After nearly a decade of the Local Control Funding Formula, it’s easy to take the system for granted. For many school trustees and most of the Legislature, it’s the only school funding system they’ve ever known. Perhaps that’s why many of our representatives at the Capitol are complacent toward or even dismissive of LCFF. This nonchalant attitude is cause for alarm because LCFF is a huge step beyond California’s previous method of funding public education. Anyone seeking to improve resources and conditions for students should be focused on bolstering LCFF — primarily by increasing base funding — not chiseling away at a historic commitment to our public schools.
A robust defense of LCFF, combined with aggressive advocacy for its expansion, is crucial to address both our near-term challenges and our long-term goals of strengthening public schools, closing opportunity and achievement gaps, and improving student outcomes. To understand the connection, it’s helpful to review the funding system before LCFF.
When LCFF was implemented in 2013, it represented the most significant change to California school funding in about 40 years. Schools were still reeling from years of cuts during the Great Recession of 2008 to 2012, when state funding dropped by 20 percent and the average district reduced expenditures by roughly $2,000 per student. At the time, about 18 percent of school districts posted “qualified” budgets, indicating they were unable to meet their financial obligations for both the current fiscal year and the two after it.
But the deep cuts of the Great Recession weren’t the start of California’s school funding crisis. In 2006–07, before the economy collapsed, California spent $731 or 7.5 percent per student less than the national average, ranking 29th out of 50 states and Washington, D.C. in that category. Absolute totals fail to account for the high cost of living in California relative to other states. On a cost-adjusted basis, California ranked in the bottom five — 46th to be exact — in expenditures per pupil, spending more than $1,400 per student less than the national average. School staffing ratios were also dismal and California ranked second-to-last in the number of certificated staff per student, a statistic that includes not only teachers, nurses, counselors and principals.
About 80 percent of current school trustees joined their governing boards in 2012 or later, as the country and the state began its sluggish emergence from the Great Recession. Yet, even new school board members are still coping with the fallout from those years of cuts, which have had a generational impact on California’s public schools. And those who served on school boards before 2012 remember that education funding in those days did relatively little to recognize and address how to close opportunity and achievement gaps for the state’s highest-need students. To make the situation worse, a heavily reliance on “categoricals,” essentially funding that was restricted for certain purposes, deprived local educational agencies of the flexibility required to align spending with student need.
The many and compounding shortcomings of California’s school funding system finally brought things to a head. Frustration with inadequate funding levels, minimal flexibility, and a profound lack of support for struggling student populations created momentum for major school funding reform. After extensive haggling at the local and state level — debates where CSBA played a major role — Gov. Jerry Brown signed the California 2013–14 Budget Act, which included legislation (Assembly Bill 97, Senate Bill 97, and SB 91) establishing LCFF.
LCFF marked a paradigm shift in the way California funded public schools. For the first time, the state was attempting to align funding with student need. It didn’t go far enough, however, either in terms of base funding for all students or in terms of the supplemental and concentration grants for low-income students, English learners, and foster and homeless youth. What it accomplished was to establish a philosophical approach to funding rooted in equity and help raise per-student funding levels significantly. When LCFF was funded to targeted levels for the first time in 2018–19, the Proposition 98 per-pupil spending of $11,640 was $4,663 above 2011–12 levels.
LCFF enjoys significant support in the education community and research credits it with helping to spread state resources more equitably across districts and for helping to improve services and student outcomes — although opportunity and achievement gaps remain. It’s clear we need to do more for our students.
LCFF’s funding targets, which were insufficient to start with, were reached four years ago. Since then, LEA costs have continued to rise, particularly in expensive areas such as employee compensation, pension contribution costs, health care, special education and transportation, among others.
Outside of cost-of-living allowances, new revenue from the state has primarily come in the form of categorical programs with limited eligibility to specified grades, competitive grant programs, and one-time money that is earmarked for specific purposes, robbing LEAs of critical flexibility. Call it the return of the categoricals.
We can’t sit idly by and backslide into pre-LCFF funding scenarios where districts’ hands are tied, and they find themselves unprepared to weather a recession without decimating services to students.
I encourage you to consider how you can share this knowledge with your students, staff, families, community members and legislators and educate them on the benefits of LCFF and the perils of overreliance on categorical funding. The time for advocacy is now. We must constantly fight to build and enhance LCFF to create a more stable, more sustainable future for California’s students.