Fixing funding for schools -- and colleges, and all the rest
CSBA, the California School Boards Association, and other major education groups have been talking for years about suing the state to bring California’s dismally low school funding up to something approaching adequate levels.
And while there are still no details, it now seems increasingly likely that a suit will be filed this spring, possibly as early as April. There are certainly ample grounds for it.
The suits would come at the same time that researchers at the Public Policy Institute of California are working on a plan to thoroughly revamp what they call California’s “overly complex” and “inequitable” school funding system and as the U.S. Department of Education is reportedly readying its own civil rights suit against educational inequities in some Southern California school districts.
Six years ago, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, much to his credit, settled the Williams v. California, a suit demanding that the state provide the materials, decent facilities and competent teachers – or indeed any regular teachers – that tens of thousands of poor and minority California school children weren’t getting.
But the settlement, which promised a book for every student, better facilities and the eventual end of truncated, broken-up school calendars and fractured school years,
