Why Can’t Our Schools Afford to Improve the Education of our Kids?

School budget season is on us once again. This is crunch time for local activists who really want to see what your district is planning for the future and have some influence on how they spend our tax dollars. Nothing your local school board does has more impact on your child’s education than how they choose to spend our education dollars, here is where parents can step up and make a difference. 

Many districts are now facing “financial difficulties.” Even though the governor is proposing an increase in K12 funding of 2.3% in the coming year, we will now hear our schools can’t afford to properly educate our kids, because they don’t get enough funding from the state.  Many board meetings will include proposals for cuts that will further damage the education of our kids – along with excuses that those cuts are needed.  Because apparently a 2.3% increase is just not enough.  Whatever the increase, it is never enough. 

In reality, overall funding per student (based on Average Daily Attendance or “ADA”) has skyrocketed in the last decade.  According to the California Department of Education’s database, funding has risen from $61B in 2015 to $114B in 2024, a growth rate of about 7% per year, or about twice  the rate of inflation (3.64%) for the state during this period.

Attendance has been dropping during this time, from 5.4M to 4.7M kids last year.  Factoring this in, per student funding has gone from $11,181 to $24,222/ADA, a growth rate of almost 9%/year, or over two and a half times inflation.

With an overall average class size of 26.31 (as of 2019, the CDE has still not updated this data since blaming the lack of new data on Covid…) that means each average class is being funded to the tune of almost $640,000 per year.  If that sounds like a lot of money it’s because it is.

Despite this tremendous growth in funding – a growth rate any private company would be popping champagne corks over – academic performance in the state is miserable.  In 2024 only 47% of our kids met standards for English, and a miserable 36% in Math.  By all objective measures, academic performance in our state has gone from bad  to worse.  According to the National Assessment of Academic Performance (NAEP) results our state ranks 38th in reading.

We’re provided many excuses by those whose paychecks come from the education system.  It’s covid – right?  Despite being years past the shutdowns (which the education system itself orchestrated) and having spent billions on “learning loss recovery.”  We’re told $24,222 is not enough money to educate our kids.  

Is the problem really lack of money, or perhaps it has something to do with how that money is spent?

And why does it seem like the more money we give the education industry the worse academic performance gets?

Unlike academic performance, there is one area of education spending also growing by leaps and bounds – what our education industry pays itself. 

In 2015, the median total compensation (including contributions by the district to retirement and healthcare) of an administrative/management employee was $133,628.  Median total for a full-time certificated employee (teachers) was $100,600. 

By 2023 (the last year full records are available), admin compensation had reached $193,206 and certificated $141,115.   Roughly a 4.5% annual growth rate for both, a rate well in excess of inflation.

These compensation numbers may be hard to comprehend for those fed the continual “myth of the underpaid education employee”, but they are verifiable facts derived from actual pay records obtained through Public Record Act requests and posted to Transparent California.  If you’d like to see what your district is actually paying people, not what those being paid would like you to think, go there and do the search.

Driving this is a system we all know.  The unions fund the election of school board members and those school board members continually vote in favor of higher pay and benefits for union members.  The disclosure system, where the state tells districts they’re supposed to tell us when a proposed raise will result in cuts, is broken.  Our County Offices of Education rarely enforce it, turning a blind eye to disclosures that say “to be determined” or “NA” in that blank on the form. 

You might think district administrators would want to make their schools better as a means of keeping kids from leaving.  But they are incentivized not to care because in a classic example of corruption they almost always give the same raises they propose for unions to themselves, in what is called a “me too” increase.

The end result is we have enormous cost increases approved by the Board without asking a single question about where the money is going to come from.  And when districts later have to cut from our kids parents have already forgotten what they did to give money to themselves a few months ago.  If they ever really knew. 

San Diego Unified is a classic example of this.  Even though they knew they were already projecting a huge deficit, their raises for employees were approved with 75 seconds of discussion by the Board, and no plans at all were put forth on how they were going to pay for those raises without cutting from kids. Manhattan Beach Unified is yet another clear example of the same thing. Neither Board cared enough about the education of kids to demand to know  how raises were going to be given to adults without creating problems funding actual education before approving those raises.

When your local district admins or board tells you a lack of funding is the only reason they can’t improve the education provided our kids are you going to believe them?  Or are you going to believe actual numbers from budget data?

In June your local K-12 district is going to be having board meetings to discuss their proposed budget for 2025-2026.  Those meetings are required by law to include two meetings in June – the initial proposal and the final adoption – and those meetings are required to include public hearings on that. 

When your district tells you they can’t afford new books or science supplies because the state doesn’t provide enough money, are you going to stand up at the podium and perhaps read them back some of their own compensation data, telling them you know the real source of the problem?

CA K-12 Compensation By District 2015

CA K-12 Compensation By District 2023