Funding and staffing the classroom: Insight from three years of comparative data on teacher and revenue utilization at 547 public school districts in California

Some public school district managers have difficulty putting resources into the classroom, although revenues that have grown faster than inflation for several years. Reports of teachers buying their own supplies and classrooms with insufficient textbooks obscure the fact that average class size is now 20 percent higher than pupil-teacher ratios statewide in California (this study produced this calculation from the difference between average class size and pupil-teacher ratio at 547 school districts in the state). This means that 20 percent of teachers, up to 30 percent in larger districts, are out of the regular classroom assignment. This study tracks this variable, percent of teachers outside regular classrooms, plus nine other variables, such a teachers salary as a percent of total revenue, at 217 elementary, 64 high school and 266 unified school districts managing 97.6 percent of total state pupil enrollment over a three year period. The purpose of the study is to determine where the money goes that does not reach the classroom, to describe how teachers are utilized, to identify what allows some districts to manage resources more efficiently than others and to red-flag problem districts. Reasons for shorting the classroom include complications of funding and bureaucratic supply problems including high instructional support costs. Districts that reduce average class size use revenue: (1) for instructional, not non-instructional, purposes; (2) to hire new teachers, not increase salaries of existing teachers and (3) to assign teachers to regular classes, not specialist functions. Management in public schools has lost some of its past discretion to make the decisions that lower class size due to an institutional environment that is political, regulatory and union-influenced.