pull them from another source. 

    After July, he does not know how long programs will continue without federal funding, although the outlook is not good, he said.

    State has 1 million English learners

    Withholding $158 million in grants for English language acquisition could have a huge impact on California K-12 schools where 1 in 3 students speak a language other than English at home, Goldberg said.

    Martha Hernandez, executive director of Californians Together, said the announcement that federal funding is being withheld for English language acquisition has districts scrambling to figure out how they will provide legally mandated services to English learners.

    Administrators are frantic about what they’re going to do, particularly about staffing, because state law requires school staff to be notified in March if they are going to be laid off, she said. 

    “So now, having to think about, with declining enrollment and budgets already being tight, how are they going to possibly retain staff that have been paid for out of Title III?” Hernandez said.

    Districts are still required under federal law to provide services to English learners to help them learn English and help them understand their classes, she said.

    “It’s just an unconscionable blow to districts. To cut it on July 1, when the funding was supposed to be disbursed, is just really cruel,” Hernandez said.

    Summer school, teacher training impacted

    Several of the frozen grants could impact over 10,000 after-school and summer programs serving 1.4 million students, said Jodi Grant, executive director of the Afterschool Alliance. Many will have to close, leaving more children unsupervised.

    “Parents across the country are counting on these programs to support their kids this summer, this fall, and throughout the school year,” Grant said.

    The largest chunk of funding being frozen is $232 million from the Supporting Effective Instruction grant, which can be used to reform certification programs, support new teachers, provide additional training for existing teachers and principals, and reduce class size by hiring more teachers. 

    In February, the Department of Education threatened to withhold federal funding from schools and colleges that did not abandon “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs.

    Last month, Trump also threatened to withhold federal funding from states or schools that allow transgender students to play sports on teams that align with their gender identity. The state went to court seeking to have the funds restored and won. 

    But even after California won cases against the Trump administration, it has sometimes had trouble drawing down funds from the federal government.

    Thurmond said it may look for legal recourse again to restore the grant funding.

    “We are going to push back on these egregious overreaches by the federal government and what we’re calling an illegal impoundment of federal education dollars,” Thurmond said.

    In the meantime, David Schapira, chief of staff for Thurmond, recommended that school districts consult their legal counsel on how to proceed while the grants are in limbo and make individual decisions about what is best for their communities based on the information available.

    Education leaders at the press conference had strong words about Trump’s actions. The president is willing to punish students in states that refuse to conform to his political ideology, Schapira said.

    “The taxpayers entrusted their elected representatives in Congress to appropriate dollars that are meant to serve students across this country. Those should not be held hostage by the priorities of one person,” Schapira said.

    Lasherica Thorton and Louis Freedberg contributed to this report.





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  • California colleges worry about lawsuit challenging funding for campuses with many Hispanic students  

    California colleges worry about lawsuit challenging funding for campuses with many Hispanic students  


    At a recent Latino-themed graduation ceremony at California State University, Channel Islands, a student’s cap proclaims that nothing is impossible with family.

    Courtesy of CSU Channel Islands

    Top Takeaways
    • California colleges and universities have received more than $600 million in program grants.
    • Challenger successfully sued Harvard to end affirmative action in admissions.
    • Five UC campuses, 21 Cal State schools and many California community colleges are Hispanic-Serving Institutions.

    Each year, most of California’s public colleges and universities are eligible for extra federal funding for a simple reason: They enroll high numbers of Latino students. 

    The federal government sets aside millions of dollars in grants annually for colleges classified as Hispanic-Serving Institutions, a designation earned by having an undergraduate student body that is at least 25% Latino. In total, California colleges and universities have received more than $600 million in HSI grants since federal funding for the program began in 1995.

    California, with its large Latino population, has the most HSI campuses in the nation — 167, or more than a quarter of the 602 HSIs in the country. That includes five of the University of California’s nine undergraduate campuses, all but one of California State University’s 22 regular campuses and the majority of the state’s community colleges. 

    But now, California colleges classified as HSIs are facing an uncertain future and could be at risk of losing that designation and funding if a recently filed lawsuit is successful.

    The lawsuit was brought in U.S. District Court by the state of Tennessee and Students for Fair Admissions, the same group that successfully sued Harvard to end affirmative action in admissions. It argues the criteria to become an HSI are unconstitutional and discriminatory against other ethnic groups and that all colleges serving low-income students, regardless of racial composition, should be allowed to apply for the grants currently available to HSIs.

