California has more money than projected after admin miscalculated state budget

Screens can be helpful for kids (mine have learned a ton from Khan Academy and other online tools), but kids will have different thresholds. Some will only be able to learn a little from screens because they can't work independently. Others can learn a lot. Blanket statements like "kids lean better from humans than machines" are not helpful. They obscure the fact that there is typically one teacher for 25 kids, whereas there might be 25 screens. Even if a screen is only 1/10 as good as a teacher, it could be that learning from a screen is better than learning from a teacher (who is busy with your classmates almost all of the time).

My kid learned more math when she was doing AoPS for 2 yrs than when she was in class listening to lectures she already knew, followed by worksheets she had already mastered. Machines enable much more differentiation.

My 1,500-student public California high school currently lists 7 administration-team members (principal, executive assistant, three assistant principals, school-facilities manager and food-services manager) and 11 administrative-support members (school data-processing specialist, print-center technician, senior-clerical assistant, separate registrar and attendance roles, interventions-support specialist, and others). That doesn't include 4 site maintenance, a network-support and a separate network-systems specialists; a separate media-library specialist; 2 psychologists; a college and career advisor; 4 school counselors; a wellness-space support specialist; and a social science and an athletic director.

34 administrative hires. One per 44 students. Many of those roles strike me as fluff.

Only if you assume if per-teacher productivity can't increase.

In 2021, California spent about $121 billion on K-12, out of a GDP of $3.4 trillion, or about 3.5% of state GDP. That puts it above the OECD average of 3.3%, around the same as France at 3.5%. blob:https://www.oecd.org/702dcc03-0749-41b6-af41-112fd1af1bfb. (This is the parent page: https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/public-spending-on-e.... You have to select non-tertiary education, which is basically what we call K-12.)

However, Oregon's costs have no relation to the revenue that the state predicted it would get, so it is constrains the solution space when unforeseen costs or cost trends happen. For example, Oregon predicts a certain amount of revenue, but gets 3% more than the predicted revenue, but that is because prices for everything went up 3% more than expected, now Oregon has less money than it needs to pay its expenses (since it has to return any revenue which was 2% over the estimate).

Oregon is the only jurisdiction I have ever heard of with this kind of strict refund law, and its rigidity seems to be the main issue, along with the 2 year forecast requirement (since forecasting even 1 year is hard enough).