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A formula used to decide how funds for each individual school district will be used that requires stakeholder input in order to be decided upon.

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A formula used to decide how funds for each individual school district will be used that requires stakeholder input in order to be decided upon.

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Redesigned the funding formulas and flow of monies to schools from the state. Created 3 categories of students that would get sup & conc funding. Asked for community input

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LCAP is the Local Control Accountability Formula and the LCFF is the Local Control Funding Formula. These were instituted to ensure that communities have a voice in how the money is used in their school district. 

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LCAP is the Local Control Accountability Formula and the LCFF is the Local Control Funding Formula. These were instituted to ensure that communities have a voice in how the money is used in their school district. 

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Local Control Fund?

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Lcap
How the school uses the $ to support unduplicated students

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Local Control Accountability Plan (LCAP)
LCFF (Local Control Funding Formula)

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LCFF is the new funding formula for California to decide how much money each school district receives. 

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LCFF is the new funding formula for California to decide how much money each school district receives. 

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LCAP is the plan the school uses to plan their budget according to the 4 identified priority.

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Local Control A

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LCAP is the local plan to use the funds to ensure educational access and success to underserved students.

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LCAP is the local plan to use the funds to ensure educational access and success to underserved students.

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The Local Control Funding Formula is the funding formula based on the Local Control Accountability Plan. It ties funding to services, specifically targeting underserved populations. It replaces both based funding and categorical funding.

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LCFF is the formula used for California to decide how much money school districts are getting.
LCAP is the budget that schools have in place to spend the money that they get from the district.

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LCFF is the new funding formula that CA uses to fund school districts.  LCAP is a plan that LEA develop with stakeholders reviewing data and school goals to support unduplicated students in the 8 state priorities.

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LCFF is the funding formula CA is using to try to fund schools in an equitable manner

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LCFF is the funding formula CA is using to try to fund schools in an equitable manner

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Lcff $ that the district gets for unduplicated students.

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Lcff $ that the district gets for unduplicated students.

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Ryan Smith, president of Education Trust-West, introduces data from Local Control Accountability Plans at Los Angeles "road show" meeting.
Parents in California have gone to the political gym. They're building their muscles and flexing them. Powered by the protein of the state's Local Control Funding Formula and its companion accountability system, they are altering the playing field of politics. They are not just changing who gets what, but also altering how education politics works.

This is perhaps best illustrated with a story.

Last month, I observed what Education Trust West calls its "road show" in Los Angeles, reporting on its research findings from the first year of the Local Control Accountability Process. It has held these meetings around the state.

I sat with a group of parent advocates and was surprised and delighted with the speed with which they were able to drill down to core issues. In what was called the "equity walk" EdTrustWest staff displayed data on English Learners, who make up 30 percent of the students in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Easels holding bar charts had been set up around the room, and participants were asked to give their general reactions, their thoughts about where the district priorities should be, and to ask "what pieces of information are missing."

The folks at my table weren't happy, and not just because English Learners do more poorly in school. The essential data were missing. Nothing was said about the students who had been in the English Learner category for a long time. "If they don't get out, they don't do good," one said. "We need to focus attention there."

The EdTrustWest case study of LAUSD illustrates how the parental muscle flexing takes place. Under the new finance formula, the district received $837-million in supplementary funds. There was no shortage of ideas about how to spend it.

Teachers and, to a certain extent, the district wanted to build back what had been lost in the recession. Many districts followed this course. There had been no general raises for seven years. Positions had been slashed, and class sizes had risen during the recession.

A coalition of 50 community organizations pushed back. They were not necessarily against raises and smaller classes, but they wanted to make sure that funds were spent on the LCFF priority groups: low income students, foster youth, and English Learners.

Not only did they get organized around "what we want;" they brought powerful data to bear on the issue. Led by the Advancement Project, a number of civil rights organizations created a Student Need Index to prioritize school funding. Using geo-mapping tools from Esri, they located the schools of highest need. As a short case study illustrates, the parents got a good hunk of what they sought.

Parent organizing around the budget process initiated by California's Local Control Funding Formula is still very much a work in process. A lot of it is not pretty, seamless, or without self-interest. But then neither is anything political.

It is clear that parents can, and do, get organized. They get organized faster and more forcefully in urban school districts, where there is a history of preexisting community organizations, than in the quiet suburbs. This continues to make urban school politics more rough-and-tumble and give school administrators in suburban and rural areas more unquestioned decisions. Thus, encouraging and inciting parent voice in quiet places is as much an issue as making parent voice productive in the cities.

