[JustTheNews] At a statewide level, “ghost” student funding accounted for 6.2% of total state formula aid to school districts.
As state enrollment continues to decline due to outmigration, falling birthrates, and parents choosing to pull their children out of public school, the number of “ghost” students could continue to rise.
Funding guarantees and enrollment decline stabilization measures mean California is paying for 400,974 "ghost" students who don't exist, costing the state $4.06 billion in the 2022-2023 school year, according to a report from the libertarian Reason Foundation.
Study authors Aaron Garth Smith and Christian Barnard examined the cost of so-called “hold harmless” policies that provide funding protections for public schools in the face of declining enrollment. The two main policies used are declining enrollment protections, which allow schools to use prior, higher enrollment numbers to determine funding, and funding guarantees, which provide schools with a minimum level of state financial support regardless of enrollment. Notably, California’s charter schools, which are public schools, do not qualify for “hold harmless” funding.
Eighty-five percent of school districts received some form of “hold harmless” funding. Of the 148 schools that received minimum state aid funding, 111 were “property-wealthy districts that didn’t otherwise qualify for state formula aid.”
California’s enrollment-based funding policy allows the use of the greater of the current year’s average daily attendance, the last year’s, or the average of the three most recent years (not including the current year). “Ghost” students are the difference between the number of actual students, and the number the school district used for funding. Los Angeles Unified School District, the largest in the state, had an estimated 50,417 “ghost” students directing $507.74 million from state funds to the district. Of the over 1,400 California public schools with enrollment declines of 20% or more since the pandemic, 125 of them are in Los Angeles Unified.
At a statewide level, “ghost” student funding accounted for 6.2% of total state formula aid to school districts. Given finite state resources, funding “ghost” students impacts funding for real students.
“California’s hold harmless policies untether the relationship between K-12 funding and students,” said Smith to The Center Square. “The state’s fiscal outlook is bleak, and policymakers should consider ways to allocate public school funding more strategically. Eliminating ghost students and the state’s [minimum state aid] provision would be a good step in this direction.”
California public school enrollment declined 325,311 between the 2019-2020 and 2023-2024 school years, even after creating a whole new grade — transitional kindergarten — to boost attendance figures and funding.
California plans on spending approximately $23,940 per TK-14 student for the coming fiscal year. Should enrollment declines continue as one-in-four Californians are projected to be 60 or older by 2030, the state may someday have no choice but to shift education funding towards elder care.
An authoritarian dad, boss, or government says: my way or the highway. They are forever barking orders and see compliance as the answer to all human problems. There is no room for uncertainty, adaptation to time and place, or negotiation. It’s ruling by personal dictate while tolerating no dissent.
To be authoritarian is to be inhumane, to rule with arbitrary and capricious imposition. It can also mean to be ruled impersonally by a machine regardless of the cost.
Sounds like a conventional government bureaucracy, right? Indeed. Think of the Department of Motor Vehicles. Think of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy which are right now issuing edicts that will end in the ability of your washing machine to clean your clothes and your car to go the distance.
They have been doing this to us for many decades, with or without the permission of Congress or the president. The agencies have become literally out of control in the sense that no one can control them.
Any society managed by a large and intrusive bureaucratic machinery is necessarily authoritarian. A government that is not authoritarian is necessarily limited in size, scope, and range of power.
Let’s say you have a political leader who has routinely called for less in the way of authoritarian rule by bureaucracies. He intends to use whatever power he has to curb the autonomous rule by administrative bureaucracies and subject them more to the wishes of the people, who should ideally be in charge of the regime under which they live.
Such a leader would not be called an authoritarian. He would be called the opposite, an emancipator who is trying to dismantle authoritarian structures.
If all of the above makes sense to you, try to make sense of this news story in the New York Times. It’s about the growing efforts on the part of many activists to resist a second term of Donald Trump.
In passing, the story says: “If Mr. Trump returns to power, he is openly planning to impose radical changes — many with authoritarian overtones” including “making it easier to fire civil servants.”
