Local Control, Rising Requirements: What Policymakers Need to Know About the California Public Education Regulatory Environment Now

June 26, 2026

In 2014, California introduced the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) to give school districts more flexibility and provide additional support for the students in greatest need. In return, districts are required to publicly report their spending through the Local Control Accountability Plan (LCAP) and share these plans with families.

But over the past 5 years, crises like COVID-19 led to districts receiving additional funding outside the LCFF and added new rules, including more reports, data requirements, and spending guidelines.

Jason Willis is a senior policy fellow at WestEd. He specializes in public finance and policy, with a focus on school funding formulas, accountability, and support strategies that connect education, health, and social services.

In this Q&A, Willis discusses what has happened over the past decade with the LCAP and other regulatory components, what the data reveal, and what practical steps educators and state leaders can take moving forward.

The LCAP was intended to improve outcomes for high-needs students while giving communities greater transparency into district spending. Where has it succeeded, and where might it be falling short?

Research shows that districts are indeed allocating dollars to these students and are taking steps to improve the quality of support. But it’s still unclear whether those efforts are strong enough, especially as district budgets get tighter. The LCAP still gives people a much better look at how local districts make decisions. Early signs are encouraging, but we need more research to understand how well districts are using their resources to support students.

What prompted your research into compliance issues in public education, and what concerns were you hearing from the field?

School leaders were increasingly saying that keeping up with the new programs and reporting rules was taking much more time than it had in the past. But there were no data to show how much these demands had actually grown. At the same time, schools were being asked to complete reports and submit data, often disconnected from the LCAP.

The state signed a bill into law to better understand the issue, but the report they received didn’t sufficiently answer the questions to provide direction for future policymaking and practice. I wanted to dig into the information in a way that would be useful for educators and district leaders and share the findings in plain language so they could better understand how these requirements had grown over time.

What data or evidence did you look at to get a clear picture of what’s actually happening on the ground?

I tracked how new laws become real-world rules—they call this the policy inscription process—by following their “fingerprints” across multiple agencies, such as the Department of Education and the State Controller’s Office. In this case, I identified the agency responsibilities and regulations resulting from the bill and then tracked changes over time. Specific measures included counting resource codes (funding buckets that LEAs must track), analyzing patterns of audit findings (state vs. federal, fiscal vs. programmatic), and documenting changes to the LCAP instructions between FY15 and FY25. One result is that the word count for the LCAP instruction grew by 800 percent over that period.

An 800 percent increase in words! Was that just the LCAP instructions?

Yes, and not even the full templates schools fill out. We pulled each version adopted by the State Board of Education and documented every change. An 800 percent increase over a short period makes you wonder: why? And is all that extra detail actually helping? One possibility is that it gives families and the public a clearer picture of how school funds support student achievement.

What did the research show about public engagement with the LCAP?

Public interest in the LCAP is surprisingly low. I compared a measure of engagement aggregating Google search terms in California. I used common terms users would search for on this topic, like the LCAP, school planning, and so on. As a benchmark, I compared it to another common measure: school budget information. School budget searches consistently exceeded LCAP searches, even right before LCAP adoption each year. That’s odd because the whole point was to make LCAPs and district actions easier for communities to understand.

Where is the disconnect happening between what the LCAP was supposed to do and what it’s actually doing?

The biggest disconnect is that the LCAP was supposed to be a simple, straightforward way to explain school plans and spending to the public, but in practice it became more of a compliance document. Over time, it was shaped by many different groups and requirements, so it became less simple and less useful as a public communication tool.

That’s why many of the most effective school systems use a separate, plain-language strategic plan to share at community meetings, schools, and church convenings and crosswalk it with the LCAP if asked. In other words, the LCAP still exists, but it isn’t seen as an effective communication vehicle for public audiences, contrary to its original intent.

What does this mean for school systems and state leaders who want to use the LCAP to drive improvement and strengthen outcomes?

School and state leaders now have proof that practitioners’ perceptions of increased requirements are real, and it’s a systemic issue. Course correction will have to be a group effort from the state and practitioners. For example, practitioners can modulate how they direct staff to spend their time on activities rather than waiting for the state to issue direct instructions. States can invest time in purposefully sequencing requests to local school systems to avoid duplicative or overwhelming requests.

At the heart of the matter is value. When educators see that LCAP data and reporting help their work, they’ll engage more, and students will benefit.

What specific shifts would help the LCAP function as it was intended? What support do systems need to make those shifts?

Right now, the LCAP is trying to do too many things at once, and it isn’t serving anybody well. It does collect useful data about whether LEAs are spending funds in ways that ensure support reaches the students who need it most. But we could take that benefit further by converting it into a replicable, standardized data-collection system that would allow LEAs to analyze and use the data and share their findings. If that happens, the LCAP could become much shorter and easier to use—maybe even a 3-to-5-page document that clearly shows what a district cares about and how it directs resources to help kids who need it most. A simpler, more accessible version like that might even result in greater trust in our public education system.

Stepping back, is this just California? Or are there other states that experience this level of compliance requirements?

No, it’s not just California. My WestEd colleagues found high levels of compliance requirements elsewhere too. Early data from states like New Mexico, Texas, and Utah point to this being a broader trend, regardless of policy approach.