LCFF lemmings poised to leap? - by Eric Premack / commentary
Eric Premack
The current Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) legislation pending before the Legislature utterly fails to reach any of the key reform goals that Gov. Jerry Brown and his advisers articulated. The bill presents the Legislature and governor with a stark choice.
The key goals of LCFF, as articulated by the governor’s astute adviser Mike Kirst and his colleagues in a seminal paper, were as follows:
- Allocate Revenue Based on Needs. Though the bill would direct substantial funding toward districts serving high proportions of English learners and low-income students, much of the allocation is driven by the quirks of California’s gerrymandered school district boundaries. Students with identical needs and living on opposite sides of the same street can be funded at dramatically different rates – simply because the school district boundary line falls in the middle of their street. Worse yet, the LCFF continues three huge categorical programs that are widely recognized to be the most grossly inequitable of all of California’s categorical funding programs. These include Home-to-School Transportation (where funding rates are based decades-old entitlement data), Targeted Instructional Improvement Grants (“pork” funding t
