This paper focuses on implications for equity in the research findings of Getting Down to Facts II (GDFTII). Policymakers changed education funding and governance with the 2014 enactment of the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), Gov. Jerry Brown’s historic school funding and accountability legislation. This policy and others intended to tackle low test scores, wide achievement gaps, and other challenges identified in the 2008 research paper series, Getting Down to Facts (Loeb, Bryk, & Hanushek, 2008; Levin et al., 2018).
Today, ten years after the initial Getting Down to Facts studies, the state has made only limited progress in reducing achievement and opportunity gaps. Students who are Black, Latino, low-income, and/or English language learners continue to have low academic outcomes, and the disparities with White and Asian students mean that California as a whole has outcomes significantly below national averages. In 2017, results from the National Assessment of Education Progress (National Center for Education Statistics & Institute of Education Sciences, 2018) showed average reading performance in California was lower than all but five other states in fourth grade, and all but 10 states in eighth grade; in math, California was worse than all but five states in fourth grade and six states in eighth grade.
California’s most recent education reforms have largely relied on good intentions rather than specific accountability, corrective action, and enforcement (Warren & Carrillo, 2015) to disrupt and reverse generations of entrenched inequity. For example, LCFF gives school districts more money to support disadvantaged students but does not guarantee adequate school funding or alter state limits, such as the Proposition 13 limits on property taxes, on local fiscal authority.
After considering the definition of education equity and noting the background of student groups’ isolation by class, race, language, and ethnicity, this paper has sections on teaching, learning, finance, and accountability. It concludes with a more speculative section defining a broader conception of equity for the future, whole child equity; it points us towards a research agenda which could well provide new evidence-based strategies for moving the needle on this nearly intractable problem.
