Is Brown’s school finance reform paying off?

However, school reform and civil rights groups have questioned whether the extra money is really being effectively spent on the targeted children, and have criticized Brown’s hands-off attitude toward monitoring spending and its results. Most independent examinations of LCFF, including an exhaustive dive by CALmatters.org, have found little or no discernible closure of the achievement gap, which is why Brown faced the sharp questions. “This is not going to be solved in Sacramento,” he replied, calling LCFF “basically a bottoms-up kind of thing” and adding, “we’ve done our part.” . . . Three weeks after Brown defended LCFF, he and other advocates received some good news from the Learning Policy Institute, a Palo-Alto-based education think tank. . . . However, to Bill Lucia, who heads EdVoice, a leading critic of LCFF’s implementation, it was “fake news.” He points out that to reach its conclusions, the Learning Policy Institute team took the most recent academic test scores and through a process it calls “norming,” compared them to results of an entirely different system of testing that the state abandoned just about the time LCFF went into effect. The state’s education leaders have warned that such comparisons are invalid and there’s even a state law that prohibits school officials from doing them.