Jul 13 2009
How California schools get their money
California school finance is a mess. Very few people in the state udnerstand the whole thing. This blog is simply meant as a primer, not a complete course. If you want to complete course you should be the Department of Finance’s education analyst. Otherwise, good luck. But here are the basics. It should help you understand why Prop. 98 is such a ridiculous thing, and why school funding seems so large, yet do little goes to the schools.
California’s K-12 schools get their money from a variety of state, locat and federal sources. The majority of a school district’s funds are for general purposes, they can do what they want with the funds. Some of the funds, the categoricals, must be spent on specific things.
State funding account for more than six out of every 10 dollars that schools receive, statewide. In some districts this is lower because they have more property tax revenue. In other districts, like L.A., this is higher. In fact, the L.A. school districts account for more than 50% of education funding in the state. Federal money accounts for approximately 9% of school funding. The state lottery funds approximately 1.6% of state education.
Almost all of the state funding comes from the General Fund. The California Department of Education receives the funds, and then provides those funds to the local school districts. On way to cut on spending would be to eliminate the California Department of Education, or at least severly reduce their staff and their work. Who knows better how a school needs to spend and use the money - the state or the locality where the school is located?
Proposition 98 guarantees a minimal level of funding for the K-12 schools and community colleges . Prop. 98, generally, says that K-14 education shall receive a greater percentage of state general fund revenues, or the amount they received the prior year, adjusted for inflation and enrollment. The language is confusing, as are the three formulas that Prop. 98 uses to fix the percentage of revenues the state gives the schools. The main point is that under no circumstances, unless Prop. 98 is suspended, can education receive less funding than it did the prior year.
Are you still confused? So is everyone else. School funding is a hard issue, and Prop. 98 only makes it harder. The California Budget Project puts out a great primer on school finance. It is only a few pages long, and you can read that.
But do you see how education funding is ridiculous? There is nothing that bases the funding on need, performance, or anything else that is a tangible output. If businesses operated a program in this manner it would fail. Why not reform education spending to match what everyone expects it to be - based on performance. Bad performing programs shouldn’t get more money. Teachers who cannot control classrooms or teach their students shouldn’t get tenure and raises because of their years of service. School funding is broke. It is time we fixed it.
