By John Fensterwald, EdSource
Diverting funds intended for California’s high-needs students for other spending “dampens” the potential to significantly close the achievement gap between high-poverty and low-poverty students, new research from the Public Policy Institute of California has found.
School districts on average are directing only 55 cents of every dollar of extra funding from the Local Control Funding Formula to the schools that high-needs students who generate the money attend, research fellow Julien Lafortune concluded in a policy brief and full report.
Lafortune examined school-level financial data reported to the state for all districts with more than 250 students and with more than 10 schools. He was able to do the research using federally mandated school-level data available for the first time.