The National Science Foundation was a target for Elon Musk’s DOGE boys. Trump seemed to dislike science, so he went along with deep cuts. We can hope that historians will one day explain Trump’s disdain for science. At the moment, it’s inexplicable.
Only days ago, Trump released an executive order that places political appointees in charge of grantmaking, with the power to ignore peer reviews.
Science magazine reported:
Research advocates are expressing alarm over a White House directive on federal grantmakingreleased yesterday that they say threatens to enhance President Donald Trump’s control over science agency decisions on what to fund. It would, among other changes, require political appointees to sign off on new grant solicitations, allow them to overrule advice from peer reviewers on award decisions, and let them more easily terminate ongoing grants.
Although many changes described in the order are already underway at research agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation (NSF), its existence could strengthen the hand of Trump appointees, says Carrie Wolinetz, a former senior administrator at NIH.
“We’ve already seen this administration take steps to exert its authority that have resulted in delays, freezes, and termination of billions of dollars in grants,” says Wolinetz, now a lobbyist for Lewis-Burke Associates. “This would codify those actions in a way that represents the true politicization of science, which would be a really bad idea.”
149 NSF employees, all members of the American Federation of Government Employees chapter that represents the agency’s workforce, sent a letter to Congress warning staffing cuts and other disruptions to NSF operations were threatening the agency’s mission and independence. Jesus Soriano, president of the chapter, said NSF has lost one-third of its staff—or nearly 600 employees—since January. The agency also began canceling hundreds of its research grants in April and has now scrapped 1,600 active grants, employees said.
Last month, the Trump administration announced it is going to evict NSF from its headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia, to make room for the Housing and Urban Development Department, and has yet to unveil a plan detailing where the agency will relocate. President Trump proposed slashing NSF’s budget by 56% in fiscal 2026.
“What’s happening at NSF is unlike anything we’ve faced before,” Soriano said at a press conference held last week by Democrats on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee. “Our members—scientists, program officers, and staff—have been targeted for doing their jobs with integrity. They’ve faced retaliation, mass terminations, and the illegal withholding of billions in research funding.”
Jan Resseger reports some surprisingly good news: the Senate Appropriations Committee passed an education budget that restored Trump’s cuts to education and disregarded his plan to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education.
Jan sees their action as evidence that public protest works and that the public does not want to abandon federal funding of schools. Jan also cautions that education may yet be imperiled by Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Secretary of Education Linda McMahon. Vought was overall writer and editor of “Project 2025” and McMahon is a dedicated ideologue.
Nonetheless, it’s heartening to know that some Republicans were willing to stand up to Trump and Reject one of his worst ideas.
She begins:
On July 31st, K-12 Dive’s Kara Arundel reported some very good news: “The Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday approved a bipartisan spending bill for fiscal year 2026 (FY 26) that would prevent the executive branch from removing Title I and special education programs to agencies outside the U.S. Department of Education. The legislation also rejects several other funding reforms proposed by the Trump administration… In total, the Senate Appropriations Committee recommends funding the Education Department in FY 26 at $79 billion…. That’s $12.3 billion more than President Donald Trump’s proposal of $66.7 billion. In the current fiscal year, the Education Department is funded at $78.7 billion.”
A UC Berkeley labor economist this week offered a California answer to the persistent question of whether more money matters for K-12 education.
Rucker Johnson, who researched the state’s decade-old school finance overhaul known as the Local Control Funding Formula, concluded it does matter, especially for the highest needs students targeted for help by the equity-based funding.
“The findings provide compelling evidence that school spending matters and providing additional resources to support high-need students pays dividends,” wrote Johnson, a professor of public policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley.
The improvements were consistent across grades, subjects, and performance metrics, the research found. Johnson calculated that a $1,000 increase in per-student funding, sustained for three consecutive years in the highest-poverty districts, produced roughly a full grade-level increase in math and reading achievement for students in grades three through eight and 11, relative to what the average student achieved in the years preceding the formula’s passage in 2013.
It’s a big deal for students who started third grade a year behind in math to be at grade level by the end of fifth grade, he said.
