Senators want to know more about how districts spend funding
State Sen. Richard Pan questions State Board members Michael Kirst and Sue Burr.
State senators pressed members of the State Board of Education on Wednesday to tell them whether dollars spent for schools under a new system of local control are being spent effectively.
“Are we getting our money’s worth and how do we know?” Sen. Marty Block, D-San Diego, asked during a Senate Education Committee hearing.
He and other senators didn’t get a simple or fully satisfying response from State Board President Michael Kirst and board member Sue Burr. They told the committee, in an otherwise upbeat assessment of landmark changes the state is going through, that it’s too soon to know.
In the past three years, Block said, school districts have received $13 billion in new funding. Funding per student varies by district under the Local Control Funding Formula, or LCFF, in which revenue is distributed partly according to enrollment of low-income children and English language learners. So it’s been a big increase for some districts, yet barely enough to bring spending back to pre-recession levels for others with few high-needs students.
Districts are required to account for spending in a Local Control and Accountability Plan, in which they set three-year goals and priorities and then update annually. County offices of education must review and approve each LCAP, but Kirst acknowledged that the state is not compiling and studying data on how districts are spending money under the funding formula.
That troubled Sen. Richard Pan, D-Sacramento, who said that legislators want to know how the state is spending overall education dollars. “That data is out there. Shouldn’t we be gathering it to know about impact?”
Kirst noted the challenge of striking a balance between flexibility and accountability under the new law. The Legislature, in passing LCFF, did away with dozens of categorical programs that dictated district spending. At the same time, the general accounting categories required by the state are too broad for useful comparisons, he said. They won’t differentiate between Senators want to know more about how districts spend funding | EdSource:
