Have you ever wondered how much money your local school district receives and how its academic achievement ranks compared to its neighbors?
That fairly simple information has been hard to come by, but the Pacific Research Institute has finally created a database that puts such information at your fingertips. Their School Finance Center website gives you data for the school districts and charter schools in California. One of my favorite features of the site is a simple chart that looks like your gas tank. It shows you from the lowest to the highest where your district ranks in academic achievement and in money received per student.
My Republican colleagues and I recently unveiled a reform proposal, “Roadmap To California’s Future,” which calls for more legislative sunshine and accountability. This School Finance Center website helps to achieve that goal of transparency because it clearly demonstrates how much money is being spent and how well students are performing. As you can see from the data, there is no correlation between student performance and more money—some schools do better with less money while others to worse with more money.
As a matter of fact, in the past five years we have increased school spending by nearly $15 billion statewide, while the number of students statewide has declined by nearly 74,000. Unfortunately, despite this huge investment, statewide test scores have remained stagnant and so have dropout rates. More money does not necessarily produce results – without accountability to accompany it.
I encourage you to look at this information for yourself at: http://schoolfinancecenter.org/
June 18th, 2009 at 12:00 am
Well done Senator!
What can further illustrate these findings is the fact that there are Central American countries who are at least two years ahead of students here in California in Math and Science. I sincerely doubt its because of money being poured into their schools (Believe me, their schools’ budgets are almost half of the ones in CA).
In addition to the “Roadmap to California’s Future”, two ideas that can and will improve test scores in CA are increasing the amount of time it takes for teachers to get tenure from 2 years to at least 5, and getting an increased emphasis on discipline in the classroom.
Both of these ideas have to come from teachers’ actions, although I wouldn’t hold my breath anytime soon for them to warm up to this notion.
June 18th, 2009 at 12:00 am
The linked website is terrific! Two things it clarifies, in particular, are the disparity in funding between urban and “low wealth” districts and how much higher total per student funding is than we are told by the education establishment. Average funding of $11,000 or so per student! Systems like L.A. Unified get over $14,000 per student! All of the voters need to see and understand this information.
Another revelation from the website is how little relative funding has to do with academic performance.