Graphic note: Third graders’ test scores in math improved as they progressed through fifth grade while receiving increased funding from the Local Control Funding Formula. The vertical scale measures growth in math beyond a standard year of achievement (1.0 is a full extra year of additional growth, whether catching up to grade level or accelerating beyond it). The horizontal scale measures the percentage of high-needs students in a district, which determines how much bonus funding a district receives. The dotted line in the middle marks 55% of high-needs students, the point at which districts gradually begin receiving an extra dose of concentration funding. The blue line shows average academic growth for districts with 55% or fewer high-needs students. The red line shows the impact of districts’ concentration funding on academic growth. The dots signify groups of districts above and below average.
Johnson’s research focused from 2013-14, when the funding formula was introduced, through 2018-19, when the full funding targets were achieved. What mattered, he said, was not just the amount of the increase but the number of years in a row students benefited.
The Covid pandemic of 2020, with more than a year in remote learning for many districts, has wiped out most of the academic gains during this period, particularly among low-income Black and Hispanic students — despite record federal and state funding.
Did equity-based funding cause the improvement?
The Legislature included a number of major policy and accountability initiatives, along with providing more money, in the funding formula law. It required that districts and charter schools spell out how they planned to spend on high-needs students in a Local Control and Accountability Plan or LCAP and then measure the impact. The law defined high-needs students as English learners, homeless and foster youths, and low-income students — those qualifying for free or reduced school meals and other income-based government benefits.
The locally controlled funding formula introduced the color-coded California School Dashboard, which ranks districts’ performance on multiple measures in an effort to pressure districts to reduce suspensions and chronic absences and raise high-school graduation rates. In 2015, the State Board of Education ended the high school exit exam and switched to the Smarter Balanced tests to measure the newly adopted Common Core standards.
Johnson, however, wrote that new money, not new policies, caused the widespread gains in student performance “based on compelling evidence.” Another prominent researcher, however, said that the claim is overstated.
Johnson said he was able to isolate the impact of additional funding in two ways. The new funding formula’s distinct design, with concentrated funding for highest-needs districts, showed disproportionate gains in achievement. He could find no similar pattern of achievement in the decade preceding the new formula. Julien Lafortune, a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, who also has studied the funding formula, agreed that is a fair conclusion.
Johnson also compared the achievement of districts funded by the Local Control Funding Formula with basic aid districts – the 100-some districts that received no funding under the Local Control Funding Formula because their funding from property taxes exceeded what they would have received from the state. Because there were no similar effects in student achievement among the basic aid districts that he found with Local Control Funding Formula districts during its rollout, Johnson concluded more funding must be the cause.
That comparison is problematic because the majority of basic aid districts are small, wealthy residential communities with few low-income families. They include Palo Alto, Saratoga, Santa Clara and San Mateo Union High School District in the Bay Area, and Santa Barbara, Newport Mesa, and San Dieguito Union High School District in Southern California. Graduation rates and test scores generally were already above average in those districts, and suspension rates were already lower than in high-poverty districts.
“The correlation of LCFF funding with poverty is at the extreme with the basic aid districts,” said Eric Hanushek, an economist and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, who has written extensively on education financing. Johnson “makes an admirable attempt to parse the impact of LCFF funding, but this is an exceedingly difficult task. He cannot convincingly separate pure spending changes from the host of other changes in California schools at that time.”
The study did not cite the number of districts that received $1,000 per student in additional funding, sustained over three years, and, therefore, how many students should have gained approximately a year in academic growth. A graph showing yearly Local Control Funding Formula funding increases during this period indicated that many districts benefited by at least that amount. Some districts with the largest numbers of high-needs students received more than $2,000 more per student over the three years.
Funding for the Local Control Funding Formula increased annually after its adoption in 2013. Districts with more than 55% high-needs students received increased amounts of funding, called concentration grants.
But Johnson said the exact number of students whose math and reading scores grew the equivalent of a grade was not calculated because of the methodology and parameters he used. The research was more precise than looking at the unfiltered year-over-year results of all students. It eliminated students who transferred schools during the period and took into account parental socioeconomic status and race/ethnicity. Its specific parameters compared:
Students from the same school across cohorts evaluated at the same grade.
Students from the same school and same kindergarten cohort across successive grades.
Student achievement growth among students from the same cohort and same grade across districts.
