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How to improve California’s school funding formula
Credit: Alison Yin / EdSource
Top Takeaways

The Local Control Funding Formula must be more responsive to enrollment trends to ensure funds serve the high-needs students for whom they are targeted, rather than filling gaps in the district budget.

Policymakers must create incentives for districts to improve coordination and merging of services for students with multiple needs.

In making adjustments to the formula, policymakers must avoid introducing too many new, disparate factors that can further burden school systems.
California has an opportunity to ensure that its school funding formula fully delivers on its goals to improve student outcomes, especially for those who need the most support. The key to success will be accounting for shifts in enrollment and creating incentives for districts to blend student programs.

The 2013 Local Control Funding Formula, or LCFF, represented a dramatic shift from a complicated morass of centralized funding requirements that often resulted in large variations in per-pupil funds delivered in and across districts.

Under LCFF, higher overall student outcomes have resulted, thanks to localized decision-making and additional funding to ensure that high-needs students also have the opportunity to succeed in schools. However, progress to close achievement gaps — a central intention of the funding formula — remains slow.

Last year, the California State Assembly held a series of LCFF panels with researchers and educators from across the state. Though divergent views were expressed, multiple experts recommended improving the distribution of supplemental grant funds to the highest-needs students and factoring in geographic cost differences — points underscored by WestEd’s evidence-based review of the funding system.

However, two significant dynamics, which we have frequently seen, received little airtime during the hearing. They may hold clues for further optimizing the use of taxpayer dollars.

First, funding formula updates must meaningfully account for future enrollment declines that could cause changes in the proportions of high-needs students to be served as well as the mix of funding available to school systems.

California’s public schools have lost a substantial number of students, and forecasts project further declines ranging from half a million to nearly 1 million students by 2032-33.

Because many students leaving California public schools — often due to the high cost of living — are English learners, economically disadvantaged and white students, the total and mix of available revenues for school systems is changing, and changing differently by region.

The math is clear: As each student leaves, so does a fraction of the base revenue available to the school system to cover foundational expenses, including teachers, secretaries, utilities and the like. Meanwhile, concentrations of high-needs students, like English learners and students requiring special education services, continue to rise where they are left in greater proportions than their peers, requiring more resources per student to provide equitable opportunities and access.

Reducing expenses for school systems proportional to revenue loss is difficult. School systems often make small, marginal changes that don’t lower expenditures to meet available revenues. This may undercut more meaningful, necessary steps — whole system re-evaluation of resource investments that match student need to the skills and expertise of educators. As a result, resources that should be dedicated to additional supports for students may instead get redirected to support basic school costs. This could leave high-needs students out in the cold instead of achieving the state’s intention to equitably allocate funds.

To avoid this, policymakers must ensure that any future LCFF adjustments include triggers that reconcile the base, supplemental and concentration grants to ensure proper alignment with enrollment and shifts in student need. School systems will also need guidance and support to analyze, design and manage these larger shifts. The formula for special education should be re-evaluated, given that funds are tied to overall student enrollment and not students with individualized education plans (IEPs).

Second, following any further LCFF adjustments, school systems will need policy, regulatory and funding incentives to seamlessly blend student programs like special education and English learner programs where such services are needed for the same multidimensional students.

Eighty-five percent of English learners are economically disadvantaged, as are 67.5% of students with disabilities. California’s high population of students with multiple needs requires additional support to successfully navigate school.

When supports are smartly combined — such as when English learner development support is integrated into a general education classroom — the result is the simultaneous delivery of good instruction and scaffolding for English learners in all general education classrooms. Directing funding to support one identified student need or a specific program sends a message to local school systems about where to direct resources. However, it can go too far. Unchecked, the system begins to look more like what we set out to get away from in the first place: layers of “categorical” programs funded with money that could only be spent in very restricted ways.

Policymakers must write policy that incentivizes and supports local educators to build programs that work together to address the multiple needs of students simultaneously. This includes reevaluating existing education funding to reduce its complexity, which would then allow local school systems to achieve coherent programs that seamlessly support the needs of the array of students being served on school campuses — from learning and instruction to collaborating with other agencies to provide supports such as food, health care and more.

Panelists at the Assembly hearing also noted the need to account for missing factors like geographic cost and economies of scale. While these factors are meaningful adjustments to account for school systems’ costs, introducing too many new, disparate factors can further burden school systems when they are required to track how each of those funding streams is being used. In fact, the governor just signed a bill to conduct a comprehensive review of the overwhelming amount of district reporting already required. Accountability and transparency are important, but too much will limit school systems’ ability to wisely blend and braid funding sources to construct coherent programs that support a wide range of student needs.

The Local Control Funding Formula has already helped California make significant headway to improve public education. By paying attention to changes in the student population and meaningfully accounting for them in funding and policy, the state will be better poised to deliver on its promise to close achievement gaps.

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Jason Willis is with the strategic resource allocation and systems planning team at WestEd, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research, development, and service agency that works to promote excellence, achieve equity, and improve learning for children, youth, and adults.

