Eric Premack / commentary
June 14, 2013

Eric Premack

Eric Premack

The current Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) legislation pending earlier the Legislature utterly fails to accomplish any of the key reform goals that Gov. Jerry Chocolate-brown and his advisers articulated. The neb 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 pecker would straight substantial funding toward districts serving high proportions of English language learners and depression-income students, much of the allocation is driven by the quirks of California'due south gerrymandered school district boundaries. Students with identical needs and living on contrary sides of the same street can be funded at dramatically dissimilar rates – only because the schoolhouse commune boundary line falls in the center of their street. Worse still, the LCFF continues three huge chiselled programs that are widely recognized to be the most grossly inequitable of all of California'south chiselled funding programs. These include Home-to-Schoolhouse Transportation (where funding rates are based decades-onetime entitlement data), Targeted Instructional Improvement Grants ("pork" funding that give some districts $1,000 per student and others none), and Special Education (with per-student rates ranging from less than $450 per student to about $1,000 for no adept reason). LCFF also continues to allow property-rich "Basic Assist" districts to continue to receive massive sums of above-the-formula funds – reaching to the tens of thousands of dollars per students in some instances.
  • Adjust for Regional Cost Differences. The LCFF makes no assart hither. Arguably, it never should have, so no major loss hither.
  • Transparency and Simplicity. While the core elements of the LCFF formula are straightforward, the system created past the 226-page legislation is a model of complexity and opacity. The transition period to the new system is painfully long – the reform equivalent of pulling off a Rough-and-tumble in slow move over an 8-year period – and includes a mishmash of (ane) base, (2) transition, (iii) "economical recovery," and (four) hold-harmless formulae.  Already, a cottage industry of consultants are selling "LCFF Reckoner" services to aid schools and districts to guesstimate their funding under the new, volatile system. Fifty-fifty the California Section of Education, the keeper of primal funding and entitlement data, needed a private grant to brainstorm its simulations.Though LCFF volition practise abroad with a few dozen land-funded categorical programs along with their wasteful application and compliance rules, the new system could easily be worse. It replaces the categorical funding rules with a complex fix of new "accountability" requirements and grades Thou-3 class size reduction targets. The legislation articulates dozens of "country priorities" that local schoolhouse officials must now address in written schoolhouse and district accountability plans developed through lengthy consultation and adoption processes. LCFF also calls for the State Lath to develop regulations to supposedly ensure that the actress funds for English learners and low-income students are spent to their do good. The new laws, however, specify that districts can throw these extra funds into "districtwide" pools based on loose federal rules for "schoolwide" plans.  Decades of experience with such plans demonstrates that they provide huge loopholes – and LCFF'due south extending these from the schoolwide to the districtwide level will ensure footling or no transparency or accountability.  They are no friction match for the powerful suction of the labor bargaining table. In short, the LCFF is remarkably complex, replaces existing categorical rules with even more burdensome pseudo-accountability requirements, even so assures no real accountability.

Veto Bait

The governor and his advisers deserve kudos for trying to adjust many of California's influential education involvement groups and for attempting to keep the process transparent – at least until the last week when extensive changes were made backside airtight doors and without public discussion. The resulting LCFF proposals, unfortunately, are worse than the electric current system because they lend the false impression of a significant improvement. The Legislature should reject it. If non, Governor Chocolate-brown should simply come make clean, admit the failure, and veto the LCFF legislation if it hits his desk. If not, this bungled pseudo-reform volition bear witness a major stain on an otherwise increasingly-impressive rails record.

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Eric Premack is executive manager of the Charter Schools Development Centre, a leading charter school support and advocacy organisation he founded in 1993.  Premack previously worked for School Services of California, Inc., and the Office of the Legislative Annotator.

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