    Colleges are eligible for the HSI designation if they sustain Hispanic enrollment of at least 25% and at least half of their students are low income. The designation allows them to apply to the competitive grant program. The money is meant to be spent on programs that could benefit all students, not just Latino students, proponents note. 

    So many California public campuses have the HSI designation in large part because of the state’s demographics: 56% of the K-12 enrollment is Latino. 

    The legal challenge is distressing to some officials and students who say the HSI grant funding has allowed many California campuses to improve their student support services, such as by offering faculty development as well as adding counseling and student retention programs that benefit Latino students and others.

    “A lot of these campuses depend on HSI funds. And with that potentially being stripped, there is going to be a loss of vital infrastructure,” said Cristian Ulisses Reyes, a graduate student at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, where he has been part of an effort to help that campus earn HSI designation by next year. 

    Supporters of HSIs have been anticipating the possibility of a challenge to the program since President Donald Trump returned to office in January, particularly with the White House’s increased hostility toward diversity, equity and inclusion programs, said Deborah Santiago, the CEO of Excelencia in Education, a nonprofit focused on the success of Latino students in higher education. 

    “So this lawsuit feels like a culmination of all those fears,” she said.

    The lawsuit names the U.S. Department of Education and U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon as defendants. It’s not clear to what degree the department will fight the lawsuit. The Department of Education did not return a request for comment. 

    Edward Blum, a conservative activist and president of Students for Fair Admission, said in an email that the explicit Latino enrollment threshold requirement for HSI designation is, in his view, illegal.

    “That means otherwise qualified institutions are denied access to millions in federal support solely because they lack the designated racial mix. That’s racial preference disguised as education policy,” he said. 

    The lawsuit was filed this month in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee, and the plaintiffs argue that all colleges in Tennessee serving low-income students should be eligible for grants currently available to HSIs. 

    “Funds should help needy students regardless of their immutable traits, and the denial of those funds harms students of all races. This Court should declare the HSI program’s discriminatory requirements unconstitutional, letting colleges and universities apply regardless of their ability to hit arbitrary ethnic targets,” the lawsuit states.

    The lawsuit would create a lot of problems if the case goes against HSIs, but in the immediate future, it doesn’t change anything, said Santiago of the Excelencia in Education group. “There’s still going to be an application, as far as we know, for competitive grants this year, and institutions that have HSI funds are able to continue to use them,” she added.

    California State University, Channel Islands, recently held its 2025 Sí Se Pudo Recognition Ceremony, an annual graduation celebration hosted at the campus.
    Courtesy of CSU Channel Islands

    California State University, Channel Islands, has been an HSI since 2010 and now has a student body that is about 60% Latino. Achieving and maintaining the designation has likely helped the campus recruit Latino students over the years, said Jessica Lavariega Monforti, provost of the campus.

    “Students are savvy today and they want to know what programs are available to support their success,” she said. 

    The campus, since 2010, has received $42 million in HSI-related funding, which includes National Science Foundation grants for which HSIs are eligible to apply. 

    One of the programs created with that funding, called the CSUCI Initiative for Mapping Academic Success, launched campuswide in 2022 and aims to help students who are struggling academically. They are then set up with faculty in weekly workshops to get back on track. So far, according to Lavariega Monforti, retention for students in the program is 7% higher than their peers.

    The majority of students who have participated in that program are Latino, but like many initiatives funded by HSI grants, it is not exclusive to Latino and Hispanic students.

    The campus has also used HSI funding to train faculty in culturally responsive pedagogy, improve outreach to nearby community colleges to increase transfers, and offer mentorship for students to prepare for their careers after graduation.

    “I think what we’re most proud of is that we have been truly student-centered in our approaches,” Lavariega Monforti said. “I hope we get to continue to do this because this is about the ways in which our institution is able to invest back into our community.”

    About 150 miles north of the Channel Islands campus, another Cal State campus, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, is in the process of trying to earn its own HSI designation. This past fall, Latino and Hispanic enrollment at the campus hit 25% for the first time. Campuses must maintain that threshold for two years before they can apply for the designation. 

    If the campus becomes an HSI next year, every CSU campus would have the designation. As of now, the only other campus that is not an HSI is California State University, Maritime Academy, but that is soon to be merged with San Luis Obispo. 

    Across UC, five of the system’s nine undergraduate campuses are HSIs: Irvine, Merced, Riverside, Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz. Another, Davis, achieved eligibility this past fall by crossing the 25% threshold of Latino enrollment. UC hopes for every campus to eventually have the designation, including UCLA and UC Berkeley.

