California

Costing Out | Recent Events | Advocacy Movements | Useful Resources

Historical Background

Serrano v. Priest

In 1971, the California Supreme Court ruled education a fundamental constitutional right and remanded Serrano v. Priest, 487 P.2d 1241, for trial in what is generally regarded as the first of the modern-era education finance litigation decisions. In 1976, in Serrano v. Priest (Serrano II ), 557 P.2d 929, the same court affirmed the lower court's finding that the wealth-related disparities in per-pupil spending generated by the state's education finance system violated the equal protection clause of the California constitution. The court distinguished the U.S. Supreme Court's 1973 Rodriguez decision, which applied only to the federal constitution.

When the subsequent Serrano remedy was challenged in 1986, 93% of California students were in school districts whose per-pupil spending was within $100 of each other. The court held, in Serrano v. Priest, 226 Cal. Rptr. 584 (Court of Appeal, 2d District 1986), that this level of disparity satisfied California's equal protection requirements.

Williams v. State

In 1999, several California organizations filed a school funding case, Williams v. State, in state superior court on behalf of a class of students attending substandard schools. The complaint cited inadequate, unsafe, and unhealthy facilities, a shortage of qualified teachers, missing libraries, a lack of instructional materials, and overcrowded schools that resulted in a staggered and shortened school year (together known as Concept 6). The state filed cross-claims against 18 school districts, but in 2000 plaintiffs won a motion to sever and stay proceedings on the cross-claims.

The court granted class certification in 2001, the Williams plaintiffs released their experts' reports in 2002, and the trial was scheduled to begin in 2004. Instead, in August 2004 the parties announced a settlement – later approved by the court – to: (1) provide $800 million over the next several years for school repairs; (2) create a School Facilities Needs Assessment program; (3) create standards for instructional materials and facilities; (4) require a complaint process for inadequate instructional materials, teacher vacancies, and emergency facilities problems; (5) intervene in schools ranked in the bottom 30% under the 2003 Academic Performance Index if instructional materials and facilities standards are not met; (6) streamline California credentialing for out-of-state credentialed teachers; (7) allocate about $140 million for instructional materials in 2004-2005; and several other provisions.

While the parties were optimistic about the settlement, leaders of some education organizations were concerned that it might focus too much on monitoring and compliance and not enough on educating every child, and that the amount of the settlement may be insufficient to repair every school and provide books to all children.

Plaintiffs were represented by a team of organizations, led by Public Advocates, Inc., the ACLUs of Northern and Southern California, Morrison & Foerster, LLP , and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund(MALDEF).

Costing-Out

In 2002, the State passed a law establishing the California Quality Education Commission to develop a Quality Education Model (QEM) for pre-K through grade 12, in the image of a similar commission in Oregon. The Commission was to be appointed by the governor, legislative leaders, and the Superintendent of Public Instruction, and was charged with determining the "educational components, educational resources, and corresponding costs" necessary "so that the vast majority of pupils can meet [state] academic performance standards." The law required the Commission to involve parents, educators, school board members, and the public in the design of the QEM, and to issue a report in July 2004.

However, soon after he took office, Gov. Schwarzenegger withdrew the appointments made and has chosen not to appoint members to the commission.

A number of cost studies, utilizing differing methodologies were undertaken as part of “Getting Down to Facts,” an extensive collection of studies of California’s education system released in March 2007. Two of the main studies were performed by Jay Chambers, Jesse Levin, and Danielle DeLancey of the American Institutes for Research (AIR) and by Jon Sonstelie of the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC).

Jennifer Imazeki of San Diego State University also produced a cost function study to determine how levels of spending should vary amongst districts depending on their student populations. Her study takes an econometric approach by looking at spending as a function of outcomes, and outcomes as a function of spending. It uses data on per-pupil school expenditures, student performance, and various characteristics of students and school districts. These methods result in a very broad range of possible results, largely because of inefficiencies in the present California education system.

In addition, the AIR study, a professional judgment study, asked panels of superintendents, principals, teachers, and business officials from “beating-the-odds” schools to outline the resources necessary for providing children an adequate education, in accordance with the state’s performance standards. California, the researchers found, had incredible resource gaps, ranking 25th among all the states in regard to tdotal per pupil expenditures, but falling to 44th when expenditures were adjusted for geographic cost differences. In addition, 42 percent of all students came from language minority backgrounds and 25 percent of students were classified as English learners. The state spent $45 billion annually on education, and the study concluded that $24 to $32 billion more – a 53 to 71 percent increase – was needed for all schools to reach adequacy. Most of the increased costs came from extending the school day and/or year, hiring more teachers to reduce class sizes, hiring more specialists to work with special-needs students, and more high-quality professional development time for educators.

