Consolidation of School Aid Urged

Individually, they provide academic support to the state’s most vulnerable students, including the poor, disabled and those at risk of failure.

And a vocal constituency stands behind each of these more than 100 programs known as categoricals, which include bilingual teacher training, agricultural vocational education, English learners assistance, Native American centers, home-to-school transportation, advanced placement and digital high schools, to name a few.

But collectively, they have swelled over decades into a $12-billion-a-year system that takes three out of every 10 state education dollars and spreads them around the state with what legislative critics in Sacramento complain is little discernible pattern.

Efforts in the past to streamline this school aid have failed. This year, however, California’s budget crisis is providing the impetus to shake up the structure of categoricals, which school districts use to expand their regular per-student funding.

In attempting to bridge a multibillion-dollar spending gap, Gov. Gray Davis has proposed combining 64 of approximately 110 such programs into a single grant that school districts could spend as they see fit. The grant would be about 12% less than the current total of the individual programs, setting up a competitive free-for-all as school boards decide whether to spread the cuts evenly or gut some programs to spare others.

As the Legislature tackles the budget this spring, the governor’s proposal promises to become the focus of a debate pitting arguments for efficiency and fairness against impassioned pleas of groups that say their needs will be ignored without the specially directed funds.

“Their money is sacred,” said state Sen. John Vasconcellos (D-Santa Clara), chairman of the Senate Education Committee, who pledges to fight to keep the categorical programs.

“They’re not someone’s flight of fancy,” he said. “They were written out of bitter experience of the school districts saying they need the money and then spending it on something else.”

The governor’s initiative isn’t especially radical. It has much in common with proposals advanced by the legislative analyst’s office over the years but never acted on. The state’s Master Plan for Education committee made a similar recommendation last year.

For years, budget analysts and local officials who must account for the numerous threads of funding have complained that the system buries school districts in outmoded, overlapping and unworkable regulations that they must negotiate. They consider the funds indispensable but think they could do a better job of distributing the money on a local level.

“You have this geological effect -- the rock building up layer after layer until you can’t get down to the core of the earth,” said Susan Burr, assistant superintendent for business services in the Elk Grove Unified School District near Sacramento, describing programs that were added year after year and seldom eliminated.

Targeted Programs

Behind every program is a law usually purporting to fix a problem, give teeth to a new educational theory or target a group that is perceived to be shortchanged.

In Los Angeles, a piece of the $9.7-million community day school fund helps support a system of 23 storefront schools for students who can’t cope in elementary and middle school or have been expelled, usually for serious violations such as bringing a weapon to school.

Once, these students might have merely been transferred, but zero-tolerance policies now preclude their placement in a regular school.

To maintain classes of no more than 15, Principal Eric Spears cobbles together regular school funding with the special state money along with a handful of other state and federal funds.

There is no money for transportation, so Spears tries to disperse the schools around the district by securing space in churches, mini-malls and social service agencies.

One campus, in Lincoln Heights, occupies two classrooms with the Boys and Girls Club, and another is in St. Anne’s group home in Westlake.

Spears worries that his students, who are virtually invisible in the 747,000-student district, might lose out in competition with bigger programs over a new block grant.

“I will go head to head with any program for the needs of that student. I don’t think I’d win,” he said.

The trend to specifically direct various uses of state education funds by statute goes back to the 1960s, when the War on Poverty inspired compensatory education funds to overcome the disadvantages of poor children.

The 1970s brought reading specialists, desegregation, mentor teaching, American Indian education centers and early childhood education.

“A Nation at Risk,” the somber 1983 report on mediocrity in American schools, set off a new flurry of programs, including 10th grade counseling, dropout prevention and services for foster children.

School reform, the byword of the 1990s, added class-size reduction, intervention for low-performing schools and stipends for nationally certified teachers.

A few of the programs are so large and widely accepted that not even block grant proponents want to toss them into the blender. Davis excluded special education ($2.7 billion), class-size reduction ($1.5 billion) and summer school ($230 million) from his plan. Others say adult school ($507,000) and regional occupational centers ($359,000) should be left alone.

Some Exceptions

Dozens of other programs, such as $26 million for principal training or $28 million for community day schools, are too small to have shown up on the public radar screen, but they are in Davis’ plan.

