10 (2): 126. See Technical Appendix A for further details on the data and sample restrictions. Funding How Should States Count Students to Calculate School Imperfect targeting of supplemental and concentration dollars dampens how well LCFF can affect inequitable outcomes by student income, race, and language status, but the reliance on districtwide need is also important. Some of this difference is also due to the funding formula itself, which targets even greater funding increases to districts with the highest concentrations of high-need students. Schools with fewer than 50 students are excluded. Test scores from some California districts (Pier et al. Percentiles are based on district-level estimates of supplemental and concentration funding targeting. School Resources and the Local Control Funding Formula: Is Increased Spending Reaching High-Need Students? (Forthcoming). We next examine test scores on the Smarter Balanced Assessment (SBAC) and the California Standards Exams (CST), for students in grades 38, and grade 11. However, difference-in-difference estimates of the effect of concentration grant funding on reclassification rates show no differential change in reclassification rates in high-need districts (Technical Appendix Figure B5). Gaps are similarly large across districts: the gap between the highest- (80%+) and lowest- (under 30%) need districts was roughly 36 percentage points in 201819, a decrease from a gap of approximately 42 percentage points in 201415. Districts baseline funding depends on the number of students enrolled, minus the daily average number of absent students. Districts will face considerable challenges over the coming years as they attempt to recover from the pandemic. However, even within these categories there is significant variation. The U.S. Supreme Court has found that Harvard and the University of North Carolina's admissions policy violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. Is LCFF funding equitably distributed within districts, and is funding reaching the schools and students with the greatest need? Finally, we examine trends and changes in measurable student outcomes to determine the extent to which increased spending translates into improvements. As students return to full in-person learning in 202122, California public schools face considerable challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. How Supreme Court affirmative action decision affects CA | The 2021. The COVID-19 Pandemic and Student Achievement on Ohios Third-Grade English Language Arts Assessments. Working paper. The fact that trends in funding and spending were similar across districts of varying need prior to LCFF provides some support for this assumption (Lafortune 2019). Putnam-Walkerly, Kris, and Elizabeth Russell. Figure shows estimates of the change in slope (kink) at the cutoff for test scores in standard deviation units, by year. For reference, the difference in the share of students who met or exceeded grade-level standards in ELA between low-income and non-low-income students in 201819 was nearly 31 percentage points; the test score gap between the highest-performing racial group (Asian Americans) and the lowest-performing one (African Americans) was 44 percentage points. That district loses $29 for each day a student isnt in class a number that ballooned to $102 million in the 2009-2010 school year. These trends over the past five years on SBAC suggest that additional LCFF funding leads to higher test scores; but a more definitive statement about cause and effect requires an empirical design that can account for other changes unrelated to the funding change. A memo to school districts from the former state superintendent of schools in 2016 clarified that districts could spend supplemental and concentration grant dollars on general salary increases for staff districtwide, reversing an earlier position expressed by the Department of Education (Fensterwald 2015). Next, we turn to the question of within-district resource allocation, and provide new statewide evidence on whether resources are reaching the students and schools within districts that have the greatest student and academic needs. Southern California Edison, 2021 Public Policy Institute of California. NOTE: Figure plots the share meeting or exceeding grade-level standards on the SBAC, in ELA and math, districts with different shares of high-need students. School Funding Warren, Paul, and Julien Lafortune. We use income rather than the LCFF definition of student need, as this was defined pre-LCFF. We ask three primary research questions: We begin with a brief overview of LCFF in the context of California school finance history. The shift to a funding system weighted by student need altered how the state distributed funding across districts of varying need. The overwhelming majority of that funding, like 90% or more, comes from sales and income taxes, said Mariajose Romero, a researcher at Pace University. Getting Down to Facts II. Children in the South San Antonio, Texas, school district receive $8,473 per student, while in the tiny Doss, Texas, school district it is $48,597 per pupil. However, given that most districts spend less than one dollar per extra dollar of S&C funding generated at a site, this would imply that districts regressively spend their other funding sources (spending less on high-need students), thereby limiting the ability of LCFF to