The spending increase recommended by the PPIC study was slightly lower, coming in at $17 billion, or 40 percent, but the authors noted that this amount was not the full amount required to meet the state’s education goals, which California calculates as an Academic Performance Index (API).

The PPIC study utilitized a new costing-out methodology. Instead of asking panelists to design schools, researchers gave electronic surveys to almost 600 educators. Each educator, working independently, was given a hypothetical school and a maximum budget, and was asked to allocate resources and estimate the API for that school. The authors then extrapolated the costs necessary for each of California’s schools to reach the state goal of an API of 800.

The authors found, however, that to reach an API of 800 many schools would have to exceed the highest maximum budget provided to participants in the study. Not wanting to extrapolate the cost-achievement relationship outside the bounds they studied, they truncated estimated costs, resulting in a maximum per pupil cost for any school of about $11,500. This truncation, the authors noted, left fully half of schools below an API of 797. The $17 billion increase, therefore, was not the full cost of adequacy, but only an estimate of what was needed to start California’s climb towards adequacy.

“Getting Down to Facts” also included studies looking specifically at the resource needs of special education students and English learners. Both of these studies concluded that conventional “costing out” techniques shed little light on the true costs of educating these groups of students. The special education study, for example, found that the actual per pupil expenditures for students receiving special education services was greater than estimates derived through various costing-out methodologies. In addition, while current levels of spending may be enough for students to meet the goals outlined in Individualized Education Programs, they may be insufficient for reaching federal targets under the No Child Left Behind Act.

Recent Events

In June 2005, a group of school districts filed suit against the state for alleged violations of the federal “No Child” education law and the California state constitution because the state is testing English language learners in English instead of their native languages.

In other litigation, a coalition of parents, students, community groups, and legal advocates sued the United States Department of Education in federal district court in San Francisco in August 2007 because it allows novice teachers in training to be considered “highly qualified,” the central teacher qualification requirement under NCLB.. The plaintiffs claim that classification of intern teachers as highly qualified harms students, especially the “large numbers of poor and minority students” served by these “intern teachers.” “A primary purpose of NCLB was to address this problem,” said one plaintiff.

The coalition objects to a U.S. Department of Education regulation that considers teachers with little or no prior training to be “highly qualified” on their first day on the job, if they are taking part in an alternative certification entry route. Plaintiffs are asking the court to void the Department of Education’s regulation as being arbitrary and capricious under the federal Administrative Procedure Act.

Alternative routes to certification, the plaintiffs said, aggravate the achievement gap and augment disparities among students because intern teachers are generally concentrated in low-income and high minority districts. California has over 10,000 interns and over 50% of them serve in the lowest performing schools, according to the complaint. Coalition members added that across the nation students of color are more likely to be taught by non-qualified teachers, perpetuating the pervasive achievement gap between miniority and non-minority students. Moreover, the coalition concludes that if intern teachers are disproportionately placed in schools, they will not benefit from the skills of experienced teachers. Students and teachers alike are harmed by the concentration of intern teachers and the full responsibilities these interns assume, they assert.

Advocacy Movements

In September 2007, Parents and Students for Great Schools, a coalition of liberal advocacy groups, conducted a statewide survey and published "Now That We Have the Facts," the first of a series of grassroots proposals to the state legislature in response to "Getting Down to Facts."

“Getting Down to Facts”

“Getting Down to Facts,” the unprecedented education finance study in California that brought together researchers from 32 institutions was released in March 2007, after 18 months of planning and preparation. The final 1700-page report encompassed 20 separate studies that touched on virtually every aspect of the education finance and governance structures in California.

The California project, overseen by Dr. Susanna Loeb and others at Stanford University, was exceptionally broad in scope, including studies of the state’s school finance systems, education governance, personnel issues, and data systems, as well as more traditional “adequacy” cost studies. The over-all conclusion of the studies was that California’s education system is substantially under-funded, but that funding increases must be accompanied by major governance reforms and elimination of regulatory and contractual impediments to efficient functioning and the implementation of meaningful reforms, if the extra funds are to really matter. Yet, despite strong recommendations, the study has received little attention.

Useful Resources

EdSource Online is a comprehensive source of information on California's education system. Their overview of the state's very complicated finance system is especially useful.

Last updated: February, 2008