Blog Post Week 2: Background Information Research

In last week’s post, I mentioned that I want to research educational budgets and their allocations. To gain some insight on this topic, I researched on how educational budgets are created and what California’s current budget is (2015-2016).

To locate my first source, I searched EBSCO Host, Gale Virtual Reference Library, and Blackwell Reference Online; I couldn’t find anything relevant to my topic. Then, I searched Sage Knowledge and, after filtering through the subject education and its lower subjects, found that they published a work on educational leadership and management. In this work, there was a section on school finance laws and practices. It was perfect for my research.

To locate my second source, I did the common thing; “I googled it”. After looking through a couple of web pages, including the ca.gov page on educational budgeting, I found an EdSource page. The EdSource page was an article about California’s educational budget that Governor Brown proposed last year. I liked this page, because it had the explanations with the numbers, making it easy to understand.

One thing I learned about educational budgets is that most school administrators discuss school finances with four values in mind: equity, efficiency, liberty, and adequacy. These values help educational administrators come up with a number ($) for each student that represents fairness, provides for the amount of output a student should give, makes sense for what a student can learn within a year, and helps schools teach what they want/need to teach.

Another thing I learned about my topic is that in the 2015-2016 school year, the total budgeted spending rose to $83 billion dollars for K-12 schools, community colleges, and state preschools. That equals 71.9% of the state budget that Governor Brown signed last year (in effect July 1, 2015). 

What I would like to research further is why schools are so underfunded if the budget for public education is about 72% of our total state budget. It doesn’t make sense. $83 billion is a lot of money to spread among the public schools in California. So why doesn’t it work?

[More research to come in the upcoming weeks…]

Sources:

Houck, E. (2015). Understanding school finance laws and practices. In F. English The sage guide to educational leadership and management (pp. 239-256). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications Ltd. Retrieved from http://sk.sagepub.com.libproxy.chapman.edu/reference/the-sage-guide-to- educational-leadership-and-management/n26.i5.xml 

Fensterwald, J. (2015, June 23). 2015-16 state education budget by the numbers. Retrieved from http://edsource.org/2015/2015-16-state-education-budget-by-the- numbers/81895