The latest data from the California Department of Education shows that the student population in public schools for the 2024-2025 school year continues to decline. However, K-12 education funding continues to rise, leading to questions about whether taxpayers are truly getting value for their money.
In the just-ended school year, California recorded a total of 5.8 million students, a decrease of 31,000 from the 2023-2024 school year and a decrease of 380,000 (about 6%) from before the pandemic. But the loss of students from traditional public schools is actually more severe than these figures suggest.
The statistics include Charter Schools, which have increased by 75,000 students since the 2018-2019 school year. Excluding the increase in Charter School students, the actual enrollment in traditional public schools has decreased by 8%; this is even with the addition of a new pre-kindergarten level – Transitional Kindergarten (TK).
Despite the decline in student numbers, the required taxpayer funding has increased.
According to state budgets, total K-12 education funding has increased from $97.2 billion in the 2018-2019 school year to $133.8 billion in the 2024-2025 fiscal year. Even after adjusting for inflation, expenditures have still grown by 10%. And this only covers operational expenses. Last year, voters also approved over $40 billion in local K-12 school bonds and a state school bond that will provide funding for school construction.
Although some degree of capital expenditure is reasonable for refurbishing old school buildings, in a situation of continuously declining student numbers, it is almost unnecessary to construct new schools. However, California is still building new schools, sometimes at astonishingly high costs.
For example, Los Angeles County recently completed a new school project to replace the existing Compton High School, which covers 31 acres and cost a staggering $225 million, providing instructional space for just about 1,400 students.
Furthermore, Alameda County’s Dublin Unified is constructing the new Emerald High School with a budget of $374 million. While the school is designed to accommodate 2,500 students, its actual utilization rates remain to be seen.
To save resources, districts facing declining enrollments should consolidate schools with too few students. However, school closures often face strong opposition from stakeholders. Just in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), from the 2018-2019 school year to the 2024-2025 school year, 36 schools have seen student numbers drop below 200, indicating that these schools are highly suitable for consolidation.
However, when it comes to merging schools, the chair of the LAUSD Board told “The 74” education news network, “I’m even a little scared to bring it up because people will completely lose it.”
Such reactions are regrettable because schools with too few students cannot effectively spread fixed costs (such as administrative staff salaries and utility expenses) and struggle to offer sports teams and extracurricular activities due to inadequate numbers, thus failing to provide a comprehensive learning environment for students.
California’s huge expenditure on education has not translated into outstanding academic achievement. Despite California’s per-student spending far surpassing the national average, fourth and eighth-grade students in the state scored below the national average in math and reading standardized tests.
In Utah, even though per-student spending is only 55% of California’s, the state outperforms California in all national education rankings, and even the poorest state in the country, Mississippi, performs better than California in some tests.
California’s increasing education funding seems to not truly help students but primarily benefit specific interest groups, including unions, developers, election consultants, and financial intermediaries.
While we often hear the voices of teachers’ unions, other school staff also have unions. In LAUSD, administrators, financial analysts, and even field assistants have collective bargaining rights and pay union dues. These unions have an incentive to expand their membership (thereby increasing fee income) and naturally oppose any reforms that could reduce manpower or compress employee salaries.
Therefore, California’s excessive investment in school infrastructure has received active support from a network of service providers. Election consultants conduct polls and carefully craft the wording of ballot measures to increase the passage rate of school bonds. Financial consultants, bond underwriters, and construction contractors often donate to school bond campaigns, thus increasing their chances of obtaining contracts in the future.
In fact, the California school construction industry has its lobbying group in the state capital, Sacramento, called “CASH” (Coalition for Adequate School Housing), which last year participated in the passage of a state school facilities bond measure Proposition 2.
While unions and construction supporters often push policies under the guise of being “beneficial to students,” the facts are clear: California has spent large sums of public funds yet provided mediocre education for the dwindling population of students in public schools.