    Reyes, the San Luis Obispo graduate student who also earned his undergraduate degree there, is hopeful that the HSI designation will still exist by the time the campus is eligible to apply. He helped launch the campus’s push for HSI designation while working in the Office of Diversity & Inclusion, including helping to plan a symposium on the effort in 2023. 

    Reyes is a first-generation college student and said connecting with other Latino staff and students helped him find his way and succeed on the campus. 

    He first enrolled as a biology major, but was failing classes and on academic probation in his first year. Then he met with a counselor who happened to be Latina and helped inspire him to change his major. He also ended up joining the Lambda Theta Phi Latin Fraternity, a Latino fraternity that he said ended up being the “backbone” of his time on the campus. 

    Getting the HSI designation and potential federal funding would allow the campus to add more services to help future students, Reyes noted. But after seeing the lawsuit that was filed targeting HSIs, he’s worried the campus might never get to that point.

    “It kind of felt like attacks were inevitable to happen, but actually seeing that was frightening and worrisome for me,” he said.





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  • Property-poor districts demand fairer funding for school facilities

    Property-poor districts demand fairer funding for school facilities


    Construction site at Murray Elementary in Dublin Unified in 2022.

    Credit: Andrew Reed / EdSource

    A public-interest law firm threatened Wednesday to sue Gov. Gavin Newsom and state officials unless they create a fairer system of subsidizing the costs of school facilities. That system must be as equitable as the Local Control Funding Formula, the decade-old formula for funding schools’ operating budgets, Public Advocates demanded in a lengthy letter.  

    At a news conference announcing their demand, Public Advocates and school board members, superintendents and parents with decrepit, inadequate and unhealthy school buildings charged that the state’s school facilities program discriminates against districts with low property values. Districts with high property values gobble up most of the state’s matching subsidies to modernize schools, while property-poor districts serving low-income families can’t afford local school bonds to qualify for state subsidies to build comparable facilities, they said.

    “It is our clear call to get this right,” said Gary Hardie, a school board member in Lynwood Unified in Los Angeles County. “We have not solved our facilities needs — not because we don’t fight each and every day for our young people, but we are up against policies that prevent us from doing the best we can do for our community.” 

    Hardie is one of four potential plaintiffs in a lawsuit. The others are Building Healthy Communities – Monterey County, Inland Congregations United for Change, and True North Organizing Network, which works with families across Tribal Lands and the broader North Coast region.

    In  1971, the California Supreme Court struck down the school funding system based on local property taxes as violating the constitutional right of students in low-wealth districts to have an equal education. In the letter to Newsom, Public Advocates argued the current system of funding school facilities is no better than the property-tax-based system that the court rejected in the Serrano v. Priest decision. 

    “Study after study has acknowledged the open secret here: Some districts get to build swimming pools and performing arts centers, while others suffer through leaky roofs and black mold,” said John Affeldt, Public Advocates’ managing attorney and director of education equity. Citing a 2022 study by the Public Policy Institute of California, he said that lower-wealth districts have received nearly 60% less state modernization funding than higher-wealth districts since 1998.

    “The discriminatory design of the state’s facility funding system is no accident,” he said. “It has been intentionally baked into the system, and its disparate results are wholly foreseeable.”

    Hardie, a native of Lynwood, called his city “culturally rich” but under-resourced as a result of federal redlining policies that divided Lynwood’s Black and brown communities with highways that lowered property values. 

    Lynwood Superintendent Gudiel Crosthwaite said that this week the district of 12,000 students “had about 40 classrooms that were leaking due to the rains, and last year it was a different 60 classrooms.”  While other districts are modernizing labs and performing arts theaters, he said Lynwood was forced to demolish the only major auditorium in the city because of the building’s condition. In the district, 99% of students are Black or Hispanic, and 94% are from low-income families.

    Going Deeper
    Credit: bike-R on flickr

    Read more EdSource coverage about school facilities funding, planning and construction. California school districts rely on state and local bonds and developer fees to fund facilities. As this funding has fluctuated over time, research has found significant disparities in their capacity to keep up facilities that adequately meet students’ needs.

    Public Advocates’ 21-page demand letter coincides with the start of negotiations between legislative leaders and the Newsom administration over the size and details of a school facilities bond for the November ballot. Two bills must be reconciled. Assembly Bill 247, by Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, D-Torrance, calls for a $14 billion TK-12 and community college state bond. Senate Bill 28, by Sen. Steven Glazer, D-Orinda, calls for a $15 billion bond that includes funding for UC and CSU.

