Over the last several decades there\u2019s been a recurring debate in political, academic and media circles over the\u00a0relatively poor levels of academic achievement\u00a0among California\u2019s\u00a0public school\u00a0students.<\/p>\n
In basic skills, such as\u00a0reading\u00a0and\u00a0mathematics, measured on state and federal testing, California kids in general were subpar vis-\u00e0-vis state standards and in comparison to other states.<\/p>\n
The education establishment \u2014 school boards, administrators and unions \u2014 repeatedly declared that California\u2019s spending on schools was too low and that achievement would rise if they got more money.<\/p>\n
There was some factual basis for the first assertion. Relative to other states, California\u2019s per pupil spending did lag; it\u00a0was second lowest, just ahead of Utah in 2010, according to Education Week\u2019s calculations.<\/p>\n
However, as EdSource, a journalistic website devoted to California schools, notes: \u201cIn 2012, threatened with further cuts to education, state voters\u00a0approved a temporary income tax increase\u00a0on the wealthiest Californians and renewed it in 2016.\u201d<\/p>\n
The surtax currently generates about $10 billion a year, with schools claiming a hefty portion under the state constitution\u2019s school finance mandate. Slowly but surely California school spending increased relative to other states.<\/p>\n
The newest comparison,\u00a0released recently by the Education Law Center, pegs state spending on California schools in the 2022-23 school year \u2014 the latest data available \u2014 at $19,894 per pupil, 13th\u00a0highest in the nation and $2,000 over the national average.<\/p>\n
During 2019-20,\u00a0Gov. Gavin Newsom\u2019s first budget\u00a0contained $58.8 billion for elementary, middle and high schools, and with local property taxes and federal funds the total was $103 billion, or $17,423 per pupil.<\/p>\n
Newsom\u2019s last proposed budget\u00a0for the 2026-27 fiscal year\u00a0would spend $88.8 billion in state funds and the total, with local and federal funds, would hit $149.1 billion, or $27,418 per student.<\/p>\n
The latter numbers, by the way, exclude $5.6 billion in mandated state aid \u2014 or nearly $1,000 per student \u2014 that Newsom wants to withhold to help narrow the state budget\u2019s yawning deficit.<\/p>\n
By any measure, California\u2019s schools have seen a big increase in financial support in recent years, although quite a few local districts are underwater \u2014\u00a0Sacramento Unified being a notable example\u00a0\u2014 due to their penchant for overspending revenues no matter how high they are.<\/p>\n
The state\u2019s schools have also been seeing a steady erosion of enrollment due to a variety of demographic and economic factors, so the money they get should boost per-pupil resources even more.<\/p>\n
If more money is the cure for California\u2019s academic ills, why hasn\u2019t a $10,000 (57 percent) per pupil increase during Newsom\u2019s governorship resulted in an equally dramatic increase in academic achievement?<\/p>\n
It might be that school officials, such as those in Sacramento Unified, were pressured by their unions into using most of the money for salary increases rather than for qualitative improvements, such as adopting phonics-based tutoring to improve reading.<\/p>\n
Or it might be that money is not the critical factor in academic achievement, as the education establishment has insisted.<\/p>\n
New York spends the most per pupil in the Education Law Center study \u2014 $29,440 per student, or $10,000 more than California. But in the most recent testing by the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress conducted in 2024, just 31 percent of New York\u2019s fourth graders were proficient in reading, one point above the national average and two points above California\u2019s kids.<\/p>\n
Idaho came in last in the Education Law Center\u2019s rankings of per pupil spending at $11,805, but 32 percent of its fourth graders were proficient, higher than California, New York and the nation as a whole.<\/p>\n
An adequate amount of money is, of course, necessary to support a public school system. But we shouldn\u2019t kid ourselves, or allow politicians and school officials to kid us, that spending more will automatically increase achievement.<\/p>\n
Dan Walters is one of most decorated and widely syndicated columnists in California history, authoring a\u00a0column\u00a0four times a week that offers his view and analysis of the state\u2019s political, economic, social and demographic trends. He began covering California politics in 1975, just as Jerry Brown began his first stint as governor, and began writing his column in 1981, first for the Sacramento Union for three years, then for The Sacramento Bee for 33 years and now for CalMatters since 2017.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Over the last several decades there\u2019s been a recurring debate in political, academic and media circles over the\u00a0relatively…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":248437,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8,111828,7286,7287,266,975,71256,3234,58048,71257],"class_list":["post-315382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-columnists","tag-mendocino-county","tag-north-coast","tag-northern-california","tag-opinion","tag-redwood-valley","tag-santa-cruz-county","tag-ukiah","tag-willits"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=315382"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315382\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/248437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=315382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=315382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=315382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}