achieve greater equity in distributing resources to higher-need school sites. Consider funding mechanisms based on school site need. The median concentration district spends about 14 cents more at the school site per dollar of additional S&C funding the site generates, while non-concentration districts spend a median of $1.07 more per dollar of additional funding. Taken together, these findings suggest that LCFF notably affects funding, resources, and student outcomes in the highest-need districtsbut that imperfect targeting of resources to high-need students within districts remains a concern. As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to affect student enrollment and school attendance rates, states are grappling with how they should count WestEd. The result can be financially staggering, according toa study of San Diego public schools. But with lower enrollment, he knows next years finances may be unpredictable. Recall that nearly 20 percent of high-need students are in non-concentration districts, while just under half (43%) of the states non-high-need students are in concentration districts (Table 1). The figure below illustrates how this could happen. 2016. In California, school districts receive funding based on the number of students who attend school or what is known as Average Daily Attendance (ADA). CrowdSmart, Cassandra Walker Pye Districts with ADA less than 250 are excluded. You may split your Independent, objective, nonpartisan research, 2023 Speaker Series on California's Future In-Person and Online. Achievement in Californias Public Schools: What Do Test Scores Tell Us? When a school plans and directs funding, it is based on enrollment, not on attendance. Test scores have seen modest improvements, and in particular, improvements have been much greater in the states highest-need districts. Schools with fewer than 50 students are excluded. Yet despite these early indications of success, achievement gaps by student income, race, and language status have remained large and stubbornly persistent. WebTraditionally, public schools are funded based on their total student enrollment. Attendance The UK still has it bad. Mitigating harm from changes in enrollment and counts of students in poverty is a key first step toward helping schools get students back on track. Moreover, critiques of LCFF funding mechanisms have grown, often centered on concerns that funding intended for districts highest-need students is not reaching them (Howle 2019). Given that no such kink existed before LCFF, we can examine whether an analogous kink emerges post-LCFF in the relationship between student test scores and district share high-need.Any distinct change in the slope at the 55 percent threshold would therefore reflect the impact of the additional concentration grant funding per district. Spending increased across districts of all levels of student need following LCFF, with larger increases in student spending among higher-need districts. What will states do next year as they determine how they will fund schools in the 2021-2022 school year? Chang said. Perfect targeting assuming S&C funding is allocated equally to all high-need students, at the school site they attend. Because we are interested in how LCFF dollars are distributed, here we focus only on site-level and central expenditures that are not federally funded. What additional resources did this extra funding provide? While the funding formula targets districtwide need, it does not explicitly allocate these dollars to the students or schools that generate this additional district funding. 2021) and from other states (Kogan and Lavertu 2021; Lewis et al. NOTES: Figure plots the average increase in spending from 201213 to 201920 for subcategories of student spending, in inflation-adjusted 2020 dollars. Learning during COVID-19: Reading and Math Achievement in the 202021 School Year. NOTE: Figure plots the statewide share meeting or exceeding grade-level standards on the SBAC, in ELA and math, for low-income and non-low-income students. 2019. Court-ordered Finance Reforms in the Adequacy Era: Heterogeneous Causal Effects and Sensitivity.Education Finance and Policy.14 (1): 3160. Standard errors are clustered by district. Some may argue that this is good stewardship of public funds. This implies the gap in proficiency is narrowing between low-income and non-low-income students by nearly 8 percent in ELA (2.5 percentage points) and 2 percent in math (0.6 percentage points). NOTES: Figure plots the student and non-student spending per pupil (see text for definition), in inflation-adjusted 2020 dollars. SOURCE: California Department of Education, enrollment and graduates files; Authors calculations. Second, the analogous change in slope for funding is $7,012 per student (Technical Appendix Figure B10). Changes to school enrollment and poverty as a result of the pandemic have complicated states attempts to equitably fund school districts. Figure 5 reports the differences in spending between high- and low-poverty districts, schools, and students over time under the hypothetical assumption that districts spend equally on each of their students. Of Counsel See Technical Appendix A for further detail on data sources and sample restrictions. Indeed, in the seminal white paper proposing the mechanism of school finance reform that would lay the foundation for LCFF, Bersin, Kirst, and Liu (2008) motivate