Local Control Funding Formula reconsidered
Gov. Jerry Brown, who championed the funding overhaul, made it clear he wanted the funding formula to roll out without interference from the Legislature and would veto any modifications to the law as long as he was in office. Gov. Gavin Newsom has proven more receptive to changes out of recognition that the law has flaws and its implementation has been uneven. Districts receiving the same funding per student have shown wide variations in student performance. That’s because, Lafortune noted, the Legislature sets the rules on funding, but districts decide how to spend it.
Last year, Pivot Learning, a national nonprofit that works with school districts on improving classroom instruction, created aDistrict Readiness Index that measures conditions like family and community engagement, principal retention, and work environment, which can determine districts’ success with programs and investments. In 2019, the Learning Policy Institute, the Palo Alto-based research and education policy nonprofit that published Johnson’s research, producedCalifornia’s Positive Outliers: Districts Beating the Odds. It identified districts that excelled and why.
Advocacy nonprofits like Public Advocates argued for a decade that the Local Control Accountability Plan rules and Local Control Funding Formula law did not require districts to be transparent enough on how they spent money for high-needs students, who make up about 60% of California students. Newsom includedone important transparency change in the 2021 state budget, prohibiting districts from transferring unspent funding for high-needs students to the general fund.
Recognizing that Covid intensified the disparities facing high-poverty areas, Newsom increased funding for districts with the greatest concentrations of high-needs students from 50% of base funding to 66%. Acknowledging the Local Control Funding Formula’s district-centric approach has not narrowed the achievement gap, Newsom created an“equity multiplier” in this year’s budget. It includes an additional $300 million in ongoing money for the high-poverty schools and requires that districts create mini-Local Control Accountability Plans with goals and actions to improve the lowest-performing schools. Until now, the formula allocated funding only by districts.
Lafortune said that Johnson’s research is an important contribution to the effort to evaluate the formula.
“I don’t think school finance formula should exist in stone because the conditions that are affecting schools are changing,” he said. “But now that we have evidence that funding targeted in high-concentration districts on average seems to be making a difference, the question becomes how to equitably deploy the funding everywhere.”
How the funding formula works
Gov. Jerry Brown and Michael Kirst, his longtime education adviser and state board president, said the Local Control Funding Formula made equitable funding a priority. On top of base funding per student, the formula gives districts and charter schools an additional 20% for each high-needs student.
The Legislature then gave an added boost to those districts with high proportions of those students, called concentration grants, based on research that high-poverty neighborhoods compounded challenges that children experience.
The concentration funding kicked in gradually once high-needs students made up 55% of a district’s enrollment. The differential could be significant. While districts with 40% high-needs students received an additional 8% funding, those with 85% high-needs students, like Los Angeles Unified, received 32% funding above the base.
In the decade preceding the new formula, California consistently ranked in the bottom of the states in per-student funding, adjusted for regional costs, according to the report. In 2011, in the aftermath of the Great Recession, it ranked last. Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed California’s socioeconomic achievement gaps were among the largest in the nation, the report said.
Faced with Brown’s threat to cut education funding severely without additional revenue, voters in 2012 passed a temporary sales tax and income tax on the top 1% of wage earners. Base funding per student rose from under $6,000 in 2013-14 to more than $8,000 in 2018-19, adjusted by grade span. Districts like Paramount Unified in Los Angeles County, with 95% high-needs students, received nearly $12,000 per student in local control funding.
Johnson found sizable improvement in other performance measures besides higher math and reading scores in high-concentration districts.
LCFF concentration funding increased the likelihood that students would graduate from high school by 8.2 percentage points for students exposed to a $1,000 increase in the average per-pupil spending experienced from grades nine to 12.
By a 9.8 percentage-point increase in math and 14.7 percentage-point increase in reading, students were more likely to meet college readiness standards, as measured by the 11th-grade Smarter Balanced tests.
By a 5 to 6 percentage-point reduction for boys and 3 percentage-point reduction for girls, Local Control Funding Formula-induced increases in school spending led to significant reductions in annual suspensions and expulsions across third to 10th grades. Suspensions for Black students in 10th grade were cut by 8 percentage points in schools benefiting from $1,000 in Local Control Funding Formula increases for three consecutive years.
