The California Education Budget
Should Be Cut .
The Fatted Cow 🐄 🐮 Education Spending. And the continued Budget problems in California begs an interesting question ❓⁉️ . California Gov. Newsom right now is prepared to axe 🪓 Medi -Cal for citizen Seniors in the state , at the same time expanding Healthcare for illegals. Of Course, Newsom is dicing certain programs. He will not touch the High Speed Train 🚂 wreck that is costing the state Billions. He will raise taxes on California citizens just to avoid cutting another big fat cow : The Education Budget. Now that the state spends $128-200 billion per year on education, the “paucity of funding” argument has become less compelling, so education leaders are now blaming the state’s education curricula for poor learning outcomes which are blamed on social economic system of parenting rather than teaching. I mean if you’re going to make cuts it’s low hanging fruit to make the
cuts that none of your voter base will feel or be affected by, which
sucks but makes sense, that the biggest fiscal spending in California is tied up half the state Budget is in Education. Not even Healthcare spending in California gets this big money spending that every other program.
The Education Budget is Bankrupting the State.
California spending 💰 on education is an insanely 200 billion dollars 💵a year, it's half of the entire state Budget collected money from struggling tax payers on the bottom of the State economy. Meanwhile California is home to 186 billionaires and 50 Fortune 500 companies. The richest billionaires and corporate CEOs have seen their wealth increase by more than $292 billion since 2020. Yet California policymakers - from the Governor to state lawmakers - have made an active policy choice to not make them pay what they owe - denying Californians of their basic needs like affordable housing. So far most school districts are fully funded and staffed public schools, that exceeds the declining student population. It's always a straw mans argument on how California policy drives were the money goes , from whom it raises taxes on. Reducing the Education budget by just 30 billion dollars for example, which would be a good idea 😉 💡 hardly makes a dent in education spending, which will always be higher than revenues being generated by taxes. $ 200 Billion is not a grand scale, it is a gargantuan scale. Massive beyond comprehension, it even exceeds Prop 98 funding which was at 40% when it passed. That was not that much decades ago , now we have huge budget monster taking ( tanking depends how you say it) the entire state Budget spending.
Trump Dissolves The Department of Education.
The Trump administration has begun dismantling the U.S. Department of Education by laying off about half of the agency’s employees, casting uncertainty over how — or whether — billions of federal dollars for California to help disadvantaged students and those with disabilities will be distributed, how college financial aid and student loans will be managed and how civil rights enforcement will be carried out. I don't pretend to know what all goes on at the DOE, but those seem like fairly small programs compared to Title I funds. Perhaps some burden can be shifted to the states in awarding those. And, as you suggest, most states do not have the same guardrails against corruption that the federal government does, so we are likely to see more corruption. I will say, I don't trust DOGE in any capacity to make any real decisions about efficiency. They seem to be more in the "let us remove and see what happens" type strategy. It seems they removed much of the support staff. Comms, admin, IT, etc. I'm not really sure how people are supposed to work without support staff.
California Education Spending is Overspending.
“We’ve got a spending problem,” Newsom acknowledged, defending the
potential cuts against anticipated blowback. “We can deny that we have a
shortfall. We can deny that we have a deficit. We can deny we have a
problem in the system and we could put it off and be irresponsible.” The CRAZY 🤣 Part is that Gavin Newsom has been repeating this for nearly five years . Has done nothing to actually reduce the crazy education budget. It's been the sticking point to every single California budget legislature gridlock for decades. The actual cause of state revenue rising expenses. Education Overspending has crippled the state of California. It's time to trim it back to levels that reflect spending in accord to actual state revenue decline, not on whim of spending deficits.
Teachers Union ?
California Teachers Union is very influential in how much the Governor pours into the education budget. It's obviously that the union has played a role in driving up education costs without looking at the dismissal economy of California and its highest taxes, that most sadly teachers can even afford to live in the state with its highest spending on education. I can say that the only flaw with 1>>(LCFF) is ADA funding. Tying funding to school minutes per student does nothing but encourage central office bureaucrats to arbitrarily increase the length of the school day, which does nothing but appease “parent groups” while exacerbating essentially every issue we see in school buildings and pushing the onus onto school employees. You want to fix the CA education budget and a few other issues in our school system? Replace ADA with a more static funding formula and cut a few useless, bloated administrative contracts. Some of the people in these central offices do less work in a year than the average classroom teacher does in a couple hours, yet they make 3x a teacher’s salary. This is the truth. The failure is a system problem. Doubling school funding would just make the cars driven by administrators nicer.
NOTES and COMMENTS.
1>>(LCFF).LCFF aimed to increase equity by funding districts based on students’ educational needs rather than simple enrollment counts or historical funding patterns. Most LCFF funding is determined by a per-student base grant to districts that varies by grade level. LCFF then “weights” this base grant to provide additional revenue for each student the law considers “high-need.” This is defined as being an English learner, from a low-income family, or in the foster system. Districts receive a “supplemental” grant worth 20 percent of the base grant for each high-need student. Seven years after California started pumping billions of dollars into schools with the neediest students — an attempt to narrow a chronic academic achievement gap — a new state audit has found that the state’s landmark school funding law isn’t adequately ensuring that targeted money is actually going to the disadvantaged students it’s supposed to help. And lawmakers are concerned that some school districts may be using money intended to help high-need students to instead pay for salaries, pensions and other across-the-board services.In a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom, State Auditor Elaine Howle wrote that her team “had difficulty determining the extent to which the districts used those funds to increase or improve services for intended student groups.”
