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University of California President Janet Napolitano has been under siege since March 2016, when state Auditor Elaine Howle released a report that showed that the UC system wasn’t honoring the principle that California students come first. Howle documented how, over the course of nearly a decade, budget-strapped UC had chosen to increase out-of-state students who pay far higher tuition by more than 400 percent – and that some were admitted ahead of nearly 4,300 California students “whose academic scores met or exceeded all of the median scores of nonresidents whom the university admitted to the campus of their choice.” At least initially, Napolitano and some regents dismissed the criticism before finally giving in and capping nonresident admissions last week. But the Golden State’s other giant higher education system – California State University – got the message loud and clear: In-state students must be the highest priority. Last week, CSU formally guaranteed that a qualified California high school graduate will be offered admission to at least one of CSU’s 23 campuses.

But despite the upbeat rhetoric, a crisis is looming in the nation’s second-largest school district as enrollment falls from a projected 514,000 in 2017 to 480,000 in 2020. Since the state’s main education funding formula is based on average daily attendance, this could force mass layoffs of teachers or even drastic measures like shortening the school year. A $422 million deficit is anticipated in 2019-20, with red ink after that for as far as the eye can see. None of this comes as any surprise. A blue-ribbon commission’s report issued in November 2015 said L.A. Unified was facing fiscal disaster because of the enrollment declines, which are primarily due to falling birth rates, and because of the cost of pensions and retiree health care benefits. Employee retirement benefits will claim 8 percent of the school budget in 2017-18 and more than double that sum in coming years as the state’s 2014 bailout of the California State Teachers’ Retirement System ratchets up required payments from districts and as more of the district’s aging workforce retires.

California’s new system for funding public education has pumped tens of billions of extra dollars into struggling schools, but there’s little evidence yet that the investment is helping the most disadvantaged students.

A CALmatters analysis of the biggest districts with the greatest clusters of needy children found limited success with the policy’s goal: to close the achievement gap between these students and their more privileged peers. Instead, results in most of those places show the gap is growing.

The test scores echo a broader and growing concern about the four-year-old Local Control Funding Formula from civil rights groups, researchers and legislators. They also raise concerns about whether the $31 billion invested so far in foster youth, kids learning English and students from low-income families has been well spent.

Here’s a cynical view: Maybe the law’s stated goal wasn’t its real goal. Maybe influential teachers unions wanted to shower big districts with money to pave the way for teacher pay raises denied during the state’s long revenue recession. Want evidence?

On the micro level, consider what happened in Los Angeles Unified, the state’s largest district. In August 2014, the United Teachers Los Angeles issued a statement calling for a 17.6 pay increase and asserting the raise was affordable because of all the “extra dollars [that] have already flowed into the district as part of the state’s new funding formula.” In May 2015, the union ended up winning a 10 percent, two-year raise, and a year of retroactive higher pay. The following month, state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson overruled an underling and said that Local Control Funding Formula money could be used for teacher raises. As Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, D-San Diego, immediately pointed out, this is not what the Legislature intended when it passed the law.

On the macro level, consider what’s happened in Sacramento. The Brown administration has been implacably opposed to attempts led by Weber and Assemblyman Phil Ting, D-San Francisco, to determine how school districts have spent their Local Control funds. It doesn’t want the public to know.

Should taxpayers underwrite special benefits to attract new teachers, such as affordable housing, expanded maternity leave and tax breaks? California lawmakers have put forward a raft of proposals offering extra perks for teachers this session, prompted by what supporters say is an urgent need to do more to encourage people to get into the profession or stay there. “Due to the extreme shortage of teachers in the state, many school districts must seek opportunities to attract qualified teachers,” Assemblyman Kevin Mullin, D-South San Francisco, said of his bill meant to increase the supply of affordable housing for teachers. Available data, though, doesn’t back up such dire assessments of the state’s overall teacher supply. Data shows that, as state finances have improved, so have the number of teachers in public schools.

Over the past 15 years, 1.5 million more people have left California than have moved here from other states, according to estimates from the California Department of Finance. Remarkably, even in the face of this outflow, California still experiences net gains of college graduates (those with at least a bachelor’s degree). Over the past five years, California ranks second among all states in net gains of college graduates from other states, even as it ranks first in net losses of less educated adults. 

YouthForce NOLA, a partnership of political, business and education leaders in New Orleans, places 1,200 high-school seniors from local public high schools in paid internships in fields such as software development and advanced manufacturing. Businesses work with school administrators to ensure students receive practical, skills-based classroom instruction. The goal is to help students obtain professional credentials for high-wage jobs that don’t require bachelor’s degrees. (YouthForce NOLA was the recipient of $5 million in grants from Bloomberg Philanthropies.)