    Neither bill, at this point, gives a funding breakdown. However, AB 247 includes a possible framework for reform, with a point system that favors low-wealth and low-family income districts with a slightly larger state subsidy. Affeldt, of Public Advocates, dismisses this as inadequate for failing to provide enough funding to address the stark disparities in the current system.

    There is little disagreement that a state school bond is needed. Money from the last state school bond, Proposition 51 (2016), with $7 billion in state support for K-12 and $2 billion for community colleges, has been allocated, and about $2 billion in state-approved projects are in the queue for the next round. There is also a demand to remove lead in school water and to shield schools from the impacts of climate change through better air filtration systems, flood protection and heat abatement.

    Under the state program, districts pass local bonds through property taxes, and the state matches the money through a state-funded bond issue paid off through state taxes. For new construction, the state splits the cost. For modernization projects — renovating facilities at least 25 years old and portables at least 20 years old — the district pays 40% and the state 60% of a project’s cost.

    Public Advocates is calling for addressing only the modernization program, not new construction. Affeldt said that the 60% guarantee for all districts, regardless of their ability to raise far more money than property-poor districts, provides substantially more modernization funds per pupil to higher-wealth districts.

    The current facility program also includes a hardship program for small districts with so little assessed property that they can’t afford a school bond. However, the current qualifying criteria — a maximum of $5 million of assessed value — are strict and don’t account for the high construction costs in remote areas. AB 247 would raise the limit to $15 billion. 

    Between 1998 and 2016, the state provided $42 billion of the $166 billion that school districts raised for new construction and modernization, according to a report by Jeff Vincent, who co-directs the Center for Cities + Schools at UC Berkeley and has done extensive research into the school facility program and its disparities.

    Spokespersons for Newsom and Muratsuchi did not respond Wednesday to a request for comment.

    Long-standing complaints

    The issues raised by Public Advocates are not new.

    In 2016, then-Gov. Jerry Brown called for major changes in the facilities program, and opposed the measure when school districts and construction lobbies wouldn’t compromise. Brown wanted to concentrate state aid on low-income, low-property-wealth districts and end the first-come, first-served basis for allocating state matches, which he said favored wealthy and big districts, like Los Angeles Unified, with large facilities planners that can quickly apply. Voters passed the $9 billion Proposition 51 ($7 billion for K-12 schools and $2 billion for community colleges) anyway.

    In 2018, Vincent co-authored a study that documented the disparities among districts’ ability to raise money through local bonds. He found that districts with the most assessed property value raised more than triple the amount of bond revenue per student than districts with the least assessed value per student.

    With calls for reform escalating, Newsom took up the cause in negotiating a $15 million bond for the March 2020 ballot. The down-to-the-wire talks led to concessions. Instead of first-come, first-served, the bond issue set priorities for state funding. They started with districts facing critical health and safety issues, like mold in schools or seismic hazards, small districts facing financial hardship, schools needing lead abatement, and districts facing overcrowding.

    The agreement also established a ranking system that factored in school districts’ ability to fund construction, as measured by bonding capacity per student and the percentage of students who are low-income, fosters, homeless, and English learners — the same measure for extra state money under the Local Control Funding Formula. Based on their point total, districts could qualify for a bonus 1% to 5% of state funding above the 60% match for modernization and 50% match for new construction.

    The changes were not implemented after voters rejected the bond issue 47% to 53%. It was the first defeat of a statewide school bond in more than 40 years. Some attributed the loss to anxiety over Covid, whose infections were making the news; others blamed its unfortunate but coincidental title —Proposition 13 — and confusion with the 1978 tax-cutting initiative.

    In September 2020, after Newsom and school districts reached a deal on what would become Proposition 13, Vincent told EdSource, “State leaders took the much-needed first step in putting forth a new program and a new wealth-adjusted funding formula. However, providing poor districts with a few more percentage points of funding may not remedy the inequities we’ve seen. It will be important to watch things closely in coming years.”

    Public Advocates and the complainants say now is the time for the much-needed second step. 

    If negotiations fail, a lawsuit in the fall could complicate the chances of passage, if not derail, a bond measure in November. Knowing that, Affeldt said, “I hope that the serious threat of litigation and negative publicity that will come with that will make all of the players realize that we need a more aggressive overhaul of the system.”





