School spending surged. Academic achievement? Not so much ...Middle East

School spending has surged some 75% in California over the past decade as new funding and funding formulas aim to help kids who need help most.

Unfortunately, this significant investment has not bought a commensurate surge in academic performance. While math and English test scores have improved in many Orange County school districts, they’ve dipped in others, despite the surge of new money.

That first bit is drawn from a new study from the Public Policy Institute of California, examining teacher staffing trends and the impact of recent spending. Student achievement wasn’t part of the PPIC’s analysis, but we were curious, so we did our own.

Our analysis suggests that student achievement is much more closely tied to something schools can’t possibly control — average household income — than it is to what they can control, such as per-student spending and class size.

Despite good intentions and many billions of dollars, fewer than half of California’s students meet or exceed grade level expectations in math and English. In some places, it’s shockingly low despite all that extra money.

Last year, in Santa Ana Unified, only 21% of students hit the mark in math, and only 31% hit the mark in English. Dismal as that is, it was an improvement over kids’ performance in 2015. Same for Anaheim Elementary, where 24% of the students met grade standards for math and 28% met them for English last year. And so it went for several other districts.

The strange disconnect between school spending and achievement is illustrated by the two highest-performing districts in Orange County: Little Laguna Beach Unified and large Irvine Unified.

Laguna Beach spent $34,914 per student in 2024. Irvine spent less than half that —  $15,518.

Laguna Beach had the smallest average class size in the county, at 16.6. Irvine had the largest, at 26.6.

Yet kids in the two districts were nearly neck-in-neck on academic performance. In Laguna, 70.5% of kids were proficient in math, compared with 69.4% in Irvine. In Laguna, 78.7% of kids were proficient in English, compared with 74% in Irvine.

Class size and per-student spending don’t appear to be the most crucial operatives here. What these two districts share is high household income and all the extras that brings. Average household income in Laguna Beach was $147,115; in Irvine, $125,321. That’s some 50% higher than in Anaheim and Santa Ana, where achievement is alarmingly low.

Our education system cannot cure all of society’s ills and it shouldn’t be asked to. But it is supposed to be as great an equalizer as humanly possible. Tweaking a system that works for wealthier kids — even by pouring lots more money into it — isn’t enough. Educators must finally square up to that reality and radically reshape the school experience for the neediest kids.

Imagine what might happen after doubling or tripling the number of teachers in high-need schools. Or the progress a teacher with five charges instead of 20+ could make. Or how higher teacher pay in higher-need schools might play out for the kids.

There should be no universe where it’s acceptable for more than half of children to founder below grade level. It’s long past time to do things that are radically, fundamentally, even uncomfortably, different.

Increased spending

Now let’s get back to PPIC’s study.

“Seeking to boost student performance, policies and strategies aimed at improving teacher preparation and district staffing levels have been ubiquitous in education policy discussions both in California and across the nation,” the authors wrote. “In recent years, California has invested over $1 billion in additional funding to address these issues. The state also increased targeted funding in 2021 with the explicit goal of raising staff counts in districts with large numbers of high-need students.

“And yet, California’s schools face growing academic, socioemotional and fiscal challenges. Whether measured on national or state-level exams, the state’s students have not recovered from the pandemic, scoring below 2015 math and reading levels on the 2024 exams. Gaps across student groups and performance levels have also widened, with scores for the lowest-performing 10 percent of students falling even further behind the highest-scoring 10 percent over the last decade.”

The surge in school spending began as the economy rebounded from the Great Recession, PPIC explained. In 2012–13, California spent an average $12,160 per student in inflation-adjusted dollars. In 2019-20, that grew to $15,830 per student. In 2023-24, it hit $21,270 per student.

“This increase was largely driven by two factors,” PPIC said. “First, the state education budget increased substantially during this time, bolstered by both an improved state economy and increased revenues from income and sales tax increases passed by voters via Proposition 30 in 2012.

“Second, federal and state stimulus funding during the pandemic significantly increased education spending starting in 2020–21…. As these funds expire, overall spending may fall, depending on the change in base state funding in the coming years.”

California’s revamped Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), introduced in 2013, changed how state and local dollars are doled out. It directs more money to schools with high-need students — low income, foster youth and/or English learners — though it did not directly increasing overall funding.

The increases have been dramatic. Spending in districts with many high-need students (more than 80%) rose more than $11,000 per kid between 2012 and 2023. In districts with fewer high-need students (less than 55%), funding rose by about $7,000 per student.

