Weintraub: Governor sets up education showdown

Governor promises to fight ‘until the last hour' to increase funding for schools where low-income students dominate.



Weintraub: Governor sets up education showdown

Gov. Jerry Brown responds to a question about his plan to overhaul education funding at a budget news conference Monday.

Why it matters

California's economic recovery and a tax increase voters approved last year mean the public schools are set to see a big increase in state funding. But how the schools spend that money is up for debate. Gov. Jerry Brown has proposed a revolutionary plan that would direct much of the new money to districts that serve large numbers of poor and immigrant children. Some Democrats in the Legislature say his plan goes too far.

SACRAMENTO – Gov. Jerry Brown and his fellow Democrats in the state Legislature are headed for a showdown over the way California pays for its public schools.

Brown is proposing a revolutionary plan to give extra state aid to schools that teach large numbers of poor and immigrant children. But he is getting pushback from some in the Legislature who think his plan goes too far – at the expense of the general-purpose money every school district receives.

Brown argues that few things are more urgent than improving schooling for California's most vulnerable children, which would improve their lives, lower social welfare costs and boost the economy. Characterizing his idea as part of a civil rights battle, Brown last month said opponents are in for "the fight of their lives" if they think they are going to block his plan.

"I'm not going to give up until the last hour, and I'm going to fight with everything I have, and whatever we have to bring to bear in this battle, we're bringing it," Brown said.

The governor has the public on his side. Polls show voters like the idea of focusing state resources on students from low-income families. A recent poll by the Public Policy Institute of California, for example, found that two-thirds of Californians think schools with more low-income students should receive more state funding.

But critics of Brown's plan say that several years of budget cuts have left all schools so short of resources that it would be unfair to divert money from mainstream programs until everyone catches up. Brown's formula, critics say, would hurt students in suburban districts that have relatively low enrollments of poor and immigrant students. Even the needy students in relatively affluent districts would be shortchanged by Brown's plan, some legislators say.

The governor, though, is determined to seize a rare opportunity for radical change arising out of the state's slow but steady economic recovery and the tax increase voters approved in November. Tax revenues are rising again, and a state constitutional provision requires the Legislature and the governor to set aside much of that new money for schools.

Public school enrollment, meanwhile, is flat or even shrinking, thanks to the state's changing demographics. That means the amount of money California spends on education per student is almost certainly going to be rising in the years ahead.

Rather than spreading that money around the way it's always been done, Brown proposes a fundamental shift. He wants to give every school district a basic grant per student, then add 35 percent more per child for each student who is either low income or learning English as a second language.

On top of that, districts with more than half their enrollment made up of low-income students or "English learners" would get another bump of 35 percent per student to deal with the challenges of educating high concentrations of disadvantaged pupils.

Under Brown's plan, no district would get less than it received last year, and eventually, every district would get back to the per-student funding they had before the recession. But the growth rate would be faster for districts with high numbers of poor and immigrant children.

To show how this would play out over time, Brown's Department of Finance recently released projections showing how much every school district in the state would get under his plan compared with the status quo. The numbers include only the state money that would be affected by Brown's proposal, which excludes restricted funds such as paying for special education, federal funds and locally raised revenues such as parcel taxes.

Consider the schools in Santa Ana and San Juan Capistrano.

Today, Santa Ana Unified gets about $400 more per student than Capistrano, but 78 percent of Santa Ana's students are poor and more than half are English learners, while in Capistrano, 23 percent are low-income and just 10 percent are still learning English.

Under the status quo, according to Brown's numbers, that modest funding gap would pretty much remain through the rest of the decade, with Santa Ana getting $10,135 per student in 2019-20 and Capistrano receiving $9,875.

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