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  • Legislature rejects ‘draconian’ cuts to UC and CSU, keeps TK-12 funding intact

    Legislature rejects ‘draconian’ cuts to UC and CSU, keeps TK-12 funding intact


    Students study in the main lobby of Storer Hall at the University of California, Davis.

    Credit: Gregory Urquiaga / UC Davis

    Top Takeaways
    • The Legislature has until June 15 to present their budget bill to the governor.
    • The proposal received praise from speakers grateful to see more funding for higher education.
    • Student teachers would receive $600 million in new funding in legislators’ plan.

    The Legislature is challenging Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposed funding cuts to higher education for next year, while largely leaving intact the relatively more generous TK-12 spending the governor called for last month.

    “In many ways, it’s a tale of two budgets,” said Sen. John Laird, D-Santa Cruz, chair of the education subcommittee, who characterized Newsom’s higher-ed cuts as “draconian.”

    In 2025-26, schools and community colleges will receive a record $118.9 billion under Proposition 98, the state formula that determines the minimum portion of the state’s General Fund that must be spent on schools and community colleges. Laird credits the law for “protecting schools from the hard decisions of what is happening to the other side of the ledger with higher education.”

    Legislators would nix Newsom’s proposal to cut next year’s funding to the University of California and California State University by 3% and instead restore that money as part of a joint agreement of the Assembly and Senate. 

    The Assembly and the Senate published their version of a spending plan for education on Monday. The Legislature has until June 15 to present their budget bill to the governor, who then has until June 27 to sign, veto, or line-item veto the bill.

    Higher education

    The latest version of the 2025-26 budget may provide some relief to the state’s college students and public universities, who in January were told by Newsom to expect an 8% ongoing cut, a figure he revised down to 3% in May. Uncertainty regarding federal funding for higher education has compounded budget anxieties in California, as the Trump administration proposes reductions to programs like the Pell Grant and TRIO.

    “I think many of you recognize that we’re facing some pretty devastating budget challenges this year,” said Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez, D-Pasadena, at a budget subcommittee hearing on June 10. “It has been incredibly, incredibly tough, and we are continuing to face ongoing challenges with potential cuts coming from the federal administration that will impact our higher education systems, and so we are going to be having ongoing conversations about the budget.”

    While the Legislature’s take on the budget may seem more generous, it is not without asterisks. By forgoing the 3% ongoing cut, the Assembly-Senate recommendations would reinstate $130 million to the 10-campus UC system and $144 million to CSU’s 23 campuses. However, the Legislature would defer those payments until July 2026, giving the universities permission to seek short-term loans from the General Fund to tide themselves over. 

    Additionally, lawmakers parted ways with the governor on a plan to defer a 5% increase in base funding from 2025-26 to 2026-27. The legislative proposal instead splits the deferral, offering the universities a 2% ongoing increase in 2026-27 and the remaining 3% in 2028-29.

    The legislative proposal was met with praise from many speakers attending the subcommittee hearing. Representatives from the California State University Employees Union, which represents non-faculty and student assistants, the Community College League of California and the Cal State Student Association all spoke in support of the Legislature’s version. 

    Eric Paredes, the legislative director of the California Faculty Association, which represents professors at CSU, thanked the Legislature for restoring funding to the university system. “We know it’s been a difficult budget year, and just are really appreciative of the Legislature’s ongoing commitment to higher education,” he said.

    The legislative proposal also alters a plan to defer nearly $532 million in community college apportionment funding from 2025-26 to 2026-27, instead offering a smaller deferral of $378 million. 

    To pare back the 2025-26 deferral, the Legislature’s plan would reappropriate $135 million from the 2024-25 part-time faculty insurance program. A representative of the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges, speaking at the budget subcommittee hearing opposed that move, calling the funds for the part-time health care pool “necessary.”

    The Legislature is also turning down a Newsom proposal to provide $25 million in one-time Prop. 98 dollars to the Career Passports initiative, which would help Californians compile digital portfolios summarizing the skills they’ve built through work and school.

    The Legislature’s plan, in addition, calls for a variety of one-time Prop. 98 funding for community colleges, including $100 million to support college enrollment growth in 2024-25, $44 million to fund part-time faculty office hours and $20 million for emergency financial aid for students.

    For the state’s public universities, the budget bill would set in-state enrollment targets, asking UC and CSU to enroll 1,510 and 7,152 more California undergraduates, respectively, in 2025-26. 

