California’s school funding model is nearly “impossible to comprehend” and should be made more transparent and more focused on helping districts that serve large numbers of students who are the most expensive to educate, a new report argues.
Expensive-to-educate students include English-language learners and special-needs children, as well as those living in rural areas who have extensive transportation needs, the report says. It was published last week by the Public Policy Institute of California.
The report also says the state should allocate money using a more-equal per-pupil funding rate, which would in turn increase the transparency of the system and make it easier to explain differences across districts.
