☆ CA already spends billions on education. Is enough getting to the districts that need it?
There’s a flaw in how California allocates money to education: funding for students who need extra help is meted out to districts far too slowly. So says candidate for State Superintendent of Public Instruction Gus Mattammal. In his book A is for Average, he proposes ramping up this funding earlier. He says it can be done without increasing taxes.
Discussions about the performance of the public school system invariably at some point turn to the issue of funding. There are those who insist (often quite loudly) that the public school system would not be failing if we simply plowed more money into it. But, as I showed, other states accomplish far more with far less than California does. So more money, without any other substantive changes, cannot be the entire solution.
That said, there is one way in which more money actually should be part of the solution. In order to understand what that way is, you first must understand how California’s public school system is funded today.
…as our state’s economy grows, and the state budget along with it, the education budget legally must also grow. That is, we are going to spend more money on the public school system no matter what. The only question on the table is whether we will spend that additional money feeding a system that is designed to fail or spend the money fixing the system. I assume, as taxpayers, most of us would prefer the latter.
…The first step toward a remedy is to recognize that the [Unduplicated Pupil Percentage – funding for students who need extra help] effect is not linear at all; it follows a steeply sloping S-curve. There is, fortunately, a simple mathematical function that produces precisely that shape: the logistic function. The following comparison illustrates how funding schools based on this function diverges from the Legislature’s current model:
The dashed line is the current [Local Control Funding Formula], and the solid curve is a more grounded proposal. As you can see, my proposed model kicks in a lot faster and far more steeply than the Legislature’s model.
…Importantly, phasing in this proposal means we can fund this program without raising taxes. That is a particularly important aspect of the proposal for me, because we Californians are already very heavily taxed.
Excerpt from Gus Mattammal’s book A is for Average.
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