It's also clear that working class parents can learn how to be insightful budget advocates. During the first year of the LCFF process, Families in Schools -a non-profit founded as part of the last great wave of school reform in Los Angeles-has trained more than 140 parent leaders in 10 school districts. Some of them, such as San Bernardino City Unified, have invested heavily in Parent Universities with the goal of having a parent center in every school.

As FIS president Oscar Cruz noted at the meeting, parent education is important because the goal has changed from distributing categorical funds to understanding how the whole school budget can be aligned to better support student learning. And this needs to be anchored in data. "It's no longer, 'what you want,'' he explained.

The increase in parent voice changes local politics. These parents were not talking about starting charter schools or taking their local schools into charter status. They were advocating for changing public budgets so their children got a better deal.

Some parent advocates, and some who have supported parent voice financially, see organized parents as an oppositional voice to teacher unions. But in practice, parent voice appears more complicated than drawing a line with community on one side and organized teachers on the other.

The experience of the last year shows a merging of interests on some issues and a divergence on others and the opening of the Local Control Accountability Plan process as a functional extension of both budgeting politics and collective bargaining.
Top: One of the posted notes calling attention to foster youth, a group of students that were largely invisible until they were included in the supplemental funding allocations under LCFF. Bottom: Oscar Cruz, president of Families in Schools, talks with participants about lessons from parent training. Photos: CTK

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'Parent Power' Getting More Powerful and Organized

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Ryan Smith, president of Education Trust-West, introduces data from Local Control Accountability Plans at Los Angeles "road show" meeting. Parents in California have gone to the political gym. They're building their muscles and flexing them. Powered by the protein of the state's Local Control Funding Formula and its companion accountability system, they are altering the playing field of politics.

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Credit: Jane Meredith Adams/EdSource Today

Nine mothers from Burma flipped open manila file folders in Room 210 in Oakland's Garfield Elementary School and looked at information that was as foreign as it was compelling - a chart comparing their child's progress in reading to that of their unidentified classmates and grade-level standards.

The data appeared in the universal language of bar graphs and the mothers, who are Karen-speaking refugees with little formal education, each saw at a glance how far her child has come and how much more there is to be to learned before the end of the school year.

It is the kind of real-time comparative data that most teachers don't reveal to families, and it is the core of an approach called Academic Parent-Teacher Teams, which is taught by the San Francisco-based research group WestEd. In addition to Garfield Elementary, the program is operating at schools in the Sacramento, Stockton and San Juan Unified districts and 300 schools nationwide. The idea is to share ongoing math and reading scores in a way that emphasizes progress, doesn't embarrass families and creates a parent-school relationship that is based on the obvious but often overlooked common ground of how a child is doing in class.

In the national drive to lift student achievement by teaching parents how to help their children learn, some say thoughtful data-sharing should be at the core of a family-school partnership - and that across all languages and cultures, nothing communicates the pressing need for academic intervention like a big gap on a graph.

"It's our intention for people to feel a little fire," said Leslie McLean, a literacy coach at Garfield Elementary, where 57 percent of K-5 students are English learners. She cited research linking the inability to read at grade-level in 3rd grade with a fourfold increase in the odds of dropping out of school, although she acknowledged that progress for English learners understandably could take longer. Still, she said, "A lot of parents know their kids are reading, but they don't know what grade-level reading is. This is urgent."

Academic Parent-Teacher Teams, which are included as a strategy in the U.S. Department of Education's framework for family-school partnerships, flips the idea that two 15-minute parent-teacher conferences a year and a "Back-to-School" information night - the norm in many schools - is the best way to involve families in their child's academic life.

Instead, parent-teacher conferences are supplemented with group meetings twice a year, where parents learn from the teacher and each other what skills in math and reading are being taught, how their child's achievement compares to others in class and specific ways to help at home, such as establishing a routine where a student works on the Spatial-Temporal Math computer game when a parent is cooking dinner. Team meetings typically consist of teachers from a classroom or grade level getting together with the parents of their students. If parents speak a language that is relatively uncommon, such as Karen, schools will group parents by language and use a translator.

"I cannot read," said Paw Lay Loe, parent of three children at Garfield Elementary. "I cannot help them. But I can encourage them to read every day."

Families that spend time reading to their children, reviewing homework and talking about ideas tend to raise students who are successful at school, according to decades of research. Yet in California, home to the largest immigrant population in the country and the second-largest concentration of refugees from war-torn countries, many families have the desire but not the background to support their children, experts say.

