A Formula for Inequity

Students in Los Angeles schools have as many needs as students in San Gabriel, yet the state pays $100 less per pupil to the L.A. Unified School District each year -- and $170 less to the Long Beach school district. A district that educates all 13 grade levels gets about $600 less per high schooler than a district that teaches only teenagers, even though the costs involved in teaching those kids are the same.

Through a strange funding formula involving high property values and relatively few students, Laguna Beach schools have $1,200 more to spend this year on each student than the less affluent Tustin schools. Then there’s the rural McKittrick School in the Central Valley, which at $17,000 per pupil spends more than twice as much as Laguna Beach schools.

All of this is as weird and unfair as it sounds. It has nothing to do with special education, higher costs of living in one area or the greater needs of poor students in another area. California has been living under a complex and nonsensical formula for school funding for about 30 years, ever since a court decision that was meant to equalize education placed the funding responsibilities in the state’s hands. The state has botched the job.

For years, there’s been talk about a fairer system. As squeezed school budgets make the disparities ever more glaring, it’s time to stop talking and fix it. This arcane system means that some students take free trips to Sacramento while others struggle to learn in packed classes with outdated textbooks.

A recent series of articles in the Sacramento Bee exposed other outrageous differences in spending. More than a third of California school districts get Meals for Needy Pupils money, based not on need but on whether the schools spent money for that purpose in 1978, the Bee reported. The federal government already pays to feed poor children; this is extra money that schools can spend any way they want, and it can add up to as much as $162 extra per student.

Money to help rustic schools that have higher transportation costs can bring in as much as $95,000 per student, the Bee reported.

In 1997, the state’s Little Hoover Commission called for a more rational funding system. But the robust economy was providing new money to all public schools, so complaints were few. The Legislature had the money to dole out yearly “equalization” funds that boosted many underfunded districts. That money has disappeared under budget constraints.

The state shouldn’t even try to adjust the system. It needs to start afresh with a basic allocation for each student in the state. Then funds can be added for real needs: inner-city schools; high schools, whose students are more expensive to educate; and small or remote districts with out-of-proportion administrative costs.

Certainly the process will end up being political and complicated. But at least it will be based on some kind of sense.