Learning from the Districts That Succeed: A Real Path for the Advancement of Low-Income Students in K-12 Education

In 2013, the California legislature approved the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) as a new way to fund local school districts. The new formula aimed to increase educational equity for low-income, English learners, homeless and foster youth students. The policy established a way to increase funding for school districts with higher percentages of students from the aforementioned categories. As a part of the policy, school districts would now be required to create a Local Control and Accountability Plan (LCAP) that outlines their plans to meet the needs of their students.This study identified the 10 most successful and the ten least successful school districts during the first five years of implementation of the LCFF from a group of 68 demographically similar unified school districts in California. Success was defined in terms of both the performance and the change of the performance gap for low-income students in the areas measured by the state and tracked on the California School Dashboard. The study then looked for ways to help explain the varying levels of success for the school districts. The study found that the input correlates with the strongest positive relationship to the performance of low-income students were the average salary of teachers and the percentage of low-income students in the school district. Next, the research analyzed the LCAPs of the 68 school districts from 2015 to understand their planned actions prior to their success. The school districts who ranked in the top 10 wrote significantly more actions in their LCAPs and more in particular categories than the bottom 10 school districts. In particular, the top 10 school districts focused more of their actions in the areas of teacher learning and student learning. The document analysis from this research provides examples of the planned actions of school districts who increased the overall performance of their low-income student population. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]