Families and individuals fleeing Burma were the largest group of refugees entering the U.S. in 2015, federal statistics show, and in Oakland, "we found there was a large number of parents where both mom and dad were illiterate and didn't have the exposure to education," said Laura Vaudreuil, executive director of Refugee Transitions, a nonprofit organization. Their desire to have their children succeed in school is "powerful," she said.

The push for parent involvement in education is under scrutiny in California, where schools are two years into creating Local Control and Accountability Plans, an annual accountability system that requires them to work with parents to create budgets, show parents how much they are spending on family outreach and then survey parents about how that outreach is going. As of 2013, parent involvement is one of eight state educational priorities, and according to studies, districts are working to get families involved in decision-making.

But while weighing in on school budgets is important, said Heather Weiss, founder of the Harvard Family Research Project at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, parents need information they can use - details about what their child is supposed to be learning, whether that learning is on track and what specifically they can do to help at home.

Kristin Ehrgood, president of the Flamboyan Foundation, which supports Academic Parent-Teacher Teams in 27 schools in the District of Columbia, echoed that thought. "It is not bake sales, it is not coming to see the school play and it is not coming to field day," Ehrgood said. "This type of family engagement is about a partnership between teachers and families so we are really igniting that child's learning."

Weiss cautioned, though, that if not well presented, the method "has the potential to cause harm" by leaving parents dejected about their child's relative lack of progress. To fend off incipient parental despair, the spirit of the meetings, she said, should be rooted in ideas expounded upon in the book "Mindset" by Stanford researcher Carol Dweck, which presents an expansive understanding of intelligence as a trait that can be developed through learning, not that students are either "smart" or "dumb" from birth onward.

On a recent morning in the parent meeting room at Garfield Elementary, the mothers from Burma - whose educational experience in their farming villages ranged from never having attended school to attending through 6th grade - stood in a circle as McLean, speaking through a translator, began a warm-up activity. She asked the women, whose children ranged from kindergartners through 5th-graders, to step forward if a statement were true. "I like to make tea leaf salad." Everyone stepped forward. "My child likes to read." No one moved.

McLean responded with empathy, acknowledging that learning to read takes a lot of effort and that learning English at the same time "takes even more effort."

But she stayed on message. Sitting with the mothers around a table, she said that their children need to be reading at home, for as much as two hours a day, if they are going to catch up to their English-speaking classmates. Like any parents of a reluctant reader, the mothers seemed none too thrilled by the prospect.

McLean offered suggestions about how to nudge this along. "You can talk to your child, in your language, about their books," she said. "You can say 'Who or what is the story about? Teach me what you learned.'"

The women spoke among themselves. Translator Hsar Htoo reported, "They say their children read at school."

Related

Report: State must adopt guidelines for parent engagement in schools

McLean nodded, but continued on. "They might be reading this," she said, holding up a slim picture book. "But they could be reading this," she said, hefting a thick paperback volume. "This is a 5th- or 6th-grade book."

She added, "I personally believe that reading is a key to freedom."

The Academic Parent-Teacher Teams approach was created in 2008 by Maria Paredes, who was then a school-parent participation coordinator and doctoral candidate in Creighton, Arizona. Paredes, who is now a senior program associate at WestEd, said the idea of focusing parent engagement on academics came to her after listening to the frustration of parents in the Creighton School District.

"We were spending a lot of time and effort in areas that did not give parents tools to really help their children be successful students," she said. "Their children were falling behind and parents didn't understand why they weren't given specific support strategies."

The group meetings have five parts: team building, introducing grade-level skills, data discussion, teacher modeling of activities to use at home, and parents practicing an activity with each other.

The approach has not been rigorously tested, but initial results have been positive. A study of 1st-graders in the Creighton schools found that in classrooms where the Academic Parent-Teacher Team approach was used, the students' average reading fluency scores of 16 words per minute in September 2009 jumped to 45 words per minute in November 2009, according to a National Education Association brief. In contrast, students in classrooms that did not use the team model increased their fluency rates to only 27 words per minute read correctly.

Later, the mothers from Garfield Elementary gathered at the home of translator and fellow parent Htoo, sitting side by side on two sofas as a baby nursed and a boy and a girl too young for school roamed the room. The mothers all had fled the Karen state in southeast Burma, spent a decade or more in refugee camps in Thailand, and eventually traveled 7,614 miles, give or take a few hundred miles, to get to Oakland. Why had they come?