Lafortune said Johnson’s research was consistent with his own findings comparing the academic growth of districts receiving the most local control funding — those with more than 80% high-needs students — with districts with fewer than 30% high-needs students. Another report will be published next month.
“I’m happy to see there’s actually some good research out using student-level data with evidence in answer to the top-level question, Is (the formula) moving the needle? Yes, for those high-concentration districts,” he said.
An EdSource examination of growth in Smarter Balanced scores for the years of Johnson’s study shows slow but steady progress for both low-income and non-low-income students. Both groups of students grew by an average of slightly more than 1 percentage point annually in math and slightly less than 2 percentage points in English language arts. After five years, the achievement gap remained nearly identical, about 30 percentage points apart.
“Yes, we do care about the gaps, but our idea of equity is not to bring the children that are performing really well to the levels that are not excellent,” said Johnson. The overall gains are evidence that more money matters for all students, he said, adding that the aggregate averages don’t reflect his research of districts receiving the biggest dose of funding.
Lafortune said that the overall averages also reflect that low-income students are spread throughout the state. A fifth — about 800,000 students — attend wealthy districts that get no concentration funding. More than 40% of non-low-income students attend districts that receive concentration funding, he said.
A teacher and students at Aspire Inskeep Academy in Los Angeles.
Courtesy: Aspire Public Schools
In times of crisis, we should be looking for ways to help, not hinder. But in California, the inequities in public school education funding are only deepening the crisis for too many students.
On top of the devastating social-emotional and academic effects of the pandemic, our communities have been dealing with widespread staffing challenges, culture wars and frequent unfair attacks on educators. And in cities across California, projections suggest that public school enrollment will continue to drop — creating a crisis for practically all schools across the state.
Public charter schools face all of these challenges and more. At Aspire Public Schools, a charter school network serving more than 15,000 students in 36 schools across the state, our student population is more than 85% Black and Latino, and the vast majority of our students are experiencing poverty. Yet since the day we were founded, we’ve been forced to get creative with limited resources: Aspire students — like all public charter school students in California — receive less funding than their peers in traditional public schools.
According to new research from the University of Arkansas, the problem remains severe. In the 2019-20 school year, Los Angeles public charter school students received $5,226 less per-pupil funding than their counterparts in traditional public schools. In Oakland, the gap is even larger, at $7,103. This is driven by a lack of public funding. In both cities, public charter schools receive less local, state and federal funding than their counterparts in traditional public schools.
Why? While both public charters and traditional public schools receive the same amount of base funding under California’s Local Control Funding Formula, or LCFF, that doesn’t mean the total funding is equal. One reason for this is that schools receive additional funding for higher-need student categories and for higher concentrations of students in those categories, known as “concentration grants.” However, charter school concentration grant amounts are capped based on the average student demographics for the district in which they reside. This means that public charters are, in effect, penalized for serving a greater share of high-need students than their district. There are also a number of local, state and federal funding streams that are only accessible to traditional public schools —for instance, voter-approved local funding for operations or capital projects.
I’m not writing this to complain. We are honored to serve our school communities and our wonderful, talented scholars. It’s hard work, but unequal funding makes it harder. The more time we have to spend fighting tooth and nail for basic resources, the less we can spend educating California’s next generation. Our scholars are the same students whom politicians claim to want to support, especially in the wake of the pandemic, but they are consistently left out because they and their families made the choice to attend a public charter school. Elected officials frequently speak about the importance of equity, and we at Aspire couldn’t agree more. But equity means all students getting what they need — and Aspire schools (as well as many other public charter schools) serve large numbers of historically marginalized students.
This challenge is nothing new. If you talk to charter leaders across California, they’ll all tell you a similar story. Due to this systemic funding deficit, we have had no choice but to try to raise philanthropic dollars to fill critical funding gaps. But that is often turned into an attack against us, with critics saying that public charter schools are bankrolled by private investors. That is simply untrue. Trust me — I would love nothing more than to be able to operate our schools without fundraising. But it’s just not an option.
And new challenges often emerge. Just two years ago we made the choice to go to Sacramento to advocate for all public charter students to fight against legislation that would have penalized charter schools — and not traditional public schools — for following the state’s guidelines for quarantining students who were exposed to Covid-19. While we were able to win that fight, it is illustrative of the larger issue: Charter students are treated as less than others.
But here’s the thing: Despite these challenges, charter schools have been able to accomplish so much. According to new research from the CREDO Institute at Stanford University, California charter students have gained the equivalent of 11 days of reading and four days of math compared with similar students in traditional public schools. Black and Latino students and students experiencing poverty had even larger gains. At Aspire specifically, we were proud to have met CREDO’s “gap-busting” criteria in both reading and math, recognizing our ability to reduce opportunity gaps at scale.
So many of our students are carrying so much. They are talented and resilient, and they work hard to achieve their goals. We believe in them, and we tell them that every day.
But this funding gap tells them something different — that because they happen to attend a charter school, they matter less. It’s time that education leaders put childish politics aside and focus on giving all of our kids what they need. They’re all California students. They deserve to be treated as such.
•••
Mala Batra is the chief executive officer at Aspire Public Schools, a charter management organization serving 15,000 TK-12 students across 36 schools in historically underserved communities throughout California.
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.
School districts around the nation are facing a terrible financial problem.
During the pandemic, they received billions in federal funding under the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief fund (ESSER), which they are required tospend or commit by the fall of 2024. Meanwhile, many districts, especially ones in California, received massive increases in state funding. Recently, because of declining revenues, states are projecting deficits and education budget cuts. This means that districts, especially urban districts suffering from declining student enrollment, could be hit by the double whammy of the ESSER funding cliff and a state budget crisis.
As I traveled the state visiting our urban districts, I listened to one budget presentation after another from finance officers talking about a post-ESSER Armageddon. In the last district I visited, I sat in a packed auditorium as the CFO showed how they’d spent their one-time money on ongoing costs and funded programs that couldn’t survive. As he droned on about all the horrible things that would happen, I drifted off to sleep.
When I awoke, the auditorium was empty. I looked down at my watch and noticed it had stopped 28 days after the board presentation. I’d clearly been out for a while because my fingernails were long, and I’d grown a full beard. I’d been asleep until the Halloween day after the ESSER funding cliff. I assumed that I owed my life to the extra-large burrito I’d eaten before the board meeting. I walked out and entered the district offices, looking for signs of life. Everywhere I walked, there were overturned tables, candy wrappers and papers strewn about.
As I turned a corner, I noticed three people shambling toward me with the typical urgency of a central office manager. I was about to approach them when I realized they were zombies trying to eat me. Terrified, I ran to my car and drove away. Over the next few days, I visited schools and district offices that were filled with zombies. It was clear that something terrible had happened and that it was connected to the ESSER funding cliff, but I couldn’t fathom what.
I knew there was only one place to find the answer — the state Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team. When I walked through their doors, I was relieved to find that they were still human. From the haggard looks on their faces, it was clear that they’d been working nonstop on a cure. “What the hell happened?” I asked.
A crisis team leader pointed to flow charts taped on a nearby wall. “We knew that the ESSER cliff would be bad and that a state budget crisis would make it worse. We also knew that some of our more financially irresponsible urban districts were already deathly ill. We were especially worried about the declining enrollment ones whose school boards made politically popular decisions to increase salaries with one-time money and wouldn’t make difficult decisions to lower costs, like closing small schools and cutting staff. What we didn’t expect was that the people in these zombie districts would actually turn into zombies,” he sighed.
“Is there anything we can do to fix this?” I entreated. He shrugged and motioned me toward another room.
“Ask him,” he said, pointing to a shadowy figure on the other side of a thick plexiglass wall. I looked closer and cried out, “Oh my God, that’s a zombie.”
“I prefer the term ‘differently human’,” said the zombie, who introduced himself as a local teacher’s union president. I asked him how he would cure the situation so kids could get back to school. He said, “There’s nothing to cure. We showed during the pandemic and in places like Oakland afterward that we don’t need kids to have schools. All we need are teachers. Now, we are proving it. Of course, if anyone wants to come back, we’ll welcome them with open arms.”
“But zombies eat children.” I gasped.
“Yes. There will be accidents, but the class sizes are delightful,” he said, smiling widely.