    The current draft of the budget bill would also require CSU campuses that have experienced “sustained enrollment declines” to submit turnaround plans to the chancellor’s office by the end of 2025, outlining how they will increase enrollment and any cost-saving strategies they have planned. The chancellor’s office, in turn, will summarize those plans in a report for the Legislature by March 2026.

    Finally, the Legislature’s proposal also includes a sweetener for the state’s financial aid budget by restoring funding for the Middle Class Scholarship program. It provides grant aid to more than 300,000 recipients and would receive $405 million in one-time funding in 2025-26 and $513 million ongoing.

    TK-12 spending

    A stipend for aspiring teachers is the single largest difference in spending between the governor and the Legislature’s version of the TK-12 budget for next year. California would go all-in on paying student teachers working on their credentials if the Legislature can persuade Newsom to build in the $600 million expense in the 2025-26 state budget. Newsom is proposing $100 million for what would be a new program.

    To make room for this and other changes, the Legislature would cut a one-time Student Support and Discretionary Block Grant that Newsom is proposing, from $1.7 billion to $500 million. 

    Brianna Bruns, a representative with the California County Superintendents, expressed concern, noting that this is an important funding source for “core educational services” in light of the expiration of one-time pandemic-related federal funds.

    Lawmakers are recommending two other significant changes that reflect their worry that state revenues may fall short of projections amid an uncertain economy. 

    It would put $650 million into the Prop. 98 rainy day fund that would otherwise be depleted, under the expectation that it will be needed next year. And in a proposal that districts and community colleges may welcome, they would substantially cut back on late payments from the state, called deferrals, under Newsom’s May budget revision. 

    The governor is proposing to push back $1.8 billion that the state normally would fund in June 2026 by a few weeks to July 2026, the first month of the new fiscal year; the Legislature would reduce the deferral to $846 million. As a debt that must be repaid to make districts fiscally sound, the Legislature would pay most of it back in 2026-27 and the rest in 2027-28.

    Advocates for paying teachers at the daily rate of a substitute teacher while they are student teaching say it is critical to encourage more people to become teachers. During a one-year graduate program to earn a teaching credential, candidates are required to spend 600 hours in the classroom. Many candidates earn no income while accumulating between $20,000 and $40,000 in debt, based on the program they attend, according to an analysis of a bill proposing the stipends before the Legislature. 

    “California is facing a persistent teacher shortage that disproportionately affects our most vulnerable students,” said Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, D-Torrance, the bill’s sponsor. “Many aspiring teachers struggle to complete their required student teaching hours due to financial hardship.”

    The proposed $600 million in the budget would cover two years of stipends for all teachers seeking a credential, according to an analysis of the bill. 

    The Legislature would support Newsom’s $200 million to support reading instruction for K-2 teachers and $100 million for training teachers in literacy and math instruction, although that would be $400 million less than Newsom favors. The Legislature also rejected $42 million to establish a math professional learning partnership and a statewide math network.





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  • Legislative analyst projects bigger funding drop for schools, community colleges

    Legislative analyst projects bigger funding drop for schools, community colleges


    Credit: Alison Yin / EdSource

    The Legislative Analyst’s Office is warning superintendents and school boards working on their next year’s budget that more storm clouds are on the fiscal horizon. 

    In a Feb. 15 report, the LAO forecast that further erosion of state revenues will likely reduce state funding for TK-12 by an additional $7.7 billion — $5.2 billion in 2023-24 and $2.7 billion in 2025-26. That would be on top of the $13.7 billion shaving that Gov. Gavin Newsom announced in his proposed budget for the current budget cycle that he released just a month ago. 

    When he presented the proposed state budget in January, Newsom built in a small cost-of-living increase and vowed to preserve funding commitments for schools and community colleges, but the deteriorating revenue estimates may force him to reconsider that promise when he revises the budget in May. 

    The California Department of Finance, which disagrees with the LAO’s financial projections for this year and next, won’t revise its budget forecast until the May revision. However, its report on January revenues, also released in mid-February, confirmed that revenues were heading in the wrong direction. Receipts from the personal income tax, the largest source of state revenue, were down $5 billion — 25% — from the $20.4 billion that the state had forecast. For the full fiscal year that started July 1, total state revenues are down $5.9 billion from a forecast of $121.5 billion.  

    About 40% of the revenues to the state’s general fund is directed to schools and community colleges through a 4-decade-old formula, Proposition 98.