concentration funding by citing evidence that concentrated poverty has its own negative impact on achievement.However, similar arguments may hold for the concentration of poverty and need at the school, rather than the district level, which LCFF does not directly target. In the next section, we will discuss the implications of how spending is targeted across schools within the same district, which is key to determining the extent to which LCFF improves resource equity at the student level. National Bureau of Economic Research. Complaints filed by advocates charged Los Angeles Unified School District with improper accounting and reporting of supplemental and concentration grant funding. And funding has been negatively impacted because of your actions.. But in this extraordinary academic year, when about half of the nations public school students are attending class online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, how do districts and schools gather and gauge that data and get the funds they need? The typical African American student is in a district that spends on average $12,200 across its school sites, and attends a school that spends over $12,400. NOTES: Figure reports average school-site and central spending per pupil and district average school-site spending from state and local sources, by student proficiency on the 201819 SBAC exams in ELA and math. Brunner, Eric, Joshua Hyman, and Andrew Ju. A significant share of supplemental and concentration dollars may not be reaching the school sites where the dollars are generated. Critics say my new discipline policy is unfair to white students. Figure 3 also reports spending levels in 201213 and 201920 for these two major subcomponents, by district share of high-need students in 201314 (the first year UPP data were collected). Biasi, Barbara. Sierra Health Foundation, Phil Isenberg However, using data on LCFF funding and demographics from the 201920 fiscal yearand using estimates of within-district targeting discussed above we can simulate and examine the impacts of this change on S&C funding across high-need districts, schools, and students (Table 3). Seven states, including California, New York, and Texas , calculate funding allocations using Why havent more game show prizes been adjusted for inflation. National evidence on state-level school finance reforms suggests that relative funding increases between high- and low-income districts reduced gaps in test scores between these districts, but not between students, likely due to the imperfect targeting of additional resources (Lafortune et al. If, for example, some of this initial widening of the gap was due to a lack of familiarity with computer-adaptive testing, differences in Common Core curriculum, access to aligned instructional materials, or less teaching to the test, then a reversal of these trends may drive later narrowing in the gap, rather than the effects of LCFF funding itself. Thus, this distinction is less important in practice: if districts are strictly spending S&C dollars on their high-need students, but are using them to supplant rather than supplement primary funding sources, high-need students still do not see the full extent of increased resources expected under the formula. Table uses enrollment data from the 201920 school year. Legislative Analysts Office (LAO). complicated states attempts to equitably fund school districts, including California, New York, and Texas, may be less likely to access remote learning, trying to find and ensure enrollment of missing students, projected, rather than actual, student enrollment, enrollment in the states largest virtual charter now stands at around 60,000 students, counts of students from low-income families may be unreliable this year, Center on Labor, Human Services, and Population, Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center. Begin scaling up programs that support the success of every student, including special education, school counselors, early interventions and screenings, and other wrap-around services. 2023 Speaker Series on California's Future In-Person and Online. Local funding largely comes from property taxes. When evaluated across districtsespecially when focusing on the highest-need districtsLCFF has led to a more equitable distribution of funding and outcomes. Did Districts Concentrate New State Money on Highest-Needs Schools? One concern for school districts is thatscreen fatigue may drive down attendance as the year drags on. Requests for more help from the federal government have stalled. See Technical Appendix C for full specification and details. Region and School District ADA Auditor of the State of California. How do states using attendance-based funding allocations adapt? 