"California allocates educational funding on a per-student basis through the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), which provides a base grant per K-12 student and additional grants for English learners, students from low-income families, and foster youth.
Your original point was that this funding should be equal, but that would reduce funding to poorer schools who benefit from the various special additional funding grants. For example, Altadena spends $4000 more per student than my upper middle class beach community.
Under the state program, the state provided $23,519 per student in funding. So, quite a bit higher than what you indicated and even more for students that qualify.
Your "half of that" number is not apples to apples. The $30K number matches with the Beverly Hills budget, not the state funding levels from property taxes.
And the state funding number is almost 50% higher than the number you suggested, your number comes from 2019, and your Beverly Hills number is the 2024 budget number, not the state funding number.
The unequal budget amounts between affluent school systems and poorer school systems are a function of donations and special sales taxes levied by local government entities.
I know my town and Beverly Hills both have foundations attempting to create an endowment to make up the shortfall from state funding which is constrained by the amount of property taxes the state can raise (in many states property taxes are based on budgets spread over assessed values, in California property taxes are fixed based on Prop 13.
In spite of California having some of the highest taxes in the state, it does not translate into even average funding per student. And Altadena gets nearly $4,000 more per student than my affluent "beach town".
Bottomline, the problem is not how property taxes are being allocated, but rather that the state underfunds education and chooses to spend the money on things like "light rail" green energy projects between LA and LV. We waste a lot of money in this state that is better spent on the state's most important constitutional obligation (state constitution), to educate our children.
