A team of education, economics and public policy scholars has built a new tool that can quickly assess how a particular school finance reform proposal might impact individual California school districts.

The tool can be used to assess any formula that consolidates so-called "categorical" or restricted, special-purpose state and federal funds. It will be discussed at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in San Diego on Tuesday, April 14.

"California currently allocates more than $40 billion of tax revenue -- more than $1,000 per resident -- through a school finance system that is not rational or transparent," said Heather Rose, assistant professor of education at UC Davis. "Reform is vital, and we hope this model will be a useful tool for legislators and others who are serious about achieving it."

The model appears as an Excel appendix to a 2008 PPIC-sponsored report, "Funding Formulas for California Schools II: An Analysis of a Proposal by the Governor's Committee on Education Excellence." It can be seen at http://www.ppic.org/main/publication.asp?i=830.

The governor's blue-ribbon committee in November 2007 recommended consolidating the bulk of the state's complex categorical funding mechanisms into just two programs -- a base revenue program for all students and a targeted revenue program for disadvantaged students. Each low-income student would receive targeted funds equal to 40 percent of base funds, and each English learner would get 20 percent more than the base. But the committee was not specific about many details.

Using their model, Rose and her co-investigators were able to show that the governor's committee proposal would, for example, give an extra $1,000 per pupil to large K-12 school districts with a high proportion of low-income students, versus $700 for similar-sized districts with fewer poor students.

Other members of the team that created the model were Ray Reinhard, then an education consultant for the Public Policy Institute of California; Ria Sengupta, then a research associate with PPIC; and Jon Sonstelie, professor of economics at UC Santa Barbara and an adjunct fellow at PPIC. Rose is now updating the model with Sonstelie and Margaret Weston, a PPIC research associate, using more recent school funding data.

The UC Davis School of Education provides nonpartisan, research-supported information and expertise to policymakers as well as to those who interpret and implement policy, with a goal of fostering a thoughtful, well-informed education system in California.

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