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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16/04/2025
Upcoming Features for the New School Year

With virtual learning more relevant than ever, we at Wowzers are working hard to release a variety of new features for the upcoming 2020-2021 school year. As more schools make the move to virtual learning, our goals are to better support the diverse needs of students, provide more automation and adaptive features to personalize content, and encourage student accountability over their own learning. Here’s a rundown of what to expect in the coming months:

Automated Personalized Learning Paths

Soon, Wowzers will be able to automatically generate a personalized curriculum for all students. After completing our comprehensive pre-assessment, your students are assigned a curriculum path that meets them at their individual needs. As students work seamlessly across grade levels, they receive exactly the right content to accelerate their learning and engagement. This new feature is in addition to our integration with NWEA, which gives each student a personalized learning path based on their MAP Growth assessment results. Now, even schools that don’t use NWEA assessments will be able to automatically generate a personalized curriculum for all their students.

Offline Mode for the Wowzers App

Available on Chromebooks, iOS, Android, Windows, and macOS, our new app can be downloaded on almost any device. Because each student’s progress is stored in the cloud, they can switch devices whenever needed and pick up where they left off in the curriculum. With new optimizations, the app downloads up to four times faster than when students access Wowzers via a browser window.

Even when an internet connection isn’t available, the Wowzers app will soon be able to work offline, which allows students to work on Wowzers anywhere. Their progress is immediately retrieved when they sign in where there is an internet connection. The app is a perfect solution for students living in remote areas of the US, and the rest of the world, who don’t have internet access at home. When using the Wowzers app offline, it also requires very little time to load and uses less battery power.

K-2 in Spanish

The kindergarten, 1st grade, and 2nd grade content in Wowzers will soon be available in Spanish! Both the text and the voiceover can be switched to Spanish to support our younger ELL students.

New Student Dashboard

The new student dashboard allows students to more easily track their own progress. They will be able to easily see their latest scores and usage, encouraging them to remain accountable in their education journey.

New Remediation Videos

We’re also adding brand new remediation videos to the kindergarten, 1st grade, and 2nd grade content, just like the ones found in the older grades. These 100+ videos target exactly where students are struggling and help get them back on track with a short whiteboard lesson.

Additional Adaptive Features

When a student doesn’t quite pass the cumulative assessment at the end of a section, we’ll now move them backward in the curriculum to review the content. Teachers no longer need to manually adjust students’ curriculum paths when they’re struggling and not quite ready to move forward.

Our hope is that these features will make all our users’ lives easier, from students and their parents to teachers and administrators.

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15/04/2025
Preparing for the 2020-21 School Year with Wowzers
The upcoming school year brings a lot of unknowns, but whether you’re looking at remote learning, in-person learning, or a combination of the two, Wowzers is designed to make learning both effective and engaging. In this blog post, we’ll go over the different ways Wowzers can be set up to meet the needs of students in a hybrid teaching model.

Using the default scope and sequence

Each grade in Wowzers contains a default curriculum path built around the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). All CCSS and state standards are addressed, and each 3-8 grade level is designed to take a school year to complete. The online curriculum can also be supplemented with related offline activities, worksheets, discussion questions, and games. With the default curriculum path, you don’t need to worry about whether students have the required prerequisite knowledge; the curriculum follows a natural progression and each section builds upon the previous ones. We particularly recommend the default scope and sequence for parents using Wowzers with their children, since there’s no need to understand all the pedagogy and math concepts; Wowzers does the work for you.

To use the default curriculum path, assign students to the Classroom Path without editing it. Remember that you can always edit the Classroom Path to put the sections back in numerical order if you already edited it.

Using the Wowzers pre-assessment to assign a personalized path

Brand new for the 2020-21 school year, all students have access to their own personalized curriculum. After completing our comprehensive pre-assessment, students are assigned a curriculum path that meets them at their individual needs. As students work seamlessly across grade levels, they receive exactly the right content to accelerate their learning and engagement. This new feature is in addition to our integration with NWEA, which gives each student a personalized learning path based on their MAP Growth assessment results. Now, even schools that don’t use NWEA assessments will be able to automatically generate a personalized curriculum for all their students. Like the default path, the personalized path is designed to take an entire school year to complete.

To use this feature, have your students take the Wowzers pre-assessment to generate their personalized curriculum path. There’s no need to edit it or re-assign them to another path unless you determine they’re struggling or need more advanced work.

Using the NWEA MAP Growth Assessment to assign a personalized curriculum

For schools that use the NWEA MAP Growth Assessment, Wowzers is able to directly import each student’s RIT score. Because both the MAP Growth assessment and Wowzers’ curriculum are aligned to Common Core State Standards, we look at how the student performed on each standard in the assessment and then match that with the corresponding Wowzers curriculum. With this data, Wowzers automatically creates a personalized math curriculum to meet students where they are and help them master the content they’re ready to learn. Since each path is individualized, it can include content from multiple grade levels to perfectly suit the student.