2021. COVID-19 and the Educational Equity Crisis: Evidence on Learning Loss from the CORE Data Collaborative. Policy Analysis for California Education, PACE. California District-level gap is the difference in spending between the highest and lowest quartile of district share low-income. Money and Freedom: The Impact of Californias School Finance Reform on Academic Achievement and the Composition of District Spending. Consistent with research documenting disproportionate impacts on minority and low-achieving students (Reardon and Kurlaender 2009), gaps between higher- and lower-need districts increased, especially in the first few years. LCFF eliminated most categorical funding programs, replacing them with a simpler and more flexible funding system. Remember that all of your aid offers will be different. When a student doesnt show up at school whether its because of illness or a suspension neither does that $41. U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, is seen during a White House event on April 27. WebInstead, its a school policy issue all but absent from the sessions debates, votes, and vetoes that of whether school funding should be based on student attendance or enrollment. Districts where school-site spending is not reported for more than 5 percent of student enrollment are excluded. Districts with greater than 500 percent or less than 20 percent of California mean spending per pupil or funding formula revenues per pupil are excluded. All of that will have a continuing financial impact on public schools, said Hedy Chang, director of the nonprofit Attendance Works. CEO The highest-need districts also spent more on materials, services, and other current spending categories (e.g., textbooks, instructional materials, consultants). Unfortunately, no comprehensive statewide database details how funding is allocated within a district over time. Nielsen Merksamer Parrinello But that lost revenue must be cut somewhere, so after-school programs vanish, broken toilets go unfixed, and the school library is closed. A teacher and student wearing masks speak between classes at Rippowam Middle School in September in Stamford, Connecticut. The share of graduates completing AG requirements has increased by roughly 1.5 percentage points over the past four years, but this rate of increase has been nearly identical for low-income and non-low-income students, meaning there has been little progress on these gaps. This distinction will be important to consider when we examine effects on statewide achievement gapsif LCFF has led to only small relative increases in resource levels for the majority of the states high-need students, one may not expect as large of improvements in student-level achievement gaps from these financial changes. For schools and students, spending is assigned based on districtwide per pupil spending (i.e., no targeting). The relative increase in spending is notable since LCFF was passed in 2013, reflecting the mechanics of the formula. A better-than-expected state budget, however, has provided record-high levels of school funding for California students. Supreme Court reverses affirmative action, gutting race-conscious LCFF defines high-need students as low-income, English Learner, or foster youth.Throughout this report, we will categorize students, schools, and districts in different ways based on the high-need status or equivalent where data is not collected: Funding levels relate to a districts share of the states high-need students (Figure 1). How to Count Students for School Funding - Attendance Works In the decade prior to LCFF, differences between concentration and non-concentration districts were small and not statistically distinguishable from zero. By 201920, the share of low-income students meeting or exceeding standards increased by 8 percentage points in ELA and 6.5 percentage points in math. Others, such as Massachusetts and Arizona, have maintained funding tied to pandemic-year enrollment, but may also rely on preexisting rules that mitigate funding losses or additional infusions of funding aimed at helping districts serving low-income families. University of California, Berkeley, the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity & Diversity. Public Policy Institute of California. NOTES: Solid bars denote statistical significance at the 5 percent level; hollow bars denote statistically insignificant estimates. Proposition 98 Overview: Contributions to CalSTRS. Spending has increased fastest in the highest-need districts, leading to a relative rise in graduation rates and test scores; additional concentration grant funding appears to raise AG completion rates at districts that received the most funding; and due to concentration grant funding, standardized test scores improved in these districts at a magnitude consistent with prior research. Conversely, lower-need districts saw larger increases in non-student spending, primarily driven by greater expenditures on capital outlay. Attendance-based funding incentivizes districts to reach out to families to see that kids show up to school; it may be a reason why California ranks among the top 10 states in student attendance, with Only districts within 40 percent of the cutoff on either side are shown. To check out an individual states profile, click here. WebStates that use attendance-based methodologies (instead of enrollment) risk underfunding districts with the greatest populations of high-needs studentsespecially now. So far, the available data only suggest that LCFF leads to relative improvements among ELs or Ever-ELs, despite the modest gains made by low-income students more generally. See Technical Appendix A for further details on the data and sample restrictions. Lets dive quickly into one element of states K-12 aid models: their funding mechanism, which refers to the basic way states allocate money. Schools Record-high funding distributed through the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) will provide some of the resources that will be key to an equitable recovery. It was baffling that, after all this bad behavior, the