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CSBA webcast: funding, flexibility, achievement 

Back-to-School Webcast explains LCFF

The state’s new Local Control Funding Formula dominated last month’s annual Back-to-School Webcast, with CSBA’s in-house experts and guest panelists shedding light on what State Board of Education member Sue Burr called “a seismic shift”—not just in how schools are funded but also in local flexibility and accountability.

Guided by questions from Executive Director Vernon M. Billy, a CSBA panel including Assistant Executive Director for Governmental Relations Dennis Meyers, Legislative Advocate Andrea Ball and Policy and Programs Senior Director Teri Burns outlined the changes under LCFF.

Funding

A level of base funding is apportioned to all districts; then, supplemental grants are allocated to three specific student populations—students from low-income families, English learners and foster youth—in order to help districts meet the unique needs of those students. In addition, concentration grants go to districts where the targeted groups comprise 55 percent or more of a district’s enrollment.

“Under the old law we had revenue limits and categorical programs, and under the new law it really gets broken down to the three grants,” Meyers explained early on in the webcast. Only a dozen or so of some 60 categorical grant programs remain, freeing local educational agencies from regulations and oversight that had long been viewed as overly restrictive and of limited effectiveness in terms of boosting student achievement.

Flexibility

This gives districts greater freedom to use their funding in ways they determine will be the most effective in increasing achievement among those targeted groups—but districts must consult a range of stakeholders and then develop Local Control and Accountability Plans to articulate and guide their efforts. The State Board of Education will establish a template for the LCAPs by next March.

Burr, an education policy expert in California for the past four decades, joined the webcast to discuss LCFF from the perspective of the State Board, which she was appointed to earlier this year after retiring as its executive director. Responding to a question from Billy, she said LCFF’s greatest potential lies in the new resources it provides “for students who need it most,” and in the “tremendous flexibility” it provides at the local level.

“We’ve kind of pretended in Sacramento … that we can tell every district—whether they were mega-Los Angeles Unified or a little tiny district in Siskiyou County—that we know how [regulated programs] are going to work in your district,” Burr said. That is changing under Gov. Jerry Brown and his principle of subsidiarity, meaning that authority ought to rest at the local level whenever possible, she explained.

Achievement

A second guest panel zeroed in on the potential under LCFF for closing the gaps in academic achievement among different student subgroups, and on the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence created under LCFF to assist LEAs in achieving the goals set out in their accountability plans.

State Board of Education member Carl Cohn—who was formerly superintendent of both the Long Beach and San Diego unified school districts—and Sacramento City Unified School District Superintendent Jonathan Raymond focused on their own experiences in building inter-district partnerships and alliances with the wider community and institutions of higher education, suggesting those offer effective models for the CCEE.

“There’s a wealth of knowledge in California and in school districts,” Raymond noted. “Somewhere around the state in a school every day, someone is being successful educating the same students coming from the same background, preparing them, and we ought to be able to take advantage of that.”

The discussion expanded to measures to keep kids in school—from anti-truancy strategies and reducing student suspensions to closing what Cohn termed the “pipeline to prison.”
“Without saying the state has the answer for how you’re going to do this, [LCFF] does give local educators an opportunity to come up with those kinds of interventions,” Cohn said. “I would argue that we should bring some missionary zeal to this work.”

2013 Back-to-School Webcast

The complete Back-to-School Webcast is archived at www.csba.org/BTS2013, allowing members to replay the nearly two-hour briefing by CSBA’s experts and guests and download informative slides used in the presentation. Discussion topics and time segments include: