In 1971, the California Supreme Court issued one of its most important and high -range decisions, stating that the state system to finance public schools, mainly, through taxes to the property collected locally, was unfairly unfair.
He decided that because there were great disparities in the amount of taxable ownership per student, there are also “substantial disparities in the expenses for students among the school districts”, which “perpetuates the dispairs of support in quality and edition.
The decision turned on decades of political debate, partly in the legislature, on “equalization”, bringing the student’s expenditure on approximate equity. Four years after that decision, Republican legislators also have the approval of the budget, demanding more school money for their suburban districts, which are based on serious houses, to compensate for the greatest capacity of urban schools to industrial property.
The equalization conflict has been scored by two emblematic voting measures. In 1978, proposition 13, which strongly limited property taxes, had the indirect effect of changing the basic schools of schools to the State. Proposal 98, promulgated a decade later, aimed at guaranteeing permanent participation, approximately 40%of the income of the General State Fund.
Another milestone occurred in 2013, when so. Jerry Brown persuaded the legislature to promulgate the local control financing formula, which reinterpreted the equalization to give schools with a large number of indital poor and English learning students to close what was called the “gap achieved.”
This year a new wrinkle appeared in the debate of perpetual equalization. The Law 743 of the Senate, transported by the state senator Dave Cortese, a Democrat of San José, aims to compensate for the ability of the school districts in the communities of high wealth to generate so much tax money to the property that qualify only for amounts of state aid.
These 139 “basic aid districts” can increase large amounts of property taxes because the legislature decided, after the approval of proposition 13, freeze the existing actions of the property tax group of each county.
Corte considers that a “1978 outdated financing formula that has created winners and losers in the public education system during the last 45 years” and says that its measure is “about equalization and invest the consequences of past errors.”
Its bill would create a state education endowment that would provide extra money to non -basic aid districts. Clean the Senate Education Committee this week.
While the cutting measure could limit the groove gaps in the expense of pupupiles, there would still be wide disparities that property taxes remain an important factor in school financing, despite the fact that the general values of the general limits.
In other words, what the State Supreme Court declared that it is constitutionally unacceptable in 1971 still exists in 2025.
The complete equalization would require eliminating property assignments to schools, replace 100% of the finance of the state budget or, as the court hint, the State that collects property taxes for schools and then assigns those procedures equally.
Any of which would be a great policy undertaken, because the school inevitably creates the School of Winners and Losers. Meanwhile, matching finance per student has suffered a review because the needs of the students vary very widely.
Brown’s local local control financing formula is an expression of that review, declaring that some children need more educational attentive than others if the performance gap will close, and that also means financial support.
However, in the last 12 years, Brown’s passage of strict equalization has not reduced the stubborn gap, at least so far, appreciably.
Then Walters is a Calmatters columnist.