I left and again wandered the state, looking for anyone with a cure. Thinking that one of the state’s tech billionaires might be helpful, I traveled to in Silicon Valley to meet a famous one who’d focused on education and pleaded for his assistance. He listened for a few minutes and then cut me off. “Why would we help?” he said. “They did this to themselves with the tax money they took from us. Now, we have much less money which means they have less money.”
“But what about the kids?” I asked. “They can’t learn in zombie districts.”
“It’s just like New Orleans after Katrina,” he said. “Sometimes you have to destroy something that is bad before you can create something better.”
I threw up my hands, wondering what could possess people to think in this destructive way. At my wits’ end, I made one last journey to visit the Oracle at Georgetown University. She was sitting in her office nursing a cup of tea. She offered me a cup and told me I could ask two questions.
“Oh Great Oracle,” I said. “What could we have done to prevent this, and what can we do now?”
“The answer is one and the same,” she said. “School districts and their communities knew what was coming. They should have had the courage to say no to spending short-term dollars on future costs that would require ongoing funding. They must make hard choices on people and schools that they don’t have enough money for. They must have state and local leaders who will encourage them to do so, and when possible, give them cover. And those political leaders must be willing to make these choices even at the expense of their careers, knowing that they are doing the right thing. That will cure this apocalypse and prevent the next one.”
I thanked the Oracle and pledged to share her wisdom, hoping that others would listen too.
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.
Since the disaster in Texas, where more than 100 lives were lost to a flash flood in the middle of the night, Senator Ted Cruz has been readily available to comment for every television camera.
He has warned Democrats and Republicans alike not to politicize the tragic events (forgetting that Republicans pounced on the Los Angeles fires to blame Democrats and DEI as the 98-mile-an-hour winds were still spreading disaster. They blamed Mayor Karen Bass [who is female and Black], they blamed the female leaders of the LA Fire Department, they blamed Governor Gavin Newsom for refusing to turn on an imaginary faucet in Northern California).
“There’s no doubt afterwards we are going to have a serious retrospective as you do after any disaster and say, ‘OK what could be done differently to prevent this disaster?’” Cruz told Fox News. “The fact you have girls asleep in their cabins when flood waters are rising, something went wrong there. We’ve got to fix that and have a better system of warnings to get kids out of harm’s way.”
The National Weather Service has faced scrutiny in the wake of the disaster after underestimating the amount of rainfall that was dumped upon central Texas, triggering floods that caused the deaths and about $20bn in estimated economic damages. Late-night alerts about the dangerous floods were issued by the service but the timeliness of the response, and coordination with local emergency services, will be reviewed by officials.
But before his Grecian holiday, Cruz ensured a reduction in funding to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (Noaa) efforts to improve future weather forecasting of events that cause the sort of extreme floods that are being worsened by the human-caused climate crisis.
Cruz inserted language into the Republicans’ “big beautiful” reconciliation bill, before its signing by Donald Trump on Friday, that eliminates a $150m fund to “accelerate advances and improvements in research, observation systems, modeling, forecasting, assessments, and dissemination of information to the public” around weather forecasting.
Cruz was vacationing in Greece with his family when the flood occurred. A few years ago, when the power grid in Texas collapsed during a bitter cold spell, Cruz and family were on their way to Cancun. Maybe he should put out public alerts about his vacations so we can all be prepared for disasters.
“While the administration has not defunded the NWS or NOAA, it is proposing in 2026 to cut significant research arms of the agency, including the Office of Atmospheric Research, a major hot bed of research,” Matt Lanza, Houston-based meteorologist and editor of The Eyewall, a hurricane and extreme weather website, told PolitiFact. “Multiple labs that produce forecasting tools and research used to improve forecasting would also be impacted. The reorganization that’s proposed would decimate NOAA’s research capability.”
In pursuit of narrowing cavernous gaps in student achievement, Gov. Gavin Newsom this year made changes to the Local Control Funding Formula, the state’s school funding law, that are among the most far-reaching since the law’s adoption a decade ago. School districts are bracing for the extra paperwork and demands.
Newsom’s directive requires that starting in 2024-25, districts and charter schools spell out how they will address poor performance and target funding for improvements in every school where one or more of the state’s 13 student groups rank red — the lowest of five performance bands on the California School Dashboard. Until now, state law required only improvement efforts for districts as a whole.
