The Children's Agenda for California
Defining the goals of
The Children's Movement
Goal 1:
Adopting a comprehensive P-to-12 education revenue and reform package that establishes an equitable and adequate finance system, ensures transparency, enables greater local decision-making flexibility, and strengthens human capital and accountability.
Specific policy components to consider:
- Developing a student-centered finance system.
The distribution of funding through the state’s current education finance system is outdated, incomprehensible and inequitable, and not based on the actual needs of students. Instead, the state should set a base funding amount for each student, set above the current state average, and then districts should receive more resources for high-need students, including for early education. The state’s categorical system should be dismantled, shifting decision-making locally to encourage innovation and the allocation of dollars based on distinct local needs. - Ensuring complete financial transparency and holding the system accountable.
To enable local decision-making flexibility, there needs to be complete financial transparency and a robust accountability system. Anyone should be able to go online and see how money is spent in each California school and district, now that each student will be generating a set dollar amount. Districts need to be measured on growth in student achievement as well as college and career readiness indicators, and will be required to meet financial and student outcome measures. - Strengthening human capital.
The plan must ensure that districts develop local strategies to recruit, support, evaluate, retain and equitably distribute skilled and knowledgeable staff. In addition, several statewide policies, including dismissal procedures, need to be modified to remove barriers at the state level that restrict the local level ability to ensure there is a high-quality teacher in every classroom. - Providing substantial additional resources to schools.
In order to implement the student-centered finance system and accountability infrastructure, the voters need to adopt a major, broad-based education tax increase at the state level, along with changing voter thresholds at the local level to allow for significant additional revenue. While the above reforms will transform how all current dollars are spent, additional dollars are needed to effectuate these reforms – i.e., meaningful reform and revenue increases should be adopted simultaneously.
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