Plaintiff in lawsuit updates costs of inadequate funding
The California School Boards Association has updated spending numbers from studies published a decade ago to support the argument its attorneys will make Wednesday in an appeal of a lawsuit claiming the state is violating students’ rights by inadequately funding public schools.
The school boards association argues in a new report that California would have to spend between $22 billion and $42 billion more annually for K-12 schools to meet the state’s constitutional obligation to ensure every child has a quality opportunity to learn. That figure is an estimate in current dollars based on two 2004-05 studies that provided evidence for the 2010 lawsuit, “Robles-Wong v. California.” Oral arguments in the case are scheduled for Wednesday in the 1st District Court of Appeal in San Francisco.
In the report, “California’s Challenge: Adequately Funding Education in the 21st Century,” the CSBA suggests that districts would need tens of billions of dollars more than the $64 billion that Gov. Jerry Brown proposes to spend on K-12 schools next year to implement the Common Core and other new state academic standards and to fulfill the eight, broad priorities laid out in the Local Control Funding Formula. The Legislature passed the new funding and school accountability law in 2013, a year after plaintiffs in Robles-Wong and plaintiffs in Campaign for Quality Education v. California, a related lawsuit, filed final briefs. Since then, both lawsuits werePlaintiff in lawsuit updates costs of inadequate funding | EdSource: