California Education Funding Ranking Plummets

The Napa Valley Register (9/24) reports that according to a report on school funding from the California Budget Project, "California - once ranked first in the nation for education spending - is now among the lowest in the country in terms of per-student K-12 funding." The state "would need to increase education funding by 32.1 percent" to be in line with the national average. The paper quotes the report saying, "After a decade of disinvestment, the gap between resources available to California schools and the rest of the US has widened substantially. California's schools spend fewer dollars per student and have substantially more students per school staff than schools in other states."