To use this feature, follow our video tutorial.

Align Wowzers to match your classroom’s math textbook

If you’re using Wowzers alongside a textbook, you may want to adjust the Wowzers curriculum to match the scope and sequence of the textbook. If you’d like assistance, we have documents that outline how to rearrange the Wowzers curriculum to match most major textbooks, including:
- Bridges
- My Math
- Glencoe
- Eureka
- Go Math
To request a correlation guide, feel free to reach out to our team at math@wowzerslearning.com. To edit the curriculum path to match a textbook’s scope and sequence, use our path editing feature to rearrange the curriculum as needed. For more information, see our video tutorial.

Whichever way you choose to use Wowzers, our goal is to get students up and running with minimal setup time. By eliminating much of the busywork involved in setting up a new program, teachers have more time to spend working 1:1 with students and focusing on the more important aspects of teaching. With our built-in Learning Management System (Teacher Dashboard) at their fingertips, teachers can easily track their students’ progress at a glance and quickly determine which students need additional intervention. For more information about our LMS, see our video tutorial.
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14/04/2025
Where are California’s high school students?
High school students in a math class.

Credit: Allison Shelley / EDUimages

As California schools continue their post-pandemic recovery, a troubling pattern has emerged: High schoolers aren’t showing up.

Recent midyear attendance data reveals that while elementary school attendance has improved significantly, high school chronic absenteeism remains stubbornly high.

Nationally and in California, chronic absenteeism numbers tell a concerning story about older students. While California’s average chronic absence rate, based on the sample in the new report, fell to 20.46% (down from 29.04% in 2022-23), high school students continue to struggle.

Over 28% of California high school seniors included in the report have been chronically absent this school year. We must rethink approaches to engaging older students to improve high school attendance.

When students miss school, they miss more than just instruction. They miss opportunities to connect with supportive adults and peers — connections directly linked to academic success and well-being.

Research from YouthTruth, which surveys elementary, middle and high school students, reveals that only 40% of high school students feel they belong at school, compared with 47% of middle schoolers. Only 22% of high school students report that their teachers understand their lives outside school — the lowest percentage since before the pandemic.

Traditional attendance approaches that work for elementary students don’t resonate with teenagers navigating complex social pressures, growing independence, and increasing responsibilities. Many high school students juggle jobs, family care duties and mental health challenges that are not as prevalent in younger grades.

The California Safe and Supportive Schools initiative identifies school connectedness as fundamental to attendance. When high schoolers have even one strong connection with a teacher or staff member who understands their life beyond academics, attendance improves dramatically. Schools can implement connection mapping to identify which students could benefit from more connections.

Schools can also leverage peer influence. According to YouthTruth, 68% of high school students want to help improve their communities, but only 30% report having opportunities to create positive change. Student-led attendance initiatives consistently outperform adult-directed programs. For example, a peer-led “attendance influencer” program has an impact exceeding what other systems can achieve.

Educators must also seek to understand and address the specific attendance barriers older students face. Many chronically absent teens are helping to support their families, caring for siblings or facing transportation limitations. Flexible scheduling options, transportation assistance and partnerships with local employers can help address these obstacles.

Communication must shift from punitive to supportive to effectively reach students and families. A recent K-12 family survey revealed that more than 71% of families want messages celebrating good attendance or improvements to share with their child, while only 37% of respondents reported receiving regular communication about steps they can take to improve attendance. Schools that successfully address absenteeism use data to identify patterns and engage students and families in collaborative solutions-finding rather than blame.

Finally, we must address the mental health component of attendance. Nearly half of all California students (48%) cite depression, stress or anxiety as obstacles to learning — yet only 41% of students nationally report having an adult at school to talk to.

This “support gap” is particularly pronounced among at-risk student populations. About 77% of LGBTQ+ students cite mental health challenges as barriers to learning, compared with 41% of their peers. While 46% of white students report having an adult at school they can talk to, the percentage is significantly lower for other racial groups, between 37-44%.

The good news? When targeted strategies are implemented, improvement can happen quickly. Effective approaches to building a culture of belonging include:
- Teacher-student connection time: Brief but regular one-on-one check-ins to understand students’ lives outside school.
- Student voice channels: Creating opportunities for students to provide feedback and lead attendance initiatives that resonate with peers.
- Positive communication: Shifting from absence-focused messages to celebrating improvements and recognizing attendance gains.
- Data-driven intervention: Using integrated attendance, academic and behavioral data to identify early warning signs and track what works.
As California continues to invest in attendance improvement, we must tailor our approaches to different grade levels. Our high schoolers don’t want automated calls or perfect attendance certificates. They need meaningful connections, relevant engagement and practical support for real-life barriers.

California’s future leaders walk our high school hallways — when they show up. Meeting these students where they are isn’t just good policy, it’s our obligation to the next generation of leaders, innovators and citizens.

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Kara Stern is director of education and engagement at SchoolStatus, a company that provides school districts with data tools and communication support for student engagement.

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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12/04/2025