Some California schools get twice the funding -- and more -- of others
Thirty-six years after the California Supreme Court ordered the state to fix its unequal system of funding schools, a gaping disparity remains between haves and have-nots.
And it may not improve much any time soon.
A scathing report on California's school finances not only repeats the indictment of an inequitable, insufficient and irrational funding scheme, but also details how California spends on average $620 less on a student living in a high-poverty area than one in an affluent neighborhood.
The report by the Education Trust-West, an Oakland-based education advocacy group, also attacks the complexity of California school financing. "The system is a haphazard collection of arcane and hard-to-navigate policies that manage to hide funding disparities from district leaders and policy makers, not to mention parents and the public," the report, released last week, reads. "The maze of programs and formulas makes it nearly impossible to understand whether dollars ever reach the schools and students for whom they are intended."
A yawning gulf separates even school districts serving students from similar demographic backgrounds. For example, in 2009-10, the latest data available, per-pupil revenue was $14,076 in Palo Alto versus $7,679 in