The revision was made in the language of the governor’s proposed state budget in January. It was discussed in legislative budget subcommittees as one of many items in the education budget but didn’t receive a separate and detailed review.
Last week, the State Board of Education implemented the changes with regulations on what school districts must do to raise the achievement of the schools’ lowest-performing students. They include setting specific goals, committing to actions and spending to achieve them, and a new requirement — determining how to measure if those strategies are effective by the end of three years and what to do if they aren’t.
Before they voted, board members heard repeated warnings from dozens of superintendents and school district administrators that piling on more extensive documentation would make districts’ three-year strategic plans, called the Local Control and Accountability Plans, unbearably long and unreadable.
“In smaller school districts, where time and resources are already significantly limited, the current requirements of the LCAP add an undue burden,” Helio Brasil, superintendent of Keys Union School District, a two-school district in Stanislaus County, wrote to the board.
“In my experience, every addition of a new table or box or check box or prompt to the LCAP makes it less and less useful as the tool to promote equity-focused, locally informed strategic resource allocation,” Joshua Schultz, deputy superintendent of the Napa County Office of Education, testified. “Already, practitioners in the field will tell you that the LCAP document is not useful for informing and engaging educational partners because of its length and complexity.”
Equity multiplier schools
Included in the revisions is a new category of “equity multiplier” schools serving many of the state’s most vulnerable students. Among the factors for their selection are the proportions of students from low-income families and parents lacking a high school diploma, and school stability — the rate of student transience. Many will likely be small alternative high schools serving students who have been expelled, bullied and struggled at standard high schools or are at risk of dropping out.
The idea was initially proposed by Black educators through a bill authored by Assemblymember Akilah Weber, D-San Diego, to dedicate $300 million to improve the achievement of Black students as the lowest-scoring student group on the dashboard. Newsom agreed to the new level of funding, but, concerned about violating Proposition 209, the 1996 voter initiative that bans affirmative action in public schools, he broadened the idea. The money will require districts to address and fund the specific needs of any lowest-performing student group on any dashboard indicator — whether math scores or absenteeism and graduation rates — and create overall goals for a school. Weber and the California Association of African American School Administrators endorsed the final plan.
The schools have yet to be designated, but the California Department of Education is projecting there could be 1,000 schools. Many will likely have student groups performing in the red and will have to address them like other schools. But equity multiplier schools additionally will be eligible for technical help from designated county offices of education and their share of the extra $300 million, based on student enrollment.
Intense focus on school spending
While not providing explicit funding for each student group, districts are held accountable for their performance. Student groups are determined by race and ethnicity, family income, students learning English, students with disabilities, and foster and homeless youth. Next month, the California Department of Education will release the 2023 dashboard, with color ratings for the first time since Covid interrupted testing in March 2020.
The statutory revisions will mark a major shift in attention and accountability for the billions of dollars in extra “supplemental” and “concentration” money that the funding formula provides to districts annually based on the enrollment numbers of English learners and low-income, homeless and foster students.
The state already reports in the dashboard every school’s test scores and other indicators of student performance. Some districts funnel supplemental and concentration dollars directly to high-needs schools, as Los Angeles Unified does through its Student Needs and Equity Index. But the state steers funding formula dollars only to districts, which in turn determine how the funds are spent: which schools get tutors, extra counselors, teacher training or additional aides. Districts determine whether supplemental and concentration dollars are given to schools or through the central office. Districts are not required to track supplemental and concentration funding by school.
Stepped up accountability
The revisions indicate Newsom agrees that either not enough funding reached the schools where high-needs students attended or funds were spent ineffectively.
“The experience of the past decade is that we haven’t seen districts consistently identify schools with specific needs and take actions tailored to those needs,” said Brooks Allen, an adviser to Newsom and executive director of the State Board of Education.
There has been overall progress in raising graduation rates and cutting suspension rates statewide. But the vast differences in proficiency rates on state test scores between Black (17% in math in 2023), white (48.2% in math) and Asian students (70% in math) have not narrowed, and absenteeism rates remain disproportionately high among Black and Hispanic students.
“Newsom is saying we should move faster and stronger to close gaps in outcomes,” said John Affeldt, managing attorney for Public Advocates, a public interest law firm, one of the advocacy groups that called for the changes that Newsom adopted.
