Q&A: Bringing Equity Back to California School Funding

March 21, 2013
New America Media

Editor’s Note: California Gov. Jerry Brown has proposed a new formula for funding the state’s public schools. Known as the Local Control Funding Formula, the plan seeks to address glaring inequities plaguing the current K-12 school finance system. In 2008, State Board of Education President Michael Kirst co-authored a policy brief that became the foundation for Brown’s proposed formula. NAM editor Peter Schurmann spoke with Kirst about how the state ended up with the system now in place and whether the governor’s formula can help turn things around.

New America Media: If education experts agree on anything, it’s that California’s current school funding system is a wreck. How did we get to this point?

Michael Kirst: California was the nationwide leader in school-finance equity up to 1971. That year, the state’s Supreme Court ruled in Serrano v. Priest that the system was unconstitutional because it was based on property tax wealth in California’s more than 1,000 districts. The court was convinced there was a correlation between the wealth of property in the district and the spending level.

This was a major issue in the 1974 campaign for governor, and I was brought in as the advisor for Gov. Brown to solve it. The courts said, “Just make sure the districts are spending about the same amount of money, even if their property tax values vary enormously.”

So we leveled the high-spending districts down and leveled the low-spending districts up. Finally, something like 95 percent of pupils were enrolled in districts that were spending within $300 of each other. The courts said, “Fine, you’ve done your job.” And they ended the suit.

Well, that left us with no adjustments for special needs. And then the categorical programs [legally required, such as special education] began to really proliferate.

NAM: In your view, will Gov. Brown’s proposed Local Control Funding Formula be effective in returning the state to a more equitable system?

Kirst: The plan really adjusts for pupil needs in a way that the current formula does not. As the state added categorical programs, some of them were directed toward needy pupils, but many were not.

As we discussed, the Serrano decision in 1971 was very important in pushing school finance equity. But it merely [said] school districts should spend about the same amount. It ignored [adjusting] the finance system to differing needs of pupils, rather than just worrying about the differences in spending between districts like Beverly Hills and low-income Baldwin Park, for example.

The other thing that is important is the [formula’s] concentration factor. This is really important for California, where so many students live in districts with high concentrations of not only low-income students, but also English learners. [In the new formula] we felt there are special circumstances like these that deserve even higher weightings.

NAM: Previous attempts have been made to pass similar formulas. What’s changed in Sacramento that might give this one a fighting chance?

Kirst: I would say it’s gubernatorial leadership. The governor’s office in California is inherently very powerful, [and Gov. Brown] has really seized this issue in a passionate and committed way, rather than in just an intellectual way.

These things are not easily generated by the legislature because they’re so divided ... Interest groups couldn’t really coalesce over this either because they have members with all kinds of pupil backgrounds. That’s been the pattern in California for the past 30 years. If you don’t have the governor, you really can’t do it.

NAM: Then in that sense, are the shortcomings in California’s education system the result of failed leadership?

Kirst: Yeah, I think so. If you go back to the last time California had money, in 2006, the governor and the legislature created 22 new categorical programs. All they did was reinforce the past. If left to its own devices, the current system will revert back to form, which is more categorical programs and then that disease “hardening of the categories” sets in as lobbyists are hired for each category.

NAM: Are categorical programs, such as those designed for special ed. students, at the root of the problem?

Kirst: I am not against all categoricals. We’ve left special education untouched [in the proposed formula]. The main problem is that California just got hooked on this much more than any other state. So problems of whatever size – big or small – were solved through a categorical grant. Then, as various districts began to be favored by the pattern of categorical grants, the districts that didn’t get much money said, “We need a categorical grant for us.” That included some of the wealthier districts.

Since there was no underlying rationale for what was being done in school finance, it became an ad-hoc political free-for-all. The legislators liked it because they could pass a categorical program and it became their footnote in history.

NAM: California is near the bottom in per-pupil spending. How will Brown’s formula affect the state’s ranking in this regard?

Kirst: The governor has concluded that over the past decade, education – both K-12 and higher education – has been cut disproportionately. So over time, he is committed to moving the [per-pupil] base funding (which averages roughly $8,500 – 30 percent below the national average) up for all districts, even those with lower numbers of needy students. This is a major shift in the priority for education within the overall state budget. That said, [the formula] still can’t make up for the lack of local revenue sources stemming from Proposition 13.

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The article originally posted on New America Media. Click for full interview.

Mentioned Publications

The full policy implications of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for Mathematics and English Language Arts K-12 are just beginning to unfold across the 45 states (and DC) that are working to implement them. The CCSS will impact almost all key state education policies in fundamental ways. As we learned from the 1990-2005 era of systemic state standards-based reform, when academic standards change, so do policies related to student assessment and school accountability. Moreover, many other specific policies must be aligned and harmonized, including state curriculum frameworks, instructional materials, K-12 and college assessment, K-12 finance, professional development, teacher evaluation/preparation, preschool, and others (Fuhrman, 1993). In this brief, I outline what the Common Core will mean for California education policy in each of these important areas.

Some background: Before 1990 most states, including California, did not have a single set of grade by grade K-12 academic content standards in ELA and Mathematics that every district was required to adopt and every school was required to teach. A student in a family that moved from one district to another might wind up studying very different material, even if he or she stayed in the same grade. Eventually the idea of creating uniform K-12 academic standards within a state took hold, although each state in the U.S. developed and adopted its own set of standards for its schools and students. As states pursued a standards-based reform strategy from 1990 to 2011 they also created assessment-driven instruction policies designed to penetrate into classrooms. Many California teachers merely posted the state standards to be taught each week at the front of their classrooms. However, teacher content coverage gradually began to change, and many teachers began meeting with their colleagues to work on attaining state standards. Public awareness and acceptance of the concept of state adopted academic standards is now well established. Today California residential real estate brokers routinely provide the state Academic Performance Index results of local school to parents shopping for homes.

Where we are now: Figure 1 depicts graphically many of the state policies that must change to be aligned and coherent with Common Core State Standards. As elsewhere, policymakers in California must eliminate contradictions between policies, look for gaps where no policy currently exists, such as instructional transition from prekindergarten to kindergarten, and ensure that newly aligned policies like those concerning professional development have sufficient breadth and depth to cover all teachers who need help.

For example, in the past the introduction of ambitious learning standards conflicted with assessment policy because existing multiple choice assessments failed to measure the deeper learning needed by students, and provided too little information to teachers about student performance. This conflict should be avoided with the Common Core State Standards because an equal amount of effort is going into the development of next generation, computer-adaptive student assessment systems that will more robustly measure student learning against the standards.

The Common Core State Standards are designed to transform current instruction by focusing teacher attention on fewer, higher, and deeper standards (NGA/CCSSO, 2010). Current state assessment and accountability systems in California, however, are not aligned with the Common Core’s specific instructional approach.

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