How do public schools get funding

That's 20 years of changing the course of education and improving public schools for millions of students. Stand is focused on ensuring all students receive a high quality, relevant education, especially those whose boundless potential is overlooked and under-tapped because of their skin color, zip code, first language, or disability. Join us in standing up for families in your community. Public schools in Washington are part of a complex and diverse system.

Here's a primer to get you started on understanding how it works and how we can ensure every student graduates from high school prepared for career or college or both. If you have a masochistic interest in California's historical school finance laws, knock yourself out.

It's a simpler and fairer system that replaced the rusty old plumbing of revenue limits and categorical funds. Nowadays virtually all school districts in California rely on state funding, because local property taxes are insufficient to generate funding at the base level per student guaranteed by the Local Control Funding Formula LCFF. There are some exceptions. For example, if the boundaries of a school district include valuable commercial property, the property taxes generated are sometimes enough to fund the district beyond the base level.

In about of California's nearly 1, districts had the local capacity to fund their schools without state assistance. In California education jargon, these are officially known as community funded districts. For historical reasons they are also inaccurately referred to as basic aid districts. For more on these districts, see Lesson 8. Nobody likes paying taxes. Passing a tax measure requires political will — a level of collective agreement that can overcome apathy, distrust, and competing priorities.

It requires trust, too — not just that the money to be raised is needed, but that it will be spent well and make a difference. There are all kinds of reasons to say no. Most voters are more inclined to support taxes that benefit their local community schools than ones that apply to the whole state of California.

This is a big, diverse state. It is hard for voters to trust that decisions made in far-off Sacramento will really benefit families locally. Serrano and Proposition 13 flipped California's education funding system from a local system reliant on local property taxes to a state system reliant on state income taxes.

It made the system fairer, but it also made the system more politically distant. The old system was unacceptably inequitable, but in aggregate it was better at raising funds.

Concerns about inadequate school funding started almost immediately after Proposition 13 was passed. As discussed above, Proposition 13 triggered a big switch in the source of funding for public education from property taxes to income taxes. This shift brought a new challenge to California school budgeting: volatility.

Property values and therefore property tax receipts vary with the economic cycle, but they don't tend to change massively. Income taxes, by contrast, are very exposed to the booms and busts of the stock market. Individual fortunes can change a lot from year to year, but they tend to have something in common: the stock market. To smooth out some of the effects of the high volatility in state revenues, in California voters passed Proposition 2 , which requires the state to spend a minimum amount each year to pay down its debts.

The proposition also changed the rules for the state's rainy-day fund , an amount the state puts into a budget reserve to protect against years when revenues fall. Keeping reserves is politically difficult. There are always real needs and worthy investments — and if a district builds significant savings it carries the risk of becoming a lucrative target for a lawsuit.

For people interested in funding for their local schools, the most important thing to know about California's system is that it can be terribly fickle.

Education is an important priority, but not the only one. Especially in a stock market swoon, funding for schools cannot be assumed safe. The next lesson, Lesson 8. Beginning in Lesson 8. Updated August Updated October Updated July Updated May Updated November Updated January Answer the question correctly and earn a ticket. Learn More. To comment or reply, please sign in. Change your mind? Sign In. We will send your Login Link to your email address.

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The Right Stuff 7. And a System… 8. Success So Now What? Schools Behind the World? In most states, local property taxes make up the majority of funding. However, Great Education Colorado reports on its website that due to falling property tax revenues in Colorado in recent year, this is one state that has had to make up some of the difference through additional state funding. Unfortunately, the recent economic recession has led to smaller state budgets as well, which has left many states and school districts without enough funding to go around.

Today, states like Colorado are taking advantage of the economic uptick to try to put some money back into public education. However, the process is slow, with slight increases annually that are not yet having much positive impact on school budgets overall. Since schools must provide the basics, including heat, electricity and transportation, cuts that must be done are frequently taken from the classroom.

This means fewer programs for students and larger class sizes that can create obstacles to student success. This video from the Harvard Graduate School of Education asks if public school funding is fair. The allocation of funding also varies from state to state. For example, according to the Intercultural Development Research Association , policymakers determine how much funding schools will receive and how it should be allocated, while school boards and personnel make many of the budget decisions in Texas schools.

In turn, members of the community have a say in the funding of public education, through their votes for those policymakers.