http://www.easyreadernews.com/71739/south-bay-educators-parents-celebrate-lcff-compromise/
School administrators and school board members, whether running for office or staying in place, have decried the new Local Control Funding Formual enacted by Governor Brown.
Despite his promises to increase local control over school funding, and engage local leaders to embrace the funding and enhance their influence over expenditures, school districts still lament the lack of clarity and accountability expected of them.
One superintendent acknowledges that Brown's insistence on local contorl waned from January 2013 to May. The budget passed, and most school districts still have no idea what to expect.
South Bay schools have a lower population of povery-level students, and thus they will still be receiving less funding than less affluent schools. This disparity has concerned a number of leaders in the South Bay.
Why students born in wealthier communities should suffer just because their parents make more money and live in a wealtier area is just as unfair and inequitable as punishing those in poorer families and impoverished communities because of their location.
The race for funding equality is becoming a race to the bottom, and punishing high-achieving students and school districts with less funding has outraged a number of leaders in school districts, as well as city leaders and committed parents and teachers.
Assemblyman Muratsuchi and State Senator Ted Lieu have been commended nonetheless for their leadership on this matter. Still, a disparity of rich and poor in the state of California cannot be undone by taking wealth from "the haves" in care of the "have nots".
In fact, some schools in the South Bay were adjudicated as "low wealth" districts for years, in spite of the growing rate of homeownership and affluence in the region.
Torrance Unified leaders point out that their schools do well because the culture in this community upholds education as critical to the well-being. Parents expect their children to go to school. This manifestion is a culuture issue, and cannot be created with more money. The well-being of a child's upbringing makes all the difference.
Yet school leaders still insist that more money will solve the problems in our schools. Assemblyman Muratsuchi and State Senator Ted Lieu have refused to take a lead on real reforms which would fix all of these problems.
State Senator Bob Huff (R-Diamond Bar)" submitted SB 451 and 452 in order for every child in the state of California to choose their public school. Torrance Superintendent George Mannon has not qualms about statewide school choice, and neither do members of the school board, because they already enact a comprehenisve permit program in Torrance Unified.
Nevertheless, the inequity of forbidding choice still forces parents to move their students within Torrance boundaries to take advantage of Torrance schools. Just reading over the rent rates along Western Ave, one will find that those apartments advertized along the western side of Western Ave cost an average of $300 more per month compared to the Eastern side of Western Ave, whose students are expected to enroll in Los Angeles Unified. Yet the irony continues in that LA students receive more money from the state than Torrance students.
Once again, it's not about the money, but how the money is spent. It's not about the funding, but how the school district allocates its funds. These are cultural issues, and such matters cannot be pressured or enforced with more laws and regulations. Competition and accountability through choice, and even vouchers and easier regulations for founding charters, will either force failing schools to commit to educating students, rather than funding expansive bureaucracies.
Al Muratsuchi ultimately backed an unfair funding formula, one which may have been the best deal which South Bay school districts could expect, yet one which reveals the fundamentally unfair elememts of driving funding from taxpayers to Sacramento back to school districts.
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