During the past decade, California has leapfrogged a dozen states in per-student funding and its system for distributing the money to high-needs students is now among the most equitable in the nation.

California also is an economic behemoth, the fifth-largest economy in the world, with projections that it will surpass Germany to become the fourth. Compared with other states, though, California falls near the bottom in terms of how much it spends on K-12 schools in relation to the total wealth it generates. Despite its reputation as an overtaxed state, California’s education funding has not paralleled the growth of its economy — its state gross domestic product or GDP.

The nonprofit Education Law Center provides this multilens picture of California’s school financing in Making the Grade, an annual ranking of the states that was published in December. The center, based in New Jersey, is a public interest law firm that advocates for increased school funding. It’s best known for initiating a protracted lawsuit, Abbott v. Burke, that led to higher school funding in New Jersey.

Its latest report covers spending in 2019-20, when COVID-19 emerged in the spring to shut down schools. The information is two to three years old because it takes that long to collect final revenue data from all states. As a result, it will take several years to incorporate the surge in K-12 funding in California that started in the second half of 2020-21, when state revenues rebounded from a short pandemic retrenchment and continued rising through fiscal 2021-22.

California’s ranking likely will continue to rise as well, although that will depend on what other states did. In at least 10 states, per-student funding was lower in 2019-20 than at the start of the Great Recession in 2008, dropping between $1,000 (Arizona) and $2,500 (Florida), adjusted for inflation.