What have we bought?

There has been a modest increase in the share of fully credentialed teachers in the highest-need districts, by about 2 percentage points, PPIC found.

Spending has shifted toward benefits and salaries for non-instructional jobs, such as teaching aids and clerical staff.

But the extra money hasn’t bought significantly smaller class sizes. Changes in student-teacher ratios are small and statistically insignificant, at less than 0.25 students per teacher, on average, PPIC found.

The share of novice teachers grew substantially as funding increased and hiring resumed following the Great Recession. That trend has continued in higher-need districts even after the pandemic.

Schools with fewer credentialed or fully authorized teachers disproportionately serve low-income students. About one-quarter of kids attend schools where at least 20% of teachers are not fully credentialed or are teaching subjects outside their formal authorization. Those schools tend to serve more low-income students.

Math and science teachers are less likely to be correctly credentialed (think, English teacher assigned to teach algebra). About 1 in 10 secondary school students attends a school where at least half of math teachers, or some 60% of science teachers, aren’t subject-matter credentialed.

In schools with the lowest shares of fully credentialed math and science teachers, the overwhelming majority of kids — two-thirds — are low-income.

“These results show that substantial per student investments in the highest-need districts in California have led to small and inconsistent relative changes in teacher spending and staffing,” PPIC said. “Instructional salaries and student-teacher ratios show no statistically significant relative change. The share of credentialed teachers has risen modestly — but so has the share of novice teachers. Given the stronger link in the research literature between experience and student outcomes than between credentials and student outcomes, these changes may indicate a very small relative decline in teacher quality in higher-need districts — although this may be a short-term outcome, assuming new and novice hires stay on long enough to gain experience.

“Where then, is this spending going if not to improving teacher quality (or quantity)?… (T)he shift toward higher benefit spending and higher spending on non-instructional staff and services is even more pronounced in higher-need districts. Indeed, this may reflect local preferences in higher-need districts for additional support staff, services, and resources.

“Prior research finds that higher LCFF spending in higher-need districts has had positive impacts on student outcomes. Still, the fact that we observe minimal changes in teacher staffing metrics and instructional spending despite large spending increases suggests that the weighted funding formula under LCFF has not led to differential improvements in teacher quality or class size for high-need students. However, the reform may have improved student-staff ratios in support and other non-instructional areas. More research is necessary to understand the impacts of these staffing patterns on student outcomes.”

What now

Pay always come up, right?

The average teacher salary in California is just over $100,000, PPIC found. But the share of teachers earning their district minimum —about $66,000 in 2024 — has more than tripled since 2011. Starting salaries are no higher than they were in the early 2000s when adjusted for inflation, and greater shares of teachers are at the lower end of the pay scale.

Policy efforts should focus on specific schools that are persistently hard to staff, particularly in math and science, PPIC recommended. Raising starting salaries could help strengthen teacher recruitment and retention. “Tailored efforts could be more effective than broad-based, statewide solutions, like funding formula allocations,” it said.

The state should also up its data game. Before the pandemic, staff-level data was collected on teacher experience, credentials and demographics, allowing for detailed examinations across multiple characteristics. Recent data, though, cover only school or district averages. “(M)ore comprehensive staff-level data would make it easier to understand where district staffing challenges are the greatest and design targeted interventions,” the report said.

Researchers Julien Lafortune, Iwunze Ugo and Brett Guinan waxed philosophic when they presented their findings online Oct. 2.

“What, specifically, is it about teachers that matters?” mused Ugo. Training and subject matter credentials can make them more effective in the early years, but staying and growing are key, he said. They get better and better on the job, blooming when they amass three to five years of experience, but the goal is to not just become a teacher, but to stay a teacher. That might be achieved by better working conditions, salaries or other variables.

And there’s tension here: Is it better to have more teachers and smaller classes, or fewer teachers who are better? That’s not necessarily clear.

“We’ve made a lot of progress,” Lafortune said. “Teacher-student ratios are down, credentials are up.” His big takeaway is that California should look beyond blunt instruments like funding formula policies and, instead, hone in on the challenges, particularly in math and science.

Buinan agreed, stressing the importance of targeting specific interventions at specific schools with specific challenges, rather than broad, across-the-board approaches.

California’s children should be getting more from our enormous investment in their schooling. “An educated citizenry,” Thomas Jefferson once said, “is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people.”

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