Moving money at the problem

Here is the main problem with the sudden focus of the District on diverting resources from Ruby Bridges’ innovative program to the latest (unfunded?) mandate from the State. This moving of budgetary deck chairs is kinda proving the point of advocates that the “fix” for student funding in LCFF isn’t actually supporting the population of kids who need it the most. When we look at the way money is doled out across the district most schools, most elementary schools are still getting largely equal shares of money, non restricted money that is. Then we’re told that Title 1 schools are getting all this additional money, as though that is leveling out the playing field, but, you know, that money came into the district for these schools and not to spread freely amongst all schools. From CapRadio:

In 2013, California adopted the Local Control Funding Formula, or LCFF, to equitably distribute funds to schools and close the achievement gap for disadvantaged youth. 

Using the LCFF model, funding was allotted based on the number of students in classrooms. Additionally, each district could get a supplemental grant based on the number of vulnerable students in three high-needs subgroups: English learners, foster youth and a group comprised of low-income and unhoused youth. If more than 55% of a district’s students fall into these subgroups, the district qualifies for these additional monies.

After a decade, the data confirms that LCFF has not accomplished what it set out to do. 

I’m told that some of these numbers have been adjusted but I can’t imagine they’ve moved all that much, what we’re seeing here is that despite LCFF Supplemental monies being distributed to the district because of high needs students, RB received the lowest distribution per pupil of all elementary schools.

Based on the testing data which is all we seem to care about, across the district where there is enough students to measure, AUSD isn’t do great for Black students no matter where they are. Of all the schools who were able to produce data for Black students, RB is the only one which had enough kids to break down the information by grades. It also educates more than twice as many Black students as any other individual school.

Anyway, here are the results for Black students across the district for elementary schools. If the school is not there, it means they could not show any data (even disaggregated data) because there were too few students to measure. As you can probably guess, providing interventions for five kids per grade is much different than double that number.

Ruby Bridges:

Maya Lin:

Otis:

Bay Farm (these are tricky because it includes the middle school numbers as well and shows that BF only has 11 Black students across five grades)

I was going to add the economically disadvantages data as well, but this is getting too long, I’ll add it tomorrow hopefully because these budget discussions should be ongoingish. But the bottom line is that however we’re allocating funding it simply isn’t trickling to where it needs to go. And certainly shuffling money around within a school to target populations of students who are not well served in the district in general does not seem a solution to a problem which has persisted.