To: The California State House, The California State Senate, and Governor Gavin Newsom
Restore California Schools to Excellence!
Thank you for our new school funding formula and for increasing funding for early childhood education. Our schools are still bringing up the rear.
Please Tackle Equity in Education! Our state needs an educated workforce, and every child deserves a great education. We support education legislation and ballot measures to fully fund and restore our schools in the following ways:
1. Increased, fair, long-term education funding from stable sources, including restoring commercial property taxes, empowering local communities to tax themselves by a 55% threshold vote, and extending the sales tax to luxury services.
2. Spend Education funds in proven effective ways for restoring schools to greatness, including universal preschool, increasing the base grant per child, and funding our once great three-tier higher education system to rebuild and keep pace with our growing population.
Please Tackle Equity in Education! Our state needs an educated workforce, and every child deserves a great education. We support education legislation and ballot measures to fully fund and restore our schools in the following ways:
1. Increased, fair, long-term education funding from stable sources, including restoring commercial property taxes, empowering local communities to tax themselves by a 55% threshold vote, and extending the sales tax to luxury services.
2. Spend Education funds in proven effective ways for restoring schools to greatness, including universal preschool, increasing the base grant per child, and funding our once great three-tier higher education system to rebuild and keep pace with our growing population.
Why is this important?
In spite of recent improvements, including the new school funding formula and increased funding for early childhood education, which represent a tremendous step forward, we've dropped to 50th in per-student funding (cost of living adjusted) and our underfunded schools remain at the bottom in academic outcomes/performance. The upcoming session represents an opportunity for our legislators to take the next step.