The finances of education governance reforms in California: Evidence from school district spending patterns.

摘要

A core element of today's education governance reform efforts is more local control of education decisionmaking. There are many issues that surround these efforts including how to assess their results, who will control decisionmaking, and who will be held accountable. In addition, there are considerable issues surrounding the finances of these reform efforts. The reform efforts call for new ways of allocating resources to public education to allow for more local control of budgetary decisionmaking. In order to design such a system, we must first understand how public education is financed today in order to determine what changes are necessary, what changes are feasible, how to allocate resources under the new scheme, and who is affected and by how much. California is the focus of this research as California often leads the nation in implementing school reforms and California's system of school finance has recently received increased attention.;This research begins by exploring the federal, state, and local mechanisms by which public education is supported in California before turning to how those resources are used by school districts. Restrictions on local budgetary decisionmaking in California come from a variety of sources examined in this research including federal and state categorical aid programs, the California Education Code, the inability to raise discretionary resources locally, the underfunding of particular programs, collective bargaining agreements, and federal and state mandates. The variety of mechanisms by which school districts receive revenues and the constraints to local spending decisions leave open questions as to how districts allocate education dollars, how this differs by districts with different characteristics, what tradeoffs districts make in their allocation decisions, and ultimately what degree of flexibility they have to make resource allocation decisions. These questions are addressed through this research. A large database was compiled on how much each school district in California receives in public funds from local, state, and federal governments and how those resources are used by the school districts. This information is matched to data on student and district characteristics.