Spending Billions, Learning Nothing
Jon Fullerton, Eric Larsen, and Morgan Polikoff
Since the pandemic, the State of California has been on a tear implementing major new programs designed to transform California’s schools and educational outcomes, part of the state’s historic surge in overall education spending:
In 2021–22, the state legislature expanded access to Transitional Kindergarten (TK) to younger students and made access universal. TK expands the kindergarten experience to two years to allow kids “an additional year of high-quality early learning and, as a result, be better prepared to succeed in kindergarten and beyond.” The cost from 2022 to 2026 has been approximately $8 billion.
Since the 2021–22 school year, California has funded the Expanded Learning Opportunities Program (ELO-P) to provide English Learners, students who qualify for the federal Free and Reduced-Price Lunch program, and other high-needs students (collectively called “unduplicated pupils” in the jargon of California state education law) access to afterschool and intersession programs. To support the ELO-P program during the 2025–26 school year, the state provides $2,750 per unduplicated student in grades TK–6 to districts with high concentration of unduplicated pupils and $1,280 per unduplicated TK–6 student in other districts. Since 2021–22, the state has spent over $18 billion on this program.
In late 2025, Governor Newsom signed AB-1454, the so-called Science of Reading bill, requiring districts and schools to align their instructional materials to evidence-based means of teaching foundational reading skills. A little under $500 million was allocated in the 2025–26 budget to support this work.
These are three “big bets” that suggest California is moving aggressively to improve outcomes for kids and eliminate achievement gaps in the state. However, although there are reasons to believe these programs could be effective, there is currently no funding or plan by the state to evaluate whether these big bets are paying off.
This is stupefying.
The state has been investing substantial dollars for years into these and other programs. Of course, we hope that they will all work as intended, but we know that many education reforms fail to live up to expectations. Yet without real investment in evaluation, we will never know whether these programs are 1) being implemented as intended, 2) reaching the intended students, and 3) “moving the needle” on academic and other outcomes.
California is losing critical opportunities to understand and improve the delivery of these programs. For instance, for the Expanded Learning Opportunities Program, one might want to know:
What percent of unduplicated students have been reached by ELO-P?
Do targeted groups participate at different rates? Why?
How much was spent on each participant? (Funds are distributed on a census basis, not an attendance basis.)
Do some ELO-P programs have better effects than others? Which ones, in which districts?
Does ELO-P have any effect at all?
However, this year (the fifth year of implementation) is the first time that the state is collecting information on even which students are participating in ELO-P programming. So over $10 billion has been spent to date on students the state cannot even identify. None of the above questions are therefore answerable for these children (at least based on state data).
Hope on the Horizon?
Happily, a new bill, AB-2117, might change this state of affairs. On the heels of a PACE report recommending the restructuring of education governance in California, AB-2117 proposes the creation of a new, appointed education commissioner to run the California Department of Education while focusing the elected state Superintendent of Education on monitoring and evaluating California’s educational progress.
Importantly, the bill states that “In order to ensure data-driven decisionmaking and risk management, the Superintendent shall conduct independent evaluations of any new education initiatives with an ongoing annual appropriation exceeding five hundred million dollars ($500,000,000) or with any one-time appropriation exceeding one billion dollars ($1,000,000,000).” In other words, no big bets without some plan for understanding how they are working and whether they are paying off.
Well-implemented, this requirement would allow California to learn from its new programming and increase the confidence of the public in California’s spending choices. Right now, this is part of the larger proposal to restructure California’s education governance. However, we feel strongly that there should be a requirement for similar independent evaluations whether or not the larger governance reform moves forward. In fact, a requirement for (and funding for) evaluation should be part of the legislation establishing any major new programs.
Objections
Here are some potential reasons that people might object to our proposal that evaluation should be required when major new programs are established in California.
We already know what works – that is why we establish these programs.
While many programs are based on prior research, establishing new programs with varied implementations across districts and schools introduces substantial uncertainty into the complex mechanisms of educational programming. Just because something worked in a Texas does not mean it will work in California. And just because something worked in a pilot of 10 schools does not mean it will work in 10,000 schools across the state.
Compare education to something simpler – rocket science. While the team at SpaceX knows almost everything needed about physics, it is still the case that their rockets often blow up in development. The team uses this feedback to understand what went wrong and make improvements in the design. Education is more complicated – we don’t usually get the immediate feedback of “Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly.” Unless careful evaluation is done, we will not know when programs are simply not be working and students are languishing.
Furthermore, it is a false and unhelpful dichotomy that programs either work or they don’t. The reality is that there are always ways to improve even programs that do “work.” However, we should acknowledge that without a careful evaluation design, it may be difficult to identify the impact of programs, especially universal ones. The challenges associated with evaluating these programs is another reason that evaluation should be included as part of any major new education program that is established in the state: it may be too late to implement a meaningful evaluation if the evaluation is not planned until after the program has launched.
Won’t this be a burden on districts and schools that will need to provide data?
Yes, there will be some burden. However, quality evaluation designs can help keep that burden to a minimum. In addition, if the state believes the program important enough to fund separately and, often, to force or strongly encourage LEAs to implement it, then the state should also want to know about its implementation and impact. If not, either don’t fund the program or just give the money that would have gone to the program to LEAs to decide how the money is to be spent in the context of the LEAs’ individual needs.
Won’t this cost money?
Yes, but relative to the cost of the program (particularly a failed program), this amount is a pittance—probably no more than a few dollars per affected student. For programs of this size, the value of a small improvement in outcomes would be orders of magnitude larger than the evaluation cost.
This does point to a weakness in the AB-2117 proposal – which requires that the Superintendent conduct evaluations of large, new programs but does not set aside any specific funding for these evaluations. One of us (Polikoff) is working to raise funds to evaluate the implementation and impact of AB-1454. While the cost is a substantial lift for private fundraising, it is far less than 1% of what the state (not to mention LEAs) is going to spend on this program.
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California has made numerous bold educational investments over the past five years. The state owes it to taxpayers to understand whether these investments are paying off, and the state owes it to students to find ways to continuously improve them.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of any affiliated institutions or organizations.