Equitable School Facilities

Today’s challenges require our public school facilities to meet new demands:

Ensuring education quality and equity; overturning community and racial injustice; expanding early education; and being a focal point of local infrastructure that supports community health, well-being, and climate resilience in a carbon neutral future.

Why School Facility Infrastructure Matters: Equity & Adequacy

The conditions and qualities of school facility infrastructure matter to children, families, and communities. School facility inequity was a major complaint in the 1954 Brown v Board of Education case and remains a problem in communities across America today. Decades of research confirm that the conditions and qualities of school facilities can positively or negatively impact students, teachers, and overall academic achievement. The facilities are not the most important aspect of school quality, but they are foundational.

And yet, every day, millions of elementary and secondary school children in the U.S. attend public schools with deteriorated and obsolete facilities that undermine achievement, harm health, and are not climate resilient.

Overcoming Policy Challenges

Capital funding for public school facility infrastructure remains the most regressive element of public education finance.

State and local policies, guidelines, and practices for public school facilities remain under-developed and largely disconnected from education equity, health equity, and overall community resilience.

The process of planning, advocating for, and designing school facilities can build social capital and foster the rebuilding of trust with communities undermined by discrimination and neglect.

Given the importance of education, it’s startling how little attention is paid to where the education of our children is carried out: the classrooms where future poets and politicians learn to read and the labs where budding scientists conduct their first experiments, the cafeterias where they eat and the playgrounds where they meet.

Mary Filardo

21st Century School Fund

CC+S’s work aims to remedy inequitable finance structures and link planning and investment decisions in ways that leverage co-benefits across education, health, and climate.

California’s Public PK-12 School Facilities

We have conducted extensive analysis of school facility planning and funding issues in California. In 2012, California redesigned its way of funding K-12 education. The Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) allocates a greater share of aid to local school districts for each of their students who is a member of a disadvantaged group, including those who are English Learners, are unhoused or reside in a foster home, or whose household reports income below the threshold of poverty. The LCFF aims to increase equity by targeting resources for disadvantaged students, especially in districts where socioeconomic disadvantages are most prevalent.

Until California adopts a similar approach to funding its aging school facilities, the promise of educational equity will remain unfulfilled. Equitable funding to modernize school facilities is the great unfinished work of the California’s goal of financial reform.

Learn more:

Blog: Moving to Equity: California School Facility Program Reform (June 2024)
California has an opportunity in 2024 to address the longstanding inequity and inadequacy of school facility funding. Governor Newsom’s administration and the state legislature are in negotiations about a November 2024 bond measure that would raise $14 billion, the first new school infrastructure bond in eight years. Unfortunately, current legislative proposals as currently written would have virtually no impact on the current inequity of funding. In this post we outline some key considerations for a meaningful reform effort and illustrate the distributional impacts of different possible approaches, in hopes that this analysis moves the conversation forward to the benefit of California’s students.

Interactive storymap on equity in California school facility funding, For Equity’s Sake: Fix the School Facility Program

Featured Publications

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Gauging Good Stewardship: Is California Adequately and Equitably Investing in its Public School Facilities?

In this paper, we investigate adequacy and equity of investment in California’s public school facilities. By using a standards-based framework to understand patterns of investment levels, we gauge the likely “good stewardship” of these physical school assets. We look at both “maintenance & operations” (M&O) spending and capital investment by local K-12 public school districts across the state for the years 2009-2019.

Climate-Resilient California Schools: A Call to Action

In February 2023, Stanford Medicine’s Center for Innovation in Global Health, UC Berkeley’s Center for Cities and Schools, UndauntedK12, and Ten Strands released Climate-Resilient California Schools: A Call to Action. The report provides a comprehensive look at climate-driven impacts on California’s children, drawing together research from the pediatric, public health, climate, and education fields. The report was developed with input from a statewide coalition of nearly 50 stakeholders – including doctors, medical and environmental health researchers, educators, youth and community groups.

Education Equity Requires Modern School Facilities

Every day millions of elementary and secondary school children in the U.S. attend public school in deteriorated and obsolete facilities that harm their health and undermine achievement. Why? Because capital funding for public school facility infrastructure remains the most regressive element of public education finance.

Are California Public Schools Scratch-Cooking Ready? A survey of food service directors on the state of school kitchens

To understand the opportunities and challenges to increasing healthy school meals across California, this study investigates the scratch-cooking readiness of the state’s public schools’ kitchens.

Financing School Facilities in California: A 10-year Perspective

This study explains California’s approach to financing public school facilities and examines the level and distribution of state and local school facility funding since 2006, including facility funding for charter schools.

Partners

At CC+S, we collaborate extensively with on-campus and off-campus partners across the public, private, and civic sectors.

National Council on School Facilities

NCSF is a non-profit membership association of state-level public school facility officials. NCSF’s mission is to support states in their varied roles and responsibilities for the delivery of safe, healthy, and educationally appropriate school facilities that are sustainable and fiscally sound. The NCSF was formed in 2012, motivated by potential school capital funds in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (2009), which were stricken during Congressional bill negotiations. State officials realized that Congress needed national comparable data on the nation’s public school facilities to inform the discussion.

Climate Ready Schools Coalition of California // #climatereadyschools

In the spring of 2022, a group of education, climate, health, youth, and labor leaders began collaborating to share policy priorities and develop common state policy and budget asks in support of #climatereadyschools for California’s most vulnerable students. Since the initial working group meetings, the Coalition has grown from a handful of organizations to 30 diverse groups representing various perspectives on education and climate policy.