Using nine years of finance data from California, we describe charter school spending for various purposes (e.g., instruction, administration, pupil support, and operations) and compare spending patterns for charter schools and traditional public schools. We also explore how school characteristics (e.g., total enrollment, percent of students eligible for free and reduced lunch and geographic location) explain differences in spending patterns.

In recent years, federal, state, and local government initiatives have focused on ways to increase walking and cycling by making routes to school safer, offering encouragement to walkers and bikers, and providing safety education. The rationale behind these initiatives, such as the Safe Routes to School program, is to improve public health by reducing injuries and increasing physical activity. While numerous studies have shown that the SRTS program has been effective at meeting these goals, few analyses have looked at how increasing walking and cycling can reduce student transportation costs for school districts and families.

Over the past several decades demographers have consistently documented the outmigration of younger residents from rural areas.  This is especially the case in economically-lagging rural places where local labor markets disproportionately offer part-time, temporary and contract work, often with limited or no benefits. 

In any given year, California alone has typically accounted for roughly half of total enrollment in year-round school calendars nationally. It is likely that this school policy option was so widely embraced in California due to the fact that the state experienced school crowding issues and that year-round school calendars often appear to be a promising solution. Year-round calendars redistribute the same number of school days more evenly across the year. A particular type of year-round calendar, multi-track, does this in a way that supports a larger student body in the same school facility. The multi-track year-round calendar has therefore gained the reputation of being a cost-saving remedy to school crowding.

Students with disabilities in the United States are guaranteed a free and appropriate public education under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEA). While the IDEA improves education access and quality for students with disabilities by requiring that school districts provide the services and supports necessary to meet their individual needs, the costs of educating students with disabilities are generally higher than the costs of educating other students. At a time when many states are facing tight budgets and growing special education costs, a new policy brief describes a method that several states, including California, have adopted for allocating special education aid among school districts to help contain special education costs.

In recent years, budget cuts have caused increases in class size in states across the nation.  Between 2009 and 2010, the pupil-teacher ratio in the U.S. increased by more than half a student for the first time since the Great Depression.

Governor Brown’s proposal includes weights for student poverty and English Learners. It also retains a small number of categorical programs but all other funding streams are folded into the core formula. Even if the LCFF is ultimately adopted in something like its current form, one question that will likely continue to be debated is whether other cost factors should also be explicitly included/funded. Almost all states provide additional, differential funding for at least a few programs, either through weights or adjustments to the base formula or through separate categorical streams. However, there is a great deal of variation in what other factors are included. In general, the options fall into three areas: student needs, demographics and resource costs.  

The most common categories of student need that states include in their school funding formulas are special education, at-risk students, generally meaning low-income but may also mean any needing remedial education, and English learners (ELs). In many states, the amount allocated for these higher-cost students is determined through pupil weights, set as a percentage of the base allocation. If a student falls into multiple need categories, the weights might be added together, or not cap the total weight that can be assigned to an individual student.

In a foundation formula, base revenue per pupil is typically equal or very similar across districts but the majority of states also distribute additional funding to compensate for differences in the cost of education in different districts. The cost of education can be defined as the minimum amount of money that a school district must spend in order to achieve a given educational outcome, such as reading at a grade-appropriate level. Costs generally differ across school districts for reasons that are outside the control of local school boards or state governments, such as the number of children with “special needs”.  In reforming California’s system to rationally address differential district needs, the key issues for policymakers are how to incorporate cost factors into the formula, which factors to include, and how large the adjustments should be.

Across the country, the primary goal of most state finance systems is to promote equalization, particularly in states where locally-financed school systems have faced court challenges. Certain formulas achieve this goal better than others. As noted in my post yesterday, both California’s current revenue limit system and Governor Brown’s proposed formula are versions of a traditional foundation state-aid formula. Typically, in a foundation system, the state assumes (or requires) that each district levies a minimum tax rate. If local revenue raised at that rate is less than the foundation amount, then state aid makes up the difference.

In the debate around Governor Brown’s proposed “Local Control Funding Formula” (LCFF), a number of issues have been raised that school finance researchers (and policymakers in other states) have been discussing for years. Over the next several posts, this ‘School Finance 101’ series will highlight what we know – and what we don’t know – about some of these issues.

In a forthcoming article titled “Gifted Education: Robin Hood or the Sheriff of Nottingham,” I examine the issue of gifted and talented education (GATE) from the perspective of public policy. In times of tight budgets, as California has experienced for the last several years, many districts can be tempted to abandon funding for GATE programs. For example, when categorical funding for GATE was ‘flexed’ in 2007, many schools dramatically scaled back gifted programs.