California school systems face red spots despite increased costs

from Dan WaltersCalMatters

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Educating the nearly 6 million students in California’s public schools is the state’s second-largest budget expense, and one that has increased sharply under Gavin Newsom’s governorship.

The Budget 2026-27 that Newsom proposed last month would spend $88.7 billion on students ranging from kindergarten through high school. When local property taxes and federal aid are included, the total would be nearly $150 billion, an average of $27,418 per student.

This is a 61% increase from the $17,014 they were receiving when Newsom became governor, but with an adjustment 29% inflation during this period will cut real profit in half.

Comparing school support in California to that of other states is difficult because there is always a lag in data collection. However, the Public Policy Institute of California, using data from several years ago, reports that the state is is no longer in the lower tiers in terms of per-pupil spending but it’s somewhere in the middle, maybe a few thousand dollars above average.

Education officials have continually pushed for more state spending, which is governed by complex formulas in a 1988 ballot measure. Proposition 98. Newsom’s budget estimates that the minimum guarantee from Prop. 98 in state and local funds would be $125.5 billion, but he wants to delay $5.6 billion in payments to reduce the budget deficit — essentially a loan from schools to the state, one of many maneuvers he and the Legislature have used to close the gap between revenue and spending.

“This delay shifts costs into the future when the state must ‘settle down’ and meet that obligation,” said legislative fiscal analyst Gabe Petek in his school budget reviewadding, “For the state budget, the settlement proposal is similar to other forms of borrowing and spending delays — it provides temporary savings in the current year but increases spending in the future.”

Calculating what the state is legally required to spend on schools, deciding what it will spend, crunching the numbers and framing political optics is a time-honored feature of the annual budget process because it’s such a big piece of the puzzle.

Meanwhile, however, school districts across the state are having remarkable difficulty balancing their own budgets this year. They face declining enrollment due to demographic factors such as declining birthrates, lower immigration, population retreats to other states, local opposition to school closings and pressure from unions to raise teacher and support staff wages to cope with their own inflationary pressures.

Fiscal anxiety is most evident in urban school districts where enrollment declines are most severe and where unions are strongest, often spending heavily to elect friendly school board members.

The San Francisco school system just suffered a teacher strike that was settled with a settlement that will increase costs by is valued at over $180 millionleaving much uncertainty as to how he will find the money.

Sacramento schools were teeters on the brink of bankruptcy for years due to expenses that are significantly greater than income. It may be forced to accept a fiscal supervisor if it needs government assistance.

Los Angeles Unified, the nation’s second largest school system, faces a A deficit of $191 millionthe latest in a series of budget lapses.

Teachers and their unions say their problems could only be solved if they had more government aid. But raising per-pupil spending by $1,000 would cost nearly $6 billion a year, and raising it to more than $30,000 to match the top tier of states like New York would cost at least $30 billion.

With the state budget already plagued by chronic deficits in the $20 million range, simply giving schools their constitutional funding level would fall $5.6 billion short of Newsom’s budget.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.