(The Center Square) – California Gov. Gavin Newsom is proposing spending $24,746 per student in the fiscal year 2025-2026 budget as the majority of students continue to fail to meet basic standards in any subject.
Newsom’s proposed spending is an inflation-adjusted 30% higher than a decade ago, but students now perform worse in reading and math than they did in the 2015-2016 school year, highlighting academic research finding little correlation between education spending and educational outcomes.
In his budget preview, Newsom compared his proposed spending with that of a decade ago, which for the 2015-2016 fiscal year was $14,240 per pupil — or an inflation-adjusted $18,963.
In the 2015-2016 school year, 49% of California students met or exceeded basic reading standards, while just 37% met or exceeded math standards. Almost a decade later, California students are performing slightly worse; in the 2023-2024 school year, 47% of students met or exceeded English standards, while 35.5% met math standards.
According to a peer-reviewed meta-analysis of nearly 400 studies that has been cited over three thousand times, there is little correlation between student performance and school resources.
“The close to 400 studies of student achievement demonstrate that there is not a strong or consistent relationship between student performance and school resources, at least after variations in family inputs are taken into account,” found Eric Hanushek in his meta-analysis. “Simple resource policies hold little hope for improving student outcomes.
However, a recent California study found that changes in curriculums — as demonstrated by a recent court-ordered settlement targeting the state’s worst-performing schools — can yield significant improvements.
A court-ordered, science-backed, phonics-based reading program for California’s 75 worst-performing schools cost of $1,144 per pupil per year, but increased educational attainment at one-third the cost of Project STAR’s classroom size reduction programs and 13 times more than a generalized increase in school spending in California.
Last year, Newsom proposed spending $23,619 per student, meaning this year’s proposal is nearly 5% higher than the year before, or an increase nearly exactly proportional to the per-pupil cost of adopting the phonics-based pilot program.
Assembly Bill 2222 from the 2023-2024 legislative session would have required schools across the state to move towards a similar phonics-based program. Though the bill had bipartisan support, it was quashed in committee without being put to a vote.
Last year, California settled a case regarding COVID-19 pandemic-era learning loss by agreeing to spend $2 billion on evidence-based learning interventions, which could include phonics-based reading programs.