student was stillallowed on the campus. However, gaps in AG completion by income are larger than the gaps in graduation rates. However, the amount of S&C funding for high-need schools and students depends on how funding is targeted within the district. Once each school has determined your financial need, you will receive aid offers from the schools youve been accepted to. Well just have to make those decisions at that time, he said. Given differential trends prior to LCFF, it is unclear whether the rise in graduation rates after LCFF represents the effect of the funding formula, continued trends that pre-date LCFF, changes in graduation policies (e.g., CAHSEE), or other factors that disproportionately affect higher-need districts. Cost of Attendance (Budget) | 2020-2021 Federal Student Aid When analyzing spending, it is helpful to separate spending into two important but distinct components: K12 student spending, which comprises most operational expenses that are relevant for students day-to-day educational experiences, including staffing, materials, staff benefits, and other services; and non-K12-student spending, which comprises other district spending categories including capital outlay (e.g., school constructions or renovations), adult and preK education, and debt service (Bruno 2018). Other states have encouraged districts and schools to continue to sign up families through the school year. In Georgia, Beasley of Clayton County Public Schools said right now virtual attendance is steady. We believe in the power of good information to build a brighter future for California. Specifically, increased school funding has been shown to increase test scores (Lafortune, Rothstein, and Schanzenbach 2018; Brunner, Hyman and Ju 2020; Baron 2021), graduation, and college attendance (Jackson, Johnson, and Persico 2016; Candelaria and Shores 2019), and eventual adult earnings and economic mobility (Jackson et al. Roughly 51 percent of all S&C funding is allocated to these highest-need districts, and this share would increase slightly, to around 53 percent. schools NOTES: Figure plots the statewide adjusted cohort graduation rate (ACGR) and the share of graduates meeting UC/CSU requirements, which we use as a proxy for the AG completion rate. Class size limits are based on enrollment, not attendance. The fact that within-district targeting of S&C dollars is more apparent at non-concentration districts is unsurprising. I also gratefully acknowledge the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Stuart Foundation for their generous support of this research. Hahnel, Carrie, Heather J. Hough, and Jason Willis. Increases in administrative salaries were relatively small across districts (less than $200 per student on average, statewide); the fact that they were also very similar across districts of varied need implies that little of the additional supplemental and concentration grant funding due to the formula went towards additional administrative expenses.. Targeted K12 Funding and Student Outcomes - Public Policy To do so, we employ a differences-in-differences approach and compare the relative trajectories of concentration districts to non-concentration districts, before and after LCFF. Attendance Aurora Capital Group, Kim Polese WebTraditionally, public schools are funded based on their total student enrollment. However, concentration schools in low-need districts spend less than similar schools in higher-need districts (Technical Appendix Figure D4). We ask two related, but distinct questions. NOTES: UPP refers to the unduplicated pupil percentage of low-income, English Learner, and foster youth in a district. NOTES: Solid bars denote statistical significance at the 5 percent level; standard errors are clustered by district. Districts with ADA less than 250 are excluded. State and local funding constitute, on average, about 90% of school district revenue nationwide. However, the margin of error on the test score estimates suggest a range of 8 to over 40 years. school funding In California, school districts receive funding based on the number of students who attend school or what is known as Average Daily Attendance (ADA). 2018. However, if districts do not target spending to their highest-need students, the impact on funding gaps by school and student is much smaller. Nevertheless, targeting additional funding increases to high-need students across a broader set of districts would further improve the formulas ability to address gaps and inequities in student outcomes, as Californias high-need students are located across a variety of districts and local contexts. Notably, total per-pupil spending was higher in 201213 for the highest-need ($14,500) and the lowest-need ($13,500) districts than for districts in the middle of the distribution ($12,100 and $12,900, for 30%55% and 55%80% high-need districts, respectively). Many state legislatures are trying to adjust their formulas ahead of the 202122 school year. Key questions vary by funding formula, as well as by other state factors, such as the availability of online charter options and the availability of supplemental allocations for high-need students. However, questions remain about how to best allocate new funding, and whether relative funding increases under LCFF are an effective mechanism to foster improvements in student outcomes. Attendance or enrollment: How should California schools be funded?