(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)

I thought that DC public schools were burning through a mountain of cash because they spent enough to send two students to the University of Texas at Austin. Amateurs! Mere amateurs!

Lo and behold, Vicki Murray of the Pacific Research Institute sent me the following, which finds that there are school districts in California spending over $200,000 per student. Take it away Vicki:

More Money, Lower Achievement
How Californians can get the real story on California education finance.

By Vicki E. Murray

California’s budget deficit is getting worse, fueling fears about the impact on school funding. Fortunately, California taxpayers and policy makers now have the just-released California School Finance Center online database to help make informed decisions about education policies that affect six million students, the country’s largest share of public school children, six million in all.

Last year when California ranked 48th on Education Week’s national ranking of school funding, California Teachers Association president David A. Sanchez warned that the state would be “locked at the bottom nationwide.” Trouble is, five other states also claimed to be 48th in school funding last year: Florida, Illinois, Nebraska, Nevada, and Oklahoma.

The CTA, along with State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell, now say that California “sank” to “a dismal” 47th place on this year’s Education Week ranking. Meanwhile, the CTA’s own parent organization, the National Education Association, ranks California much higher, around the middle of the pack, a statistic prominently posted on the website of O’Connell’s own education department. With so many competing claims, no wonder Californians are confused—including, it seems, some of the very people running the state’s public schooling system.

What really matters to most Californians isn’t how much other states are spending; it’s the money and the results their children’s schools are getting—or not getting. That is why the California School Finance Center database compiles information from a dozen California Department of Education sources and puts it right at users’ fingertips. It presents total and per-student revenue for more than 1,300 California school districts and charter schools spanning five years.

Unlike other resources, the California School Finance Center database presents complete revenue from local, state, and federal sources, all broken down into the finest level of detail currently available. The database also presents student achievement, demographic, census, and staff salary data. It even includes a “Return on Investment” feature developed by Just for the Kids-California to help quantify the relationship between a school district or charter school’s revenue, and its ability to increase student achievement.

For the 2006-07 school year per-pupil revenue averaged $11,600 per student, but Californians will probably be shocked by the staggering sums many school districts are receiving—sums that could even make “more money than God” districts, as education secretary Arne Duncan recently put it, like Washington, D.C, blush.

Dozens of California school districts exceed D.C.’s $26,555 per-student funding. Mattole Unified in Petrolia, for example, gets more than $225,000 per student. Less than one percent of its students are English learners, but only 43 percent score proficient in English language arts on the California Standards Test.

California finance experts will object to this example. Mattole’s small size qualifies it for substantial additional state funding through the state’s necessary small-schools allowance, which is supposed to help such districts achieve economies-of-scale parity with regular school districts. This funding, the reasoning goes, shouldn’t count. But consider the Ocean Grove Charter School in Placerville, which receives less than $2,500 per student. With proportionally four times more English learners than Mattole, as well as more low-income students, this charter school manages a 56-percent proficiency rate in English.

Mineral Elementary, another small-schools allowance district in Tehama County, receives even more funding than Mattole, $243,000 per student. Yet with no English learners, just 48 percent of Mineral Elementary students achieve English proficiency. Compare that performance with Hydesville Elementary in Humboldt County. English learners represent less than one percent of enrollment, but with just under $9,000 per student, a full 73 percent of Hydesville Elementary students score proficient in English.

Such examples defy the conventional wisdom that more money means better achievement, but so do most California school districts. The number of regular school districts where a majority of students is not proficient outnumbers the school districts where a majority of students is proficient by about three to one.  In fact, average student proficiency rates in English language arts and math at the state’s bottom 20 revenue districts averaging $8,900 per student are actually higher than proficiency rates at the top 20 revenue districts averaging more than $19,200 per student. Yet superintendent O’Connell and the CTA think more money for more of the same will improve California public school performance.

“What I am asking for is greater investment at a time when the state is virtually broke,” O’Connell explained in his State of Education Address earlier this year. “We must expect a different commitment from the citizens of California.”

Most reasonable people would agree that average funding worth nearly $12,000 per pupil ought to be enough to teach native-speaking elementary and secondary school children English. The Golden State fails to manage that, at $12,000 or $200,000 per student. Instead of an increasingly expensive bill for such foundering, the California schools chief should demand a commitment from the public schooling system that is truly “different.”

In good economic times and bad California schools should make the most of every education dollar. Some school districts and charter schools are doing a much better job of that than others. The California School Finance Center database makes it easier to identify them and replicate their success.

UPDATE: I made a bigger deal about the $243,000 figure than the PRI folks did, and mea culpa, I should have suspected that they were some sort of strange outlier.