By directing funding to the state’s poorest schools and targeting racial disparities statewide, Gov. Gavin Newsom is proposing the biggest changes in a decade to the state system of funding and governing schools.
His plan would be an implicit acknowledgment that school districts’ efforts under the Local Control Funding Formula have not narrowed achievement gaps. Nor have districts sufficiently steered supplemental money from the formula to schools with the greatest needs.
His proposal, announced last month, grew out of a push by Black legislators to direct new money specifically toward helping Black students raise achievement. Since the 1996 voter initiative Proposition 209 bans affirmative action in public schools, Newsom is proposing a different approach.