The latest iteration of the LCAP template is at least the sixth in the past nine years. The state board designed the LCAP both as a strategic plan for district improvement and as an accountability tool to verify that districts are directing the $13 billion in supplemental and concentration funding to students for whom it was intended.
Over time, the goals of accessibility and transparency have worked at cross-purposes. A previous iteration, for example, eliminated a potentially huge spending loophole, which the California State Auditor and Public Advocates identified, allowing districts to dump unspent supplemental and concentration dollars into their next year’s general fund to spend for any purpose on all students. Fixing it required adding yet another section to the LCAP accounting for the unspent money from year to year.
A challenge to follow the money
The Legislature hasn’t dedicated funding for research or evaluations to determine whether the funding formula was working. Consistent with his view that legislators should not meddle with local control, former Gov. Jerry Brown, the funding formula’s architect, made it difficult to compare districts’ spending from the funding formula and fought proposals to standardize spending through accounting codes.
Despite the obstacles of limited data, researchers have persisted and found evidence for optimism and skepticism. In separate research studies, both UC Berkeley labor economist Rucker Johnson and Public Policy of Institute of California research fellow Julien Lafortune concluded that the funding formula succeeded in creating a much more equitable finance system and worked as designed for those districts getting the most extra money — those in which low-income students and English learners account for at least 95% of enrollment. Johnson calculated that a $1,000 increase in per-student funding, sustained for three consecutive years in the highest-poverty districts, produced significant increases in math and reading scores.
But Lafortune, in an analysis he co-authored this year, also found that 60% of districts do not report spending on high-need students at or above the level of supplemental and concentration funding they receive. His 2021 research found that statewide only about 55% of supplemental and concentration dollars reached school sites whose students generated the funding, although some of the remaining money could have funded districtwide activities benefiting those schools.
Thus, there have been increasing calls from advocates for low-income students for more fine-grained reporting on spending.
“We don’t report in a standardized way how much we spent at a school site. Getting that would go a long way to build trust that districts are doing what the policy intended,” said Rob Manwaring, senior policy and fiscal adviser for Children Now.
Despite efforts by California Department of Education staff to eliminate redundancies, combine goals for multiple equity multiplier schools, and convert spending listings into data tables, the latest version will undoubtedly lengthen LCAPs that already are often several hundred pages for medium and large school districts, and will take extra labor to complete.
The LCAP instructions will increase from 45 to 57 pages. Districts will have to engage parents, students, and teachers in every equity multiplier school and document how the engagement shaped goals and actions. Districts will add dozens to hundreds of entries for schools with student groups in the red.
“No one wants to fill out paperwork for the sake of it,” said Allen. “But if the result leads districts to conduct further needs and data analyses, and not a compliance exercise, the result could lead to positive change and better support for kids who need it most.”
Representatives of advocacy groups who had been calling for more transparency in the LCAP expressed support for the revised template. “The governor’s proposal, combined with other improvements, would get California closer to ensuring equitable educational opportunities and outcomes,” wrote Guillermo Mayer, president and CEO of Public Advocates, and Christopher Nellum, executive director of The Education Trust-West, a nonprofit organization, in an EdSource commentary earlier this year.
In letters and comments to the state board, no superintendent or lobbyist for school groups commended Newsom’s decision to strengthen the funding formula law and add a new category of highest-need schools. Instead, celebrating seemingly small victories, many praised Department of Education administrators for holding the line by making only those changes to the template that were required by law. They also called for additional efforts to slim down the LCAP.
Advocates and school administrators are hoping that software engineers from Silicon Valley and artificial intelligence will somehow resolve their differences. They’re assuming an interactive, electronic template can reduce confusion and duplication with links to both AI-generated LCAP summaries for curious parents and detailed financial data for accountability hawks.
“I’m sure there’s technology out there that can help to take that large document that’s now being streamlined and put it into an even more user-friendly format for those who desire (it),” said state board Vice President Cynthia Glover Woods, who, she said, had read more than her share of LCAPs as chief academic officer of the Riverside County Office of Education.
The idea of an electronic fix has been mentioned for several years — so far to no avail.
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 EducationalProgress — 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.
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,” wroteresearchers 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.”
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?
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