Another lazy piece of non-investigative reporting from a magazine that's steadily going downhill. You don't even need to live in California, or in the US for that matter, to spot the pattern in the carpet here. Just spend a few minutes with the California DoE's publicly-available STAR test database, which aggregates test scores by ethnicity, language, etc for students across the state and at every single public school, and you'll see that the unmistakably clear driver of California's dreadful school performance is the abysmal scores of hispanic or latino students, who are now a majority of CA public school students. Consider:
In 2009, Asian students made up 9% of the total. Over 75% of Asian students in CA public schools scored in the two highest categories (either "Proficient" or "Advanced") on both Math and English Language Arts; 25% were below Proficiency, ie failing. http://tinyurl.com/ylrajub
African-Americans: 7% of total CA public students in 2009; ca. 35% scored Proficient or Advanced; 65% scored below proficiency, ie failing. 
Hispanic students: 50% of total, ca. 32% scored Proficient or Advanced; 68% below proficiency ie failing.
Now, the hispanic students' scores have increased in the last two years from their traditional 75-80% failing rate (for example, see 2003, when 81% of hispanic students were below proficiency, or failing: ), but it's obvious that the rapid increase in hispanics' share of the California public school population-- about 1 percentage point each year since 1990-- over the last two decades explains the astonishingly rapid decline in CA public school student achievement during that period.
Even the most quantitatively-inept journalist or commentator can see that no amount of funding, no redesign of curriculum or pedagogical approach, can overcome a semi-literate or illiterate imported underclass that now constitutes over half of the student population and that cares little about student achievement.
Do your job, folks. Please spend at least a few minutes reviewing the empirical evidence. If our political class and what's left of America's mainstream media won't tell the truth, then maybe a British publication formerly known for intelligent and numerate, no-BS analysis can mention the elephant in the room.
California schools don't have a resource or funding or union problem. They have a Mexican underclass problem.
Let's hope that the uptick in 2009's hispanic scores represents the start of a turnaround, but there's a hell of a long way to go when half the school population is at a failure rate of 68%.
t_thibaud hit the nail on the head. It's amazing to me that here in the Seattle suburb in Washington state, 1/3 of the children in our local schools are Asian, with parents who hardly speak any English, yet almost all of these children are fluent in English by Kindergarten, excel in math and reading, play sports and musical instruments. The only 2 schools with below state average test scores are 2 schools with the highest % of hispanic students, while the rest of the schools with up to 35% Asian students continue to far outperform the state.
Sadly where California is heading is where the rest of the country is heading. We are turning into Mexico. One day we'll wake up and find ourselves living in Mexico, a 3rd world country filled with illiterate young people working for drug cartels.
" It has the largest classrooms in the country, with 23.4 students per teacher in 2008, almost twice the national average."
This figure needs some explaining. You don't mean that if I visit the average algebra or sixth grade classroom, I will find one teacher with 11 or 12 students, do you?
Don't blame proposition 13 for the failure of Calif. schools. Prior to 1978 California homeowners were the financial trough for financing the states insatiable spending appetite. Senior citizens were forced to sell their homes and move out of state because they could not afford the ever increasing property taxes. As far as the 23 students per class, my, my, my. My eigth grade class consisted of 50 students taught by one strict nun. We all graduated and most went on to college. Give me a break.
Along with the specters of teachers' unions and Prop 13 I would add that of gerrymandering:
"In an unusual occurrence in 2000... the two dominant parties in the state of California cooperatively redrew both state and Federal legislative districts to preserve the status quo, ensuring the electoral safety of the politicians from unpredictable voting by the electorate. This move proved completely effective, as no State or Federal legislative office changed party in the 2004 election, although 53 congressional, 20 state senate, and 80 state assembly seats were potentially at risk." - from Wikipedia's entry on gerrymandering
In order for democracy to work, people need to be able to hold their leaders accountable. I could write a long rant about the evils of gerrymandering, but I won't. Suffice to say, gerrymandering is a cancer that eats at the core of our democracy. For an issue that underlies almost every single problem facing our nation, it gets far too little publicity. That has to change.
As a substitute teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District I observed for many years what I considered to be educational child abuse. It is a crime what is being done to these children. Not only is their ignorance of basic English, math, science and history astounding, they have also been ideologically indoctrinated in a far left wing agenda with no chance of having been prepared to think critically. And the teachers are not ashamed.
The left wants to pay teachers more; the right wants better reform and better effectiveness.
How about a compromise?
Pay 'em like rock stars, but demand rock star performance.
Patisanship in full-throated action! Not only the kids pay for it - the whole country does. If the census doesn't help re-draw 'safe' constituencies, the Obama administration just has to step in. It's unconscionable that a State that enjoys, or enjoyed, the prestige of the Berkely/Davis/UCLA/USC campuses can afford to give such short shrift to its feeder system. Next thing there'll be a Begging 101 course in the curriculum for those who can't break out of the system imposed on its youngsters by irresponsible adults in it for what they can get out of it. Democracy, shemocracy: it's not about bringing everybody down to the lowest common standard, but helping them rise above that ignorance denominator
Not only will the Stimulus funds soon be lost, health care reform requires that California find another 2-3 billion.
Most of this 2-3 billion will come out of the school budget.
School choice will introduce the much needed competition.
As it is, if you happen to live in a bad school district, there is nothing you can do about it unless you pay for private school entirely out of your pocket. If we change the law to allow students to select their schools, and make state/federal funding follow the student, almost everyone can have a private-school like education.
Typical per-student funding in my state exceeds that of typical catholic schools (by far) and exceed that of low-midrange private schools. If funding follows student to any “authorized school”, we all will have a much better education for our kids.
Yankee brought up the stimulus fiasco, aka Obama's Katrina. According to the Governor's ARRA task force head, Schwarzenegger quietly diverted $1.9 billion of the $6.7 billion made available by Secretary Duncan to California schools under the ARRA ie stimulus from schools to -- get this -- the prisons.
Ah well, at least the prison guards are getting nice perks and fat pensions.
Maybe we could bribe underperforming California kids to skip school altogether and draw lots to see who gets a fast track to a public employee position and SEIU membership. Beