Search

Tight budgets are a reality for many school districts across California, leading some to believe that a growing charter sector is squeezing the finances of traditional school districts. One common criticism of charter schools centers on special education: charter schools directly serve fewer students with disabilities, and thereby drive disproportionate costs to traditional school districts. While it is true that charter schools in California enroll fewer students with disabilities, though only at a marginally lower rate than traditional public schools, this argument is too simplistic. In reality, the way special education finance works in California affects schools of all types, and underinvestment in special education services from federal and state levels shifts costs to the local level. This argument also overlooks the ways charters, and other schools, contribute to the education of students with disabilities, including students they do not enroll. "California's Special Education Funding System Creates Challenges and Opportunities for District and Charter Schools" looks at several features of California's special education funding system which make it difficult for districts to serve students with disabilities and limit the ability of some charter schools to make decisions about the programs and services they offer for students with disabilities. For example, state special education funding is distributed to the local level according to total student enrollment rather than according to the services provided to students with disabilities or by specific disabilities. This approach is designed to remove financial incentives to over-identify students for special education services, but unlike several other states that use this approach, California lacks sufficient supplemental funding to support students who require very high-cost services. Additionally, the structures through which California allocates funding to the local level complicate the way schools receive funds, how they contribute to the broader provision of services across districts and regions, and how charter schools fit into the picture. Instead of pitting school types against each other, this brief explains California's special education finance system and analyzes how it affects both traditional and charter schools. The document also identifies financial and structural challenges facing traditional and charter schools and outlines potential solutions that focus on improving opportunities for all students with disabilities in the state. Understanding how special education funding works is important to solving the very real fiscal problems facing traditional and charter schools. [This report was supported by the California Charter Schools Association.]

California's Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) was signed into law in 2013, and represents the most significant change in California education finance and governance in 40 years. It moves additional funds to districts with students in poverty, English language learners, and foster youth. The LCFF sends supplemental funds to districts based on unduplicated counts of these target student groups and concentration funds to districts with high proportions (over 55%) of these same students. In addition, the LCFF eliminates nearly all categorical funding and pushes decision-making about how best to allocate resources to the local level. The LCFF also requires districts to develop a Local Control and Accountability Plan (LCAP) with meaningful local community engagement of parents, community members, students, and educators. The LCFF Research Collaborative has been following the implementation of LCFF since the first year of LCAP planning. In that time, we have seen broad support for the intent of the law, both in its emphasis on more equitable allocation of resources based on student need and in its incorporation of local control and flexibility to support more locally responsive and coherent approaches to improvement. However, we have also noted wide variation among districts in the extent and ways in which they have been able to manifest these intents at the local level. Often the attention of policy makers and the public is drawn to implementation shortcomings and instances in which either the intent or the specific provisions of the law are not being met. Certainly, it is important to address these shortcomings if implementation and the law itself are to be improved over time. Equally important, however, are cases in which the LCFF is operating as envisioned, for it is through such positive exemplars that others might learn and improve. Thus, after studying LCFF implementation for 4 years, the LCFF Research Collaborative decided to identify and document the work of school districts whose implementation efforts in three specific areas are reputed to be noteworthy. We were interested in school districts that were particularly innovative in their attempts to: (1) Meaningfully engage stakeholders in their Local Control Accountability Plan (LCAP) development; (2) Advance the implementation of the California State Standards (CCSS); and (3) Take an innovative approach to resource allocation decision-making.

This report provides campus and system leaders with a scan of the current state of reform within the California State University (CSU), together with contextual insight into the obstacles and possibilities for broader scale adoption of coordinated, systemic change. Researchers: (1) Reviewed information on evidence-based student success strategies at broad-access universities nationwide, creating a framework mapping six broad categories of institutional actions along four stages of students' journey through college; (2) Collected and reviewed key planning documents from each of the 23 CSU campuses to identify the kinds of efforts planned or underway; and (3) Conducted surveys with administrators and faculty members at four campuses, identified themes, and cross-walked the themes against the student success strategies uncovered across the CSU. The report is divided into four sections: (1) The California State University is Focusing on Improving Student success (graduation rates are improving, but gaps persist, and the Graduation Initiative 2025 encourages new efforts on campus); (2) National Context: A Movement toward Systemic Institutional Change; (3) CSU Campus Strategies Reflect National Efforts, with Some Early Steps toward Systemic Change (campuses are implementing a broad set of strategies and are recognizing the need for systemic reform although they are facing challenges making the shift); and (4) Conclusions and Implications: Creating a Roadmap for Student Success. [This report was produced by the California State University (CSU) Student Success Network, facilitated by the Education Insights Center (EdInsights).]

California educators continue in their struggle to communicate district plans to parents, teachers, and other members of the school community. Local Control Accountability Plans (LCAPs), have ballooned into jargon-laden stacks of tables, impenetrable to all but the most sophisticated reader. Envisioned as a tool to improve transparency, the LCAP as implemented has instead left many parents and community members utterly confused. In recognition of the LCAP's issues, state and district leaders are looking for better ways to inform the community about districts' plans and results. This brief, the fourth in a series informs district leaders as they communicate about their overall vision for school improvement, and the strategies and resource allocation decisions they are using to achieve that vision. It highlights insights that emerged from a November 2015 meeting of the California Collaborative on District Reform, in which participants reviewed resources already in use in the field--a sample of executive summaries, infographics, and other communication materials. As California continues to refine the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) system of policies and practices, these guidelines can help districts further the goals LCFF was designed to foster.

This study seeks to extend the literature on higher education enrollment patterns during times of recession by examining patterns of enrollment and successful course completion in one of the world's largest higher education systems--the California Community College system. The data are drawn from publicly available data sources on the web. CCC system budget data can be found on the Chancellor's Office website (CCCCO 2010). The CCCCO Data Mart was used to collect term-level data on head counts, enrollments in transfer courses and course success patterns. Economic data and unemployment statistics came from the California Employment. The authors begin by examining enrollment patterns during times of economic recession over the last 20 years. Figure 1 provides a snapshot of annual changes in CCC head count from 1992 to the fall 2010 term. To be more specific, the graph charts fall to fall, spring to spring, and summer to summer changes in the unduplicated term head count, so each academic year has three enrolment bars. In many of the terms, one can witness growth from year to year that tracks with California's growing adult population, and the state's budget fortunes--allowing for growth funding in the system budget. The downturns in enrollment track reasonably well with the three California recessions identified by state economists (June 1990 to May 1993, March 2001 to July 2003, and July 2007 to December 2009). The two largest drops in CCC enrollment occurred in the fall term of 2003 (-187,973) and the summer term of 2010 (-266,713), and both of those terms came immediately after the declared end of the two recessions. Community College veterans of the prior recessionary period (2003) can readily recall the massive number of course section reductions that occurred at that time and the loss in both head count and FTES. The CCC system office (CCCCO 2005, 11) reported at that time that a nearly 10% decline in unduplicated head count occurred in the 2003-04 academic year,an a decline of 4.3% in FTES enrollment. Beyond the reduced budget dollars flowing from the state, the 2003-04 period featured increased enrollment fees for students, with prices per unit of enrollment rising from $11 in spring 2003 to $18 the following year, and $26 beginning in fall 2004 (CCCCO 2005, 8). (Contains 1 figure, 4 tables and 2 footnotes.)

Though the number of districts with student-based funding-type (SBF) policies has grown, the literature on the implementation and possible impacts of these policies is limited. To address this, this report describes the implementation of SBF policies in two California school districts--San Francisco Unified School District and Oakland Unified School District--and addresses the following research questions: (1) What are key considerations that San Francisco and Oakland have faced when designing and implementing their respective SBF policies? What are the perceived impacts of these districts' decisions?; (2) Have San Francisco and Oakland distributed and utilized their resources in different ways after adopting SBF policies?; and (3) Based on San Francisco and Oakland's experiences, what are some "lessons learned" for other district and state policymakers interested in an SBF policy? This study is not an evaluation of SBF policies in California. Instead, the goal is to describe and compare SBF systems in two case study districts, to report the perceptions of key constituencies on these policies, and to present data on the patterns of resource allocation before and after implementation. Seven chapters comprise this report, following an introduction. They present information on the processes and procedures around implementing an SBF policy, some qualitative assessment of the implementation in the case study districts, and some quantitative analyses of the patterns of resource allocation before and after SBF implementation. Chapter 2 outlines the general planning and budgeting process in San Francisco and Oakland, along with the driving force behind each district's implementation of its SBF policies. Chapters 3 and 4 then detail nine key considerations both districts faced when planning and implementing their SBF policies. Chapter 3 focuses specifically on the three considerations that revolved around funding. Chapter 4 details the planning and implementation considerations beyond those specific to funding. Each consideration is laid out in detail along with the school and district stakeholders' reactions to those decisions. These chapters are especially geared toward district administrators who are interested in pursuing or refining an SBF policy based on real-life experiences in two California districts. Chapter 5 provides a detailed analysis of the changes in the patterns of resource allocation over time, both before and after the implementation of an SBF policy. Chapter 6 then summarizes the analysis of whether the equitable relationship between student need and resource expenditures changed during the implementation of an SBF policy in both districts. Finally, Chapter 7 concludes with lessons learned from our observation of both districts' SBF policies in general as well as specific insights for both district and state policymakers in California. (Contains 64 exhibits and 8 notes.)

In 2013, California moved to drive more resources for students with higher needs, create more spending flexibility and let districts decide how to spend substantial new dollars by adopting a new watershed state finance policy, the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF). As California's Weighted Student Funding (WSF) law enters Year 5 of implementation, we investigate whether we are seeing an improved relationship between spending and outcomes in the early years of LCFF. Given that one of WSF's main policy aims is to promote a more productive use of dollars, it makes sense to investigate that relationship. Our early finding suggests a more positive relationship between funding and student outcomes after LCFF than before LCFF. In other words, money appeared to matter more in the wake of LCFF. This December 2017 analysis of data from some 600 districts launches what we hope will be a new wave of much-needed research on education productivity. With LCFF, California has undertaken one of the nation's largest weighted student funding (WSF) overhauls to date. As such, its experience is of national interest. This paper is part 3 of a series analyzing early impacts of LCFF. [For part 1, see ED612169. For part 2, see ED612170.]

In 2013, California implemented a watershed weighted student funding formula (WSF) that deployed substantial new funds to districts based on their counts of student types, while also stripping long-standing spending constraints on districts. The state finance formula (the Local Control Funding Formula or LCFF) specifically boosted allocations to districts for their foster youth, students with limited English, and those living in poverty. But California's funding law does not require districts to deploy resources generated on behalf of their high-needs students to the schools those students attend. Our analysis of eight districts takes a first look at whether districts did, in fact, allocate a larger share of their new funds to their highest-needs schools. First, we find that districts generally aren't tracking allocations by school. That means district and state leaders and the public mostly don't know whether the new funds are boosting spending on the highest-needs schools. Where school-level data was accessible, we find that some districts did allocate a larger share of their new money and staffing to the highest-needs schools. Others did the opposite. Our findings underscore the need for districts to publicly report spending by school. This paper is part 2 of a series analyzing early impacts of LCFF. [For part 1, see ED612169. For part 3, see ED612172.]

In 2013 California adopted a new watershed state finance policy, the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) to drive more resources to students with higher needs, create more spending flexibility, and let districts decide how to spend substantial new dollars. Our analysis examines financial data from nearly all California school systems to clarify how their spending choices changed in the first three years of the new state funding law. We find that predictions of wholesale ill-conceived spending choices in the absence of state prescription have not been borne out. And while we find that districts generally didn't make radical changes in spending, they did spend in ways that could help the highest-need students and did show evidence of "customizing" spending to meet local needs. With LCFF, California has undertaken one of the nation's largest weighted student funding (WSF) overhauls to date. As such, its experience is of national interest. This paper is part 1 of a series analyzing early impacts of LCFF. [For part 2, see ED612170. For part 3, see ED612172.]

In 2009, California state legislators freed local educators from the specific guidelines that previously regulated spending on 40 categorical-aid programs known as Tier 3 programs. This Tier 3 flexibility reform, which deregulates $4.5 billion in education funding, was enacted at the same time the legislature made cuts in education spending in response to the economic recession. Drawing on interviews with school district leaders from around the state and with policymakers in Sacramento, this report details how leaders in 10 California school districts are responding to the Tier 3 flexibility reform, including what districts are doing with the newly flexible funds, how allocation decisions were made, and what their consequences have been. The researchers found that school districts felt uncertainty about the new flexibility and generally remained committed to the goals of the Tier 3 programs. Appended are: (1) Tier 3 Categorical Programs Combined into New "Flex Item" (2009-2010); and (2) Advisory Committee. (Contains 5 tables, 7 figures, 1 box and 8 endnotes.) [This paper was written with Mary Briggs, Scott Epstein, Nina Lorenzi, Reino Makkonen, Angeline Spain, and Anisah Waite. Additional funding for this paper was provided by the Dirk and Charlene Kabcenell Foundation.]

In 2009-2010, California made substantial education budget cuts at the same time that it removed its spending requirements from $4.5 billion of state money. This gave districts the flexibility to use the funds in any manner approved by the local school board. Researchers found that most of the formerly earmarked money was moved into general funds and that the changes did not disproportionately affect high-need students. Districts' top priorities in allocating the newly flexible funds were preserving fiscal solvency, retaining staff, and preserving current instructional programs. [This research brief describes work done by RAND Education documented in "Deregulating School Aid in California: How Districts Responded to Flexibility in Tier 3 Categorical Funds in 2010-2011," by Brian M. Stecher, Bruce Fuller, Tom Timar, and Julie A. Marsh and and "Deregulating School Aid in California: Revenues and Expenditures in the Second Year of Categorical Flexibility," by Jennifer Imazeki.]