They would have to compete with larger programs also being considered for consolidation. They include: child development ($1.2 billion), home-to-school transportation ($472 million), economic impact aid ($445 million), school improvement ($390 million) and deferred maintenance ($181 million).

In some ways, schools already are using the money from various programs as if they were from a block grant, blending them into the salaries of people who perform basic educational duties.

Madison Elementary School in a poor and heavily Latino neighborhood lumps about $200,000 in categorical funds from the state with $320,000 from the federal government to pay for three resource teachers, 10 instructional aides, a computer lab technician, community liaison, clerk typist, and music, guidance and child supervision aides to assist its 35 teachers.

The resource teachers function as assistant principals, work individually with students who are behind, manage testing materials and textbooks, and coach teachers. The instructional aides divide their time among the classrooms in 90-minute blocks.

“We’re already down to bare bones,” Principal Sandra Macis said. “Only 10 aides for 720 pupils!”

Macis, too, worries that a block grant would leave her at a disadvantage competing with other schools in her district.

“There are always groups that feel they are underfunded,” Macis said. “It becomes very political at that point.”

Critics of this giant system of targeted spending include some powerful legislators, such as state Sen. Dede Alpert (D-Coronado) and many school business officials, who contend that local districts could make better decisions than the state about how to divide scarce resources. They also say many of the programs are inherently unfair.

The one program that arouses the most hostility around the state is the $669-million Targeted Instructional Improvement Block Grant, a euphemism for integration.

Arising from court decisions of the 1970s, this money is still committed to a handful of districts that are under court orders to desegregate or have voluntary programs to avoid court orders.

About half the money goes to Los Angeles, where it augments regular school funding in dozens of ways, from transporting students who voluntarily integrate to reducing class size in segregated schools.

Assistant Supt. Theodore Alexander Jr., who runs the L.A. integration program, says state law justifiably gives integration money priority because it falls under court order.

But the California legislative analyst’s office has cited such disparities in its escalating criticism of the categorical system.

“One of the issues you have with categoricals is that some districts come out winners and some come out losers,” said Paul Warren, a chief analyst at the office.

For example, a $26-million program is the legacy of a 1972 law intended to encourage the use of reading specialists.

Only a fraction of the state’s 1,000 school districts chose to put up their own cash to match the state incentive, and after several years, the door was closed to newcomers.

Now, a computer analysis of Department of Education records shows, only a third of the state’s more than 1,000 school districts receive reading specialist funds, and the amount per student varies from nearly $900 in the 30-student Spencer Elementary School District in San Diego County to 11 cents in L.A. Unified.

Political Goals

Politics also can skew the goals of targeted funds. A $230-million program called supplemental grants cleared the Legislature in 1989 at the urging of rural lawmakers who argued that it was needed to compensate school districts that weren’t getting a fair share of other grants.

Vallejo Unified in Solano County spends its $2-million share on pupil transportation and opportunity schools. Meanwhile, Conejo Valley Unified spreads its $1.9 million over several programs, including reading specialists, 10th grade counselors and gifted and talented education.

In its 2002-03 analysis, the legislative analyst’s office attempts to balance conflicting values by proposing five large grants that each would be directed to a broad goal such as school safety or a protected group. Funding for the grants would vary according to their purpose.

A Single Mega-Grant

The compensatory grant, for example, would weigh each district’s current funding against its enrollment of poor and limited English-speaking students.

By contrast, Davis is focused on the system’s inefficiency, rather than its inequity.

His proposal, aimed at making budget cuts more palatable to school districts, would forge a single mega-grant divided among school districts in the same proportion as the total categoricals now being given out.

It would eliminate a web of reporting requirements and the duplication and inconsistencies of generations of reading, teacher development and student services programs piled upon one another.

At the same time, the current inequities would be locked in place, Davis’ staff concedes, saying the budget crisis takes precedence over a deliberation about fairness.

One reason the Legislature has backed off an overhaul of categoricals is the daunting prospect of sorting out all the conflicting interests.

Alpert, who has made several futile legislative attempts to combine categoricals, conceded that even she “wimped out” to some groups such as advocates for the “gifted and talented.”

“If they weren’t categorized separately, nobody would spend money on them,” she said.