    The single biggest fiscal challenge facing Newsom and the Legislature is how to resolve a massive shortfall in Proposition 98 funding for 2022-23. Newsom and the Legislature were mostly in the dark when they passed that state budget based on a revenue estimate in June 2022. Because of storms and floods the previous winter, the U.S. Treasury delayed the tax filing date for 2022 from April 15 to Nov. 16. Thus, officials lacked reliable data, and it turned out they were way off. The shortfall for Proposition 98 was $12 billion. 

    Because school districts have already spent that money, Newsom is proposing to hold them and community colleges harmless without counting the overfunding as part of the Proposition 98 minimum guarantee. In a trailer bill that his administration released, he calls for a one-time $9 billion supplemental payment that, due to the unique, delayed tax deadline, would be paid from the general fund, not out of current or future funding for Proposition 98. It would be repaid over five years, starting in 2025-26. 

    Opposition of the Legislative Analysts’s Office

    The LAO is skeptical of the legality and wisdom of pushing off the solution for the 2022-23 deficit into the future; it’s recommending the Legislature reject the ideas and instead use the $9 billion cushion in the Proposition 98 reserve account to cover the shortfall. 

    “The Governor’s proposed funding maneuver is bad fiscal policy, sets a problematic precedent, and creates a binding obligation on the state that will worsen future deficits and require more difficult decisions,” it said in a report issued last week. 

    It recommends balancing the budget by cutting billions of uncommitted dollars for new programs, the largest of which is $2.8 billion for creating more community schools; eliminating the $1 billion cost-of-living adjustment for the Local Control Funding Formula; cutting $500 million for low-emissions school buses and reducing costs and restructuring other programs. One is the Expanded Learning and Opportunities Program, which provides free after-school activities for low-income students. 

    Newsom would use $5 billion of the Proposition 98 rainy-day fund to cover the budget shortfall this year and next while paying for the 1% cost-of-living adjustment next year. That would leave $4 billion in the reserve to cover at least part of a bigger deficit that the LAO is predicting.

    Lurking in the background is the option of deferrals — issuing IOUs for funding that would be repaid in subsequent years. That tactic was used extensively after the Great Recession when state revenues plunged. It requires that districts and charter schools borrow short-term to cover the delay in state funding.

    School advocates clearly prefer Newsom’s approach and are critical of the LAO’s recommendations, although they aren’t ready to suggest further cuts if revenues remain slow.

    “We don’t want to start negotiating with ourselves over which programs to cut, but need to be prepared for a challenging budget if revenues do not rebound in the second half of this fiscal year,” Kevin Gordon, president of Capitol Advisors Group, an education consultancy, wrote in a letter to his clients last week.

    Edgar Zazueta, executive director of the Association of California School Administrators, criticized the LAO and called on Newsom and legislators to protect their investments in schools. 

    “The LAO’s recommendations in response to the fiscal picture are potentially devastating to schools and especially students,” he said. “The programs that could be impacted are good for students, and we’ll be urging the Legislature and governor to do everything to protect California students.”





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  • Homeless youth advocates call for dedicated state funding, local flexibility

    Homeless youth advocates call for dedicated state funding, local flexibility


    Credit: Alison Yin / EdSource

    Advocates are calling for $13 million in dedicated state funding and for the adoption of a bill that would support homeless students and youth exiting foster care as schools face the expiration of significant pandemic-era federal funding this year.

    The call comes from the Oakland-based National Center for Youth Law, which is also co-sponsoring Assembly Bill 2137.

    The bill, introduced by Assemblymember Sharon Quirk-Silva, proposes making it easier for local organizations that serve foster youth to provide direct services. It also mandates those same programs be informed when foster students opt out of applying for federal financial aid, and it requires districts to detail how they plan to increase identification of students experiencing homelessness.

    Youth exiting the foster care system face a disproportionate risk of homelessness, and some state programs dedicated to offering them housing support would be eliminated if the state’s proposed budget is approved as it currently stands.

    “If we do not have the basic infrastructure in the state to identify them and do any preventative work, we are going to continue to fail this population and then see chronic adult homelessness grow, which is the issue everyone says they care about,” said Margaret Olmos, director of the National Center for Youth Law’s compassionate education systems team in California.

    The proposed funding allocation would partially replace the federal money — which must be obligated before October and spent by January next year — while the bill seeks to implement three provisions, directing existing resources toward supporting foster and homeless youth while working to increase their high school graduation and college enrollment rates.

    The bill “really highlights the need that we have to do all we can … to be very intentional about our foster youth and outcomes of them maybe having a pathway straight into homelessness unless we intervene,” said Quirk-Silva. “This is a way to work with them through the education system.”

