California’s Career Ed Formula Lost $115 Million. The Students Who Needed Those Classes Most Paid for It.

California’s career technical education (CTE) grants require school districts to provide a 2-to-1 match: for every dollar in state funding, a district must put up two of its own. When a district cannot meet the match, the unclaimed state money reverts to the General Fund — not back into a pool where other districts could use it.

An EdSource analysis found that over the past five years, an average of $23 million per year was lost this way. Districts scaled back. Contra Costa County’s consortium of 10 school districts, which had built a network of about 300 career classes, imposed a 17% cut in 2025 after receiving $500,000 less than the year before. Robotics, culinary arts, and digital photography programs faced elimination.

Assemblymember Rhodesia Ransom (D-Stockton) is authoring Assembly Bill 1590 to fix the formula so unspent money stays in the CTE pool rather than disappearing into general revenue. Ransom said the current system “makes everybody scale back; that makes them have fewer certification programs, fewer learning opportunities and, then, fewer pathways. To me, that’s something that needed to be corrected.”

For 2026-27, some immediate relief is in sight: $450 million is available — a one-time increase of $150 million — and state officials say all of it will be distributed in a single round, the first time that has happened.

The formula creates a compounding disadvantage for exactly the districts that need career education most. Once a district exceeds 550 students in average daily attendance, it competes in the same funding tier as some of the largest school systems in the country — regardless of the fact that a 2,000-student district has far less administrative capacity, fewer grant writers, a smaller local tax base, and less leverage with industry partners than a district 10 times its size.

Nicole Newman, president of the Small School Districts Association, put it directly: “A district with 600, 1,200 or 2,000 students competes within the same funding category as some of the largest school systems in the nation.”

Those smaller, higher-need districts are often where students who have struggled in traditional academic settings land. For students who process better through doing than decoding — who understand fractions in a kitchen but zone out on a worksheet, who can wire a circuit board while still working to decode a page of text — career-connected programs are sometimes the first environment in school where their abilities show up as strengths instead of deficits.

California’s Linked Learning model, operating in more than 80 districts and reaching more than 330,000 students, specifically integrates rigorous academics with career-technical education and work-based learning. For a student whose early school years were dominated by a label, a career-connected pathway can be the first place “I’m good at something” becomes the identity they actually believe. When those programs get cut, it is not elective trimming. For some students, it is the door being closed.

AB 1590 would make the fix permanent by requiring the state to revise the formula so that all available CTE funds reach districts every year. That vote is still ahead. For 2026-27, the $450 million one-time allocation is expected to reach schools in a single distribution round — a meaningful change from prior years when two-round allocation still left money unclaimed.

For parents: CTE programs and Linked Learning pathways exist in many districts and are often underutilized because students and families do not know about them. If your child has struggled in traditional academic settings — because of a reading difference, attention challenges, or because abstract instruction has never connected — asking a school counselor about career-connected pathways is a concrete starting point. These programs are state-funded; your district may offer more than it advertises.

If the underlying reason your child is struggling has not been identified, a starting point is our AI-powered learning analysis at learningsuccess.ai/learning-difficulties-analysis/, which looks across multiple processing systems to find patterns that traditional assessments miss.