First implemented over 10 years ago, California’s Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) provides California’s public schools with additional funding for high-need students. It uses enrollment in the Free and Reduced-Price Meal program (FRPM) to proxy for low-income status. Yet the gap between FRPM and other poverty measures has been growing over time. In an event last week, PPIC researchers Brett Guinan, Julien Lafortune, and Iwunze Ugo discussed findings from their recent report, which assesses the current efficacy of California’s school funding approach.
“Using FRPM as the sole low-income measure really weakens the formula’s ability to target funding where it’s needed the most,” Guinan said. She illustrated what this can mean for individual school districts with findings from two districts just 31 miles apart. Both have similar FRPM rates and, thus, similar funding. But their students do not have the same level of disadvantage: one district has twice the poverty rate as the other and underperforms on most student outcomes.
California’s recent shift to universal school meals has also had an impact on the viability of using FRPM alone as a proxy for low income. Although the meal expansion serves more students, districts report growing challenges collecting income information needed for federal and state funding now that families have less incentive to complete meal applications. And as Ugo pointed out, “districts differ in their capacity to address” these challenges, which could affect their funding allocations.
The authors evaluated several potential alternatives to FRPM. They considered variations using FRPM but including duplicated counts—that is, allowing multiple categories of need to generate additional funding for any student. They looked at replacing FRPM with direct certification—identifying students as low income by their participation in other social service programs. They also explored several individual indicators from census data such as income, various poverty levels, and neighborhood characteristics.
Ultimately, they found that direct certification with duplicated counts would direct the most funding to targeted student groups. Nonetheless, each scenario comes with challenges. For example, implementing formula changes would require significant new state funding—or could mean some districts lose funding under a revised formula. Direct certification alone could add new challenges: not all students can or will access safety net programs, for a variety of reasons. “Students that are undocumented or from mixed status families” may be particularly hard to identify, said Ugo.
In the end, a one-size-fits-all statewide approach to targeted funding may not be the best option, noted Lafortune. In the meantime, individual districts can certainly gather “more granular data and more local data that’s relevant for their context.” The Los Angeles Unified School District’s student equity needs index (SENI) is a good example of that practice.
The group recommended policy approaches that include adding categories of high need (like homelessness), incorporating broader community characteristics and income levels, and expanding data-sharing.