"The Burmese soldiers came and burned the house and two churches and everything they saw," said Paw Lay Loe, whose children are in 1st, 4th and 5th grades. "We didn't have anything. That's why we came."

To a person, they said they wanted their children to graduate from college. Cha Say Wa, who has five children, said she'd never been to school. "We have to buy education in Burma," she said. "But here it is free."

When asked what they did for fun, no one spoke. One mother said she enjoyed going on her child's field trip to San Francisco. Others said they'd like to take a trip outside of Oakland to see trees, hills and open fields.

They said the academic team meetings at Garfield were helpful and that the teachers were friendly. "My kids are doing great," said Paw Hae, a parent of children in 1st, 3rd and 11th grade. "We have a report card meeting and the teacher told me that my kid is at grade level."

"I cannot read," Loe said. "I cannot help them. But I can encourage them to read every day."

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To reach parents, schools try universal language of data

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Credit: Jane Meredith Adams/EdSource Today Nine mothers from Burma flipped open manila file folders in Room 210 in Oakland's Garfield Elementary School and looked at information that was as foreign as it was compelling - a chart comparing their child's progress in reading to that of their unidentified classmates and grade-level standards.

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What is the role of parents/caregivers in the LCAP?

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What is the role of parents/caregivers in the LCAP?

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GET TO KNOW THE EIGHT LCAP AREAS

Your school district's LCAP must focus on eight priority areas that help all students succeed. These eight priority areas reflect PTA's belief that many factors - both inside and outside the classroom - positively impact student success:

Basic Services - Providing all students with access to fully credentialed teachers in their subject areas, as well as instructional materials that align with state standards, and safe, properly maintained school facilities.

Implementation of State Standards - Ensuring school programs and services enable all students, including English learners, to access California's academic content and performance standards, including Common Core Standards for English Language Arts and Math, Next Generation Science Standards, and English Language Development Standards.

Course Access - Ensuring all students have access to a broad course of study in all required subject areas, including math, social science, science, visual and performing arts, health, physical education, career and technical education and others, that prepares them for college and careers, regardless of what school they attend or where they live.

Student Achievement - Improving achievement and outcomes for all students, as measured in multiple ways, such as test scores, English proficiency and college and career preparedness.

Other Student Outcomes - Measuring other important indicators of student performance in all required areas of study.

Student Engagement - Providing students with engaging programs and course work that keeps them in school, as measured in part by attendance rates, dropout rates and graduation rates.

Parent Involvement - Efforts by the school district and schools to seek input from all parents, and to engage parents in decision-making, as well as promoting parent participation in programs that meet the needs of their students and all students. (See the PTA National Standards for Family-School Partnerships Assessment Guide for suggested ways to measure progress.)

School Climate - Factors both inside and outside the classroom that impact student success such as health, safety, student discipline and school connectedness, as measured in part by suspension and expulsion rates, and surveys of students, teachers and parents.

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Your school district's LCAP must focus on eight priority areas that help all students succeed. These eight priority areas reflect PTA's belief that many factors - both inside and outside the classroom - positively impact student success: Basic Services - Providing all students with access to fully credentialed teachers in their subject areas, as well as instructional materials that align with state standards, and safe, properly maintained school facilities.

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Focus Areas
IT'S A TIME OF OPPORTUNITY FOR PARENTS

The Local Control Funding Formula is a huge opportunity for parents to shape the vision for your children's education and make it happen! As California's school funding law, the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) is a way for schools to focus on student success. The LCFF requires school districts to involve parents in planning and decision-making as well as in developing Local Control and Accountability Plans (LCAPs).

The Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) also:

Requires your school district to focus on the eight key areas that help all students succeed

Provides extra funding for students with greater challenges

Gives your district more flexibility for how to spend its money to improve local schools.

Take a look at the video from the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence to learn more about the vision behind California's commitment to local control.

KNOW THE BASICS - GET THE FACTS
LCFF-LCAP Overview: Your Voice matters
California State PTA offers a variety of resources to share with parents, teachers and your school community. Download and share these resources (available in multiple languages).

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES - FLIERS, PRESENTATIONS & MORE

You'll find a wealth of information from California State PTA and other sources on the Resources page.

In addition, past PTA presentations provide valuable background.

Understanding the Local Control Funding Formula

A video from the California Collaborative for Educational Excellene
WATCH

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Focus Areas The Local Control Funding Formula is a huge opportunity for parents to shape the vision for your children's education and make it happen! As California's school funding law, the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) is a way for schools to focus on student success.