    The call for state funding specific to homeless youth, which school staff and advocates have long campaigned for, and for the adoption of the bill, come in a year that California faces a budget deficit in the billions and as rates of student homelessness in many counties have surpassed pre-pandemic rates.

    “We’re not deaf to the environment. … What we know is when there is a budget deficit that the number of families and children experiencing homelessness is just going to go up,” Olmos said.

    Advocates see both the call for $13 million in dedicated state funding and the adoption of Assembly Bill 2137 as necessary steps in preventing the rise of youth homelessness.

    State data and recent studies show that students experiencing homelessness and those in the foster care system are significantly more likely to be chronically absent from school, be suspended, have lower grades, experience higher school instability, or drop out of school.

    Dedicated state funding

    In 2021, California received nearly $100 million to aid in the identification, enrollment and school engagement of youth experiencing homelessness. This was one-time federal pandemic-era funding under the American Rescue Plan.

    Since then, school staff have hailed the funding as critical in their efforts to stay current on which of their students were homeless and how to best support them, whether by offering their families short-term stays in motels after an eviction, hiring staff to contact families they believe might be experiencing homelessness, distributing debit cards for gas, and more.

    Students identified as homeless in California are eligible to receive some resources, but the state does not dedicate funding that is specific to this population of students. Some states, such as Washington, have allocated state dollars toward replacing the American Rescue Plan funds before they sunset.

    While the state’s funding formula for education gives some funds for high-needs students, including those identified as homeless, it’s not proportionate to the number of homeless students living across the state. In practice, homeless students account for less than 1% of planned spending in the funding formula, according to a report published last year by the Public Policy Institute of California.

    Additionally, this state funding is tied to first identifying students who are homeless — an effort that school staff say in and of itself needs to first be funded.

    “This is the one subgroup that has to self-identify,” said Olmos. “None of this works if you do not have somebody who is there to count and care about that population.”

    There is some dedicated funding at the federal level, such as the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, but those grants are distributed in California as part of a competitive grant process, making them extremely limited. During the 2018-19 school year, for example, just 73 of California’s nearly 2,300 local education agencies were awarded McKinney-Vento funding; only 103 applied for the grants, according to a state audit.

    McKinney-Vento grants to California totaled about $13 million annually prior to the pandemic, and the call for $13 million in state funding would match that amount.

    That amount would not have the same statewide impact that schools felt with the American Rescue Plan funds, but Olmos said that “it’s at least, for the first time, a commitment” from the state.

    Proposal to refine current resources

    Quirk-Silva, the legislator who introduced Assembly Bill 2137, hopes the bill will help prevent youth homelessness by supporting current foster youth in schools. She was an elementary school teacher for 30 years before being elected to represent District 67, which includes cities from Cerritos in Los Angeles County to Fullerton in Orange County.

    “We know they’re part of the population (of homeless youth), and we have to do everything we can before they leave their placements,” said Quirk-Silva. “Some do go to college, and that does help them, but many of them aren’t on that track, and that’s where they become even more vulnerable.”

    In refining existing resources, the bill seeks to implement three provisions with the goal of keeping foster youth engaged in school by addressing their individual needs.

    The first of the bill’s provisions would increase flexibility for county Foster Youth Services Coordinating Programs, which coordinate with local educational agencies to provide resources such as tutoring and FAFSA support for foster youth students, when offering direct support services to students.

    Currently, the county programs, known as FYSCPs, can only offer such services after receiving written certification from the local educational agency confirming they are “unable, using any other state, federal, local, or private funds, to provide the direct services.”

    This requirement, according to the bill co-sponsors, which also includes advocacy organization John Burton Advocates for Youth, is a barrier because many local educational agencies, or LEAs, “are reluctant to provide written certification that they cannot address the needs of foster youth resulting in FYSCPs having to forgo providing these services, even when clearly indicated and when funding is available to do so.”

    The second provision would request that the coordinating programs be informed if students fill out a form opting out of applying for federal financial aid, so they may intervene and advise foster youth about their options post-high school.

    The third and final provision in the bill would require districts to detail in their three-year strategic plans how they plan to increase identification of students experiencing homelessness.

    Assemblymember Quirk-Silva said she expects her colleagues to support the bill. There are currently no estimates for how much the bill would cost, if adopted.

    “What I’ve seen as a classroom teacher is this is a very vulnerable population,” she said. “Often they need the most support and many times they get the least amount of support.”





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