Classrooms First: California Must Stop Feeding Bureaucracy and Start Funding Teachers and Students

California pours enormous resources into public education from Transitional Kindergarten through community college, the TK-14 system. Proposition 98 guarantees roughly $125.5 billion in recent years for TK-12 and community colleges, with total TK-12 spending (all sources) approaching $149 billion annually. Per-pupil funding hits about $20,427 under the Prop 98 minimum and climbs to roughly $27,418 when federal and other sources are included.

Yet student outcomes—the only metric that truly matters—remain dismal. On the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), only about 29% of California fourth-graders were proficient in reading and 35% in math. Eighth-graders fared even worse, with the state consistently ranking in the lower half nationally.

The problem is not the teachers. California educators show up daily under often difficult conditions to deliver instruction. The failure lies in how we budget and allocate those tens of billions. We treat districts and county offices like middlemen who know best, handing them large block grants under the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) for TK-12 and the Student-Centered Funding Formula (SCFF) for community colleges. Too much then vanishes into administrative overhead, compliance paperwork, endless professional development, and non-core initiatives before reaching the classroom.

Funds frequently support Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) training, sensitivity workshops, equity-focused programs, Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS), anti-bullying initiatives, and other efforts whose impact on core reading and math proficiency is questionable at best. Classroom essentials, competitive teacher salaries and benefits, instructional materials, supplies, and direct learning tools are lower priority today.

This is backward. Imagine planning a family dinner: you wouldn’t hand cash to a grocer and hope the right ingredients reach the cook. You’d ask the person doing the cooking what they need first. California education funding does the opposite. It prioritizes systems over classrooms.

What’s Broken: Top-Down Block Grants

Under LCFF and SCFF, dollars flow first to district and system-level administration, operational costs, categorical mandates, and “nice-to-have” programs. Classroom needs, actual teaching and learning, get the residual. The result is record spending alongside persistent reports of classroom shortages, while bureaucracies expand and non-instructional spending grows.

Demographics, English learners, and poverty play roles, but the data is unmistakably clesr: simply pouring more money into the current top-down structure has not delivered proportional gains in literacy, numeracy, or college readiness. Many students still require heavy remediation once they reach community college or university.

The Solution: Classrooms First Budgeting

We don’t necessarily need ever-higher totals. We need to budget existing dollars differently—starting at the classroom level and building upward. Bottom up budgeting solves these issues.

Require teachers and school sites to submit prioritized needs first: core materials, supplies, technology, and competitive compensation to attract and retain effective educators. Fund direct instruction and teacher pay as priority one. Only then layer in site-level operations, followed by central administration, compliance, and secondary programs as resources permit.

This “Classrooms First” approach flips the current budget process  model. It forces every layer above the classroom to prove it supports actual teaching and learning. The Legislature should amend LCFF and SCFF statutes to mandate classroom-level needs assessments and teacher input before any district or system overhead is allocated. Add transparency requirements, outcome-linked tracking, and stronger performance incentives tied to student results.

Where Is the State Controller?

Education consumes a massive share of California’s budget—tens of billions under Prop 98 alone, yet the state’s chief fiscal officer, Controller Malia Cohen, has been largely missing in action on the core failure: getting money to actual classrooms instead of bureaucracy. The California Constitution grants the Controller sweeping powers as the independent fiscal watchdog: to superintend all state financial concerns, audit claims against public funds, conduct independent reviews of agencies and programs, and oversee disbursements across government.

These are not ceremonial duties. They are substantive tools to expose waste, inefficiency, and misallocation that threaten taxpayers and students. Yet Cohen has treated the office more as form than substance—issuing statements and chairing narrow task forces on charter school fraud while the broader TK-14 system hemorrhages resources into overhead and secondary initiatives with little visible auditing of how Prop 98 and related dollars actually reach classrooms.

She appears to lack basic financial understanding of how top-down block grants, unchecked administrative bloat, and diversion to non-core programs distort priorities and deliver poor returns on one of the state’s largest investments. Across education and every other sector, the Controller could and must do far more: demand detailed, transparent reporting on classroom-versus-overhead spending; perform rigorous, independent performance audits tied to student outcomes; and hold districts and the Department of Education accountable for results rather than inputs.

It is time for Controller Cohen to use her constitutional authority aggressively. Californians deserve to know exactly where their education dollars are going—and why so little seems to improve foundational skills.

California does not lack funding for education. It lacks prioritization. Adopting Classrooms First bottom up budgeting would redirect resources to teachers delivering instruction and students who deserve real results. Until budgets are built from the classroom up rather than trickling down from systems, additional spending will continue to produce disappointing outcomes. It’s past time to put classrooms, teachers, and students ahead of bureaucracy.