“We Can’t Wait” for Functional School Districts

Teachers’ unions have squeezed education budgets across California without academic gains to compensate. Many California school districts face precarious financial circumstances especially the state revenue boom from AI slows down.

Recently, the state’s largest school district, Los Angeles Unified, faced a budget crisis after their local union pressured the district to accept a costly labor contract. The 32 school districts involved in the California Teachers Association’s “We Can’t Wait” campaign had student enrollment fall much faster than non-participating school districts. Combined with statewide declines in enrollment and districts being funded on a per-pupil basis,districts with higher union activism are structurally more likely to face budget deficits.

We created a model that ranks most of California’s school districts based on how much their CAASSP test scores over- or underperform their demographics. This model is only based on objective economic and demographic data. Through this model, we see that many of the worst performing school districts are those recovering from a budget crisis or have just entered one. The best performing districts in our dataset are those that have sound budgets for sustained periods. These same high performers do not waste political capital on increasing employee pension sizes but instead focus on accountability measures. Top performers like Compton Unified and Garden Grove Unified drastically improved their test score results by having schools assign frequent practice exams and requiring each school in the district to have accountability measures. The full table of ranked school districts can be found here.

You can also view and compare district rankings in our dashboard at the bottom of this post.

After we created our ranking, we tested whether districts that were part of the We Can’t Wait Campaign were higher ranked. The districts that were part of the WCW campaign were unlikely to be top performers and were overrepresented in the “Moderate Underperformer” tier. While WCW status does not necessarily cause poor performance, it is alarming that poorly performing districts adopt intense union activism with only budget shortfalls to show for it.

We also tried to find a correlation between WCW status and the California Department of Education’s fiscal certification status. A ‘qualified’ or ‘negative’ status is assigned when a district may not or will not meet financial obligations. The California Department of Education has flagged 18.8% of the WCW districts as financially distressed while only 7.7% of non-WCW districts were flagged as financially distressed. Among the school districts that were distressed, the WCW districts on average remained distressed for twice as long compared to non-WCW districts.

The current California data platform, the California School Dashboard, has a poor visual interface which makes it hard for parents and education officials to judge which schools are performing well. When parents don’t understand which districts are doing well, it is easy for teachers unions’ to distract from the underlying goal of schools: teaching students subjects like English and math. The California School Dashboard should be redesigned to make it easier for parents to understand their district’s academic performance. With a better dashboard, households can more readily advocate to fix weak points in their districts, rather than getting drowned out by interest groups. Our model gives key performance metrics and a methodology the state can use to improve their dashboard.

Teachers who wish to prioritize educational excellence over union activism should consider leaving their unions. They can learn more about doing that by visiting CPC’s Janus Project website.