Widening the View

California’s Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) represents a revolutionary break with the past 40 years of school funding law. In place of dozens of categorical grants and budgets decimated by the recession, it promises more money, targeted to students with high needs, and increased local control over those resources—in exchange for transparency and accountability for improved student outcomes. 

But as many groups have observed, implementation is still a work in progress.

We interviewed nearly 20 district and county office of education leaders, reviewed reports by California-based organizations on the issue of the LCFF, and built off our national experience with strategic resource allocation to make a series of proposals that we hope widen the lens beyond technical fixes to address these fundamental questions:

How can we use the LCFF as an opportunity to transform education for all of California’s students? How can we preserve local control and support districts in investing in the strategies most likely to lead to student success?

Widening the View: Proposals to Push California's LCFF from Revolutionary to Transformational (PDF)