The story quickly adds that he intends to replace the fired employees with “loyalists.” Maybe. But consider the alternative. The president is supposed to be ostensibly in charge of 2 million plus bureaucrats that are employed by 400-plus agencies in the executive branch — but they don’t actually have to carry out the policies of the elected president. They can in fact completely ignore him.
How is this compatible with either democracy or freedom? It is not. There is nothing in the Constitution about a vast army of bureaucrats who rule behind the scenes that is in no way reachable or manageable by elected representatives.
The attempt to pull back, rein in, and otherwise do something about this problem is not authoritarian. It is the opposite. Even if “loyalists” replaced the fired employees, that would be an improvement over a system of government in which the people truly have no control at all.
Two years into Trump’s first term, the administration came to figure out that this was a problem. The administration intended some dramatic turns in policy in a number of areas. All they experienced was dogged resistance from people who believed they and not the elected president were in charge. Over the next two years, they undertook many efforts to at least solve this problem: namely, the president should be in charge of the government that falls under his jurisdiction.
This only makes sense. Imagine you are the CEO of a company. You discover that the main divisions that actually run the company care nothing about what you say and cannot be fired even if you demand it, and yet you are personally held responsible for everything these divisions do. What are you going to do?
It is not “authoritarian” to unseat or otherwise attempt to gain control over that for which you are held responsible, professionally or politically. That is truly all that the Trump people are suggesting. This is nothing other than a Constitutional system: we are supposed to have a government by and for the people. That means that the people elect the administrator of the executive branch. At a minimum, the winner of the election needs to be able to have some influence over what the agencies in the executive branch do.
[Field Ethos] We live in a time where words once set aside to describe those who accomplish great deeds are being used up like they have an expiration date. Where any man willing to throw on a dress, paint his face as gaudy as a baboon’s ass, and step out in public armed with a list of acceptable pronouns is hailed as a hero for his bravery. There was a time, not so long ago actually, where superlatives were reserved for individuals willing to grab cold hard steel and enter the arena in service of his fellow man, regardless of the risk to life or limb.
One such individual who embodied the spirit those words were meant to impart recently passed, leaving behind a lasting legacy in the Ranger community. He lived by an ethos and creed few are willing to follow and even fewer able to uphold. He was a legend in a community of men that can call themselves warriors without equivocation. His name was Colonel Ralph Puckett Jr.
Puckett first answered the call to arms in 1943, enlisting in the U.S. Army Air Corps Enlisted Reserve to become a pilot and kill Nazis in Europe. His plan would not come to fruition, though, due to the program being terminated. Not a man to let bureaucracy stand between him and a good fight, he went on to graduate from West Point in 1949.
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[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] The Supreme Court decided on Friday that cities can enforce bans on homeless people sleeping outdoors, even in West Coast areas where shelter space is lacking. Any nearby vacant office buildings?
The case is the most significant to come before the high court in decades on the issue and comes as a rising number of people in the US are without a permanent place to live.
In a 6-3 decision along ideological lines, the high court reversed a ruling by a San Francisco-based appeals court that found outdoor sleeping bans amount to cruel and unusual punishment.
The majority found that the 8th Amendment prohibition does not extend to bans on outdoor sleeping bans.
'Homelessness is complex. Its causes are many. So may be the public policy responses required to address it,' Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the majority.
'A handful of federal judges cannot begin to ‘match’ the collective wisdom the American people possess in deciding "how best to handle" a pressing social question like homelessness.'
He suggested that people who have no choice but to sleep outdoors could raise that as a 'necessity defense,' if they are ticketed or otherwise punished for violating a camping ban.
A bipartisan group of leaders had argued the ruling against the bans made it harder to manage outdoor encampments encroaching on sidewalks and other public spaces in nine Western states. That includes California, which is home to one-third of the country’s homeless population.
'Cities across the West report that the 9th Circuit’s involuntary test has crated intolerable uncertainty for them,' Gorsuch wrote.
Homeless advocates, on the other hand, said that allowing cities to punish people who need a place to sleep would criminalize homelessness and ultimately make the crisis worse. Cities had been allowed to regulate encampments but couldn’t bar people from sleeping outdoors.
'Sleep is a biological necessity, not a crime,' Justice Sonia Sotomayor said, reading from the bench a dissent joined by her liberal colleagues.
'Punishing people for their status is ‘cruel and unusual’ under the Eighth Amendment,' she wrote in the dissent. 'It is quite possible, indeed likely, that these and similar ordinances will face more days in court.'
The case came from the rural Oregon town of Grants Pass, which appealed a ruling striking down local ordinances that fined people $295 for sleeping outside after tents began crowding public parks.
The US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction over the nine Western states, has held since 2018 that such bans violate the Eighth Amendment in areas where there aren’t enough shelter beds.
Friday’s ruling comes after homelessness in the United States grew a dramatic 12 percent last year to its highest reported level, as soaring rents and a decline in coronavirus pandemic assistance combined to put housing out of reach for more people.
More than 650,000 people are estimated to be homeless, the most since the country began using a yearly point-in-time survey in 2007. Nearly half of them sleep outside. Older adults, LGBTQ+ people and people of color are disproportionately affected, advocates said. In Oregon, a lack of mental health and addiction resources has also helped fuel the crisis.
#1
Easy: take on the ACLU and open up the state hospitals again. These are untreated mentally ill. Involuntary commitment until they can get the treatment they need. The cruel and unusual punishment is letting them suffer untreated and as prey for drug dealers.
#4
Someone getting the feeling in the judicial community that they've f*uped for decades trying to play social engineer rather than adhering to and sticking with the 'law'? Those vagrancy laws evolved for a reason. Maybe its time to quit sacrificing good members of the community to murdering insane people who indeed need to be removed from general society.
#5
#1, #3 - He's actually not wrong about that for a large segment of the homeless population, Skid.
'Deinstitutionalization' forced a lot of moderate to serious mentally ill folks back out on the streets and continues to do so today. It's like mainstreaming mentally disabled kids into normal K-12 classrooms where the instruction then focuses on the lowest level of comprehension and ignores any actual learning.
Interesting, but long, read about this from the Kaiser Commission here (pdf).
Posted by: Mullah Richard ||
06/29/2024 8:02 Comments ||
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#6
Doesn't say a municipality has to clear out public usage spaces, just that if they don't its local governments' choice to let them.
No fig leaf for you.
Maybe even call it something snazzy, like Sanctuary City, or Right to Shelter, Foyer sans Frontiers. That should attract and maintain voters.
#9
i have come to the conclusion that the two genders have unique roles. A female preserves the species and a male defends the female. how not-woke am i?
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Oleg Khavich
[REGNUM] Exactly 110 years ago the “long nineteenth century” ended. According to British historian Eric Hobsbawm, it lasted from the French Revolution until the outbreak of the First World War. The formal reason for the latter was the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in the Bosnian city of Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. The course of events of that fateful day in Sarajevo is known minute by minute; journalists from the British media corporation BBC even reported on them ten years ago, using 21st century journalistic techniques, in the style of “live reporting”. IA Regnum will take the liberty of not only reconstructing the events that led to one of the two largest catastrophes of the 20th century, but also pointing out the forces that stood behind these events.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Ol'ga Kuznetsova
[REGNUM] The night in the Eastern Hemisphere and the evening in the Western turned out to be unusually restless: everyone was closely watching what was happening on the streets of the de facto capital of Bolivia - La Paz (legally the capital of the South American country is Sucre) - and wondering whether the glory days of Latin American dictatorships had returned or not yet.
[ZeroHedge] A new report from Moody's offers yet another grim outlook that the commercial real estate downturn is nowhere near the bottom. Elevated interest rates and persistent remote and hybrid working trends could result in around 24% of all office towers standing vacant within the next two years. The office tower apocalypse will result in more depressed values that will only pressure landlords.
What about the return-to-the-office trend? Many companies are doing that, too.
"Combining these insights, with our more than 40 years of historic office performance data, as well as future employment projections, our model indicates that the impact on office demand from work from home will be around 14% on average across a 63- month period, resulting in vacancy rates that peak in early 2026 at approximately 24% nationally," Moody's analysts Todd Metcalfe, Anthony Spinelli, and Thomas LaSalvia wrote in the report.
In a separate report, Tom LaSalvia, Moody's head of CRE economics, wrote that the office vacancy rate's move from 19.8% in the first quarter of this year to the expected 24% by 2026 could reduce revenue for office landlords by between $8 billion and $10 billion. Factor in lower rents and higher costs, this may translate into "property value destruction" in the range of a quarter-trillion dollars.
In addition to remote working trends, Moody's analysts pointed out that the amount of office space per worker has been in a "general downward trend for decades."
At the peak of the Dot-Com boom, office workers used an average of 190 sq ft. The figure has since slid to 155 sq ft in 2023.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
06/29/2024 8:58 Comments ||
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#3
Having a dedicated workspace with no personal distractions, and with definitive posted hours of availability and most efficient form of communication being face to face is ideal, I can see how trying not to get killed while walking through shit and needles can be motivating.
So fewer renters, and New York has decided that the government can just determine a buildings new property value and sue the owners for the difference, every tin pot DA can copy paste that process.
#4
The World Inside is a science fiction novel by American writer Robert Silverberg, published in 1971. The novel originally appeared as a series of shorter works in 1970 and 1971, all but one published in Galaxy, including the Hugo nominated novella "The World Outside". The World Inside was nominated for a Hugo Award in 1972, although Silverberg declined the nomination.
On March 2, 2010, Orb Books published this title as a trade paperback edition.
The novel is set on Earth in the year 2381, when the population of the planet has reached 75 billion people.[4] Population growth has skyrocketed due to a quasi-religious belief in human reproduction as the highest possible good. Most of the action occurs in a massive three-kilometer-high city tower called Urban Monad 116.
War, starvation, crime and birth control have been eliminated. Life is now totally fulfilled and sustained within Urban Monads (Urbmons), mammoth thousand-floor skyscrapers arranged in "constellations", where the shadow of one building does not fall upon another. An Urbmon is divided into 25 self-contained "cities" of 40 floors each, in ascending order of status, with administrators occupying the highest level. Each building can hold approximately 800,000 people, with excess population totalling three billion a year transferred to new Urbmons, which are continually under construction.
The Urbmon population is supported by the conversion of all of the Earth's habitable land area not taken up by Urbmons to agriculture. The theoretical limit of the population supported by this arrangement is estimated to be 200 billion. The farmers live a very different lifestyle, with strict birth control. Farmers trade their produce for technology and the two societies rarely have direct contact; even their languages are mutually unintelligible. A very interesting book. I did my architecture thesis proposal based on it.
#6
^4, Deacon, not unlike Niven & Pournelle's Oath of Fealty.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
06/29/2024 13:39 Comments ||
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#7
Sometimes is people with stupid money who least understand the limits of money.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
06/29/2024 13:41 Comments ||
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#8
I remember splashes of a story like that.
Everyone was wasted away from EV travel inside the buildings. Longer treks took the electric wheelchairs in horizontal escalators between buildings, like Musk's tunnels.
A rebel group masked themselves in blankets to reduce their muscle signature. Their goal was to damage the HVAC and elevators, forcing everyone outside.
It worked. Then everyone developed skin cancer and cornea burns as the sun had also evolved.
If he won’t resign, and the party can’t force him off the ticket, the blob could have no choice except to bump him off. I imagine they would get it done humanely, say late at night sometime, in bed, using the same method as for putting down an old dog who has peed on the carpet one too many times.
#2
I'm waiting for the pivot to the idea that we actually need a dementia crippled elderly twit in office, so his helpers can actually run things. That's the ticket!
Posted by: ed in texas ||
06/29/2024 14:04 Comments ||
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#3
I wouldn't even know where to look, but I'm sure Harry Sisson is making a huge ass of himself today? Over and above what he already does.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
06/29/2024 14:09 Comments ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
To be authoritarian is to be inhumane, to rule with arbitrary and capricious imposition. It can also mean to be ruled impersonally by a machine regardless of the cost.
[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] The Supreme Court decided on Friday that cities can enforce bans on homeless people sleeping outdoors, even in West Coast areas where shelter space is lacking.