Another successful model is the state-run Apprenticeship Carolina program in South Carolina, which serves as an intermediary between businesses, workers and educational institutions. It matches employers with the state’s technical colleges, who tailor classes to meet the companies’ needs, and handles most of the paperwork (companies have to register their apprenticeship programs with the federal and state governments). Employers are responsible for paying apprentices’ wages and mentoring them on the job. Since 2007, more than 25,000 South Carolina workers have completed apprenticeships; the number of companies participating in the program has increased from 90 to 880.

The new economy is not like the old economy. Once that settles in, there is an obvious strategy to pursue: overhauling our education system so it produces far more people with elite job skills. These skills often involve critical thinking and a facility with science and technology. Fields such as information technology, life sciences, cybersecurity, robotics, automation, artificial intelligence-assisted research and advanced statistical analysis are certain to grow in coming years.

Freshmen and seniors at about 200 colleges across the U.S. take a little-known test every year to measure how much better they get at learning to think. The results are discouraging.

At more than half of schools, at least a third of seniors were unable to make a cohesive argument, assess the quality of evidence in a document or interpret data in a table, The Wall Street Journal found after reviewing the latest results from dozens of public colleges and universities that gave the exam between 2013 and 2016. (See full results.)

At some of the most prestigious flagship universities, test results indicate the average graduate shows little or no improvement in critical thinking over four years.

While the “disinvestment” narrative is simple and appealing, it collapses under scrutiny. If state funding to public colleges falls by $100 per student, it seems logical to conclude that tuition must go up by $100 to compensate. But that isn’t what happens. In a new study, I compare tuition and direct state funding changes at four-year public colleges between 2004 and 2015. This covers both a boom in state funding (2004-08) and a bust (2008-12). Sure enough, the relationship is quite weak. Less than 5% of changes in state funding pass through to higher tuition. In other words, if funding falls by $100 per student, tuition will rise by less than $5.

Colleges do tend to cut spending when state funding goes down. But the expenditures they cut are usually in areas unrelated to instruction, such as research and administration. When funding goes up, colleges largely plow that money into higher spending rather than return it to students through lower tuition.

However, the state disinvestment hypothesis falls apart upon closer scrutiny of the data. This report uses a fixed-effects regression method, which isolates underlying tuition trends from fluctuations plausibly caused by state disinvestment. At four-year public colleges between 2004 and 2015, every dollar of per-student subsidy cuts was associated with a tuition hike of less than five cents. State subsidies appear to have little, if any, effect on tuition levels at public colleges.

State law protects Cal Grant recipients from tuition increases at UC or CSU: when tuition rises, so do these students’ Cal Grants. Consequently, as tuition has increased and enrollment of low-income students has expanded, the program has grown rapidly. Next fall, tuition is scheduled to increase by $280 per year at UC and by $270 per year at CSU. In addition, UC, which has enrolled 7,400 new undergraduates in each of the last two years, plans to enroll an additional 2,500 in the fall of 2017‒18, the largest three-year increase in seventy years. CSU has added around 50,000 additional students over the past five years. The expansion of Cal Grants has drawn the attention of the governor. He noted in his May budget revision that “rising Cal Grant costs from tuition hikes will also limit the state’s ability to increase General Fund support in the future.”

In a July 2015 report, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York observed a direct correlation between student borrowing and tuition levels, noting that “higher tuition costs raise loan demand, but loan supply .  .  . [relaxes] students’ funding constraints.” The Fed spoke of a “pass-through effect on tuition,” whereby for every dollar received in subsidized federal loans, tuition rises 65 cents. They report similar findings for Pell Grants (55 cents) and unsubsidized loans (30 cents). As the Fed study indicates, student debt isn’t rising simply because college is too expensive. Rather, school is too expensive because of rising student loans and grants. Research by economist Richard Vedder, director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, bolsters this argument. He found that “when someone other than the user is paying the bills, those bills tend to explode since the buyer is not sensitive to price.” In other words, the expansion of student loans and other third-party payments for college leads to higher prices by insulating students from the actual cost of tuition. This vicious cycle leaves many low-income students (who are supposed to benefit the most from financial aid) priced out of attending college.

GreatSchools released a first-of-its-kind look at student achievement and access to educational opportunity broken down by race and ethnicity. The report sheds light on systemic gaps in access to advantages that allow students to succeed in school and prepare for college and career.

The report shows that a stunning 2% of African American and 6% of Hispanic students attend a quality school for their student group based on multiple factors, compared to 59% of white and 73% of Asian students.

California lags behind 40 other states in the amount it spends per child for a range of services including public education and healthcare, according to a new report.

But aside from education spending, where California has for years spent less than other states, the state spends more than most others on other child-related services and supports, such as health care, child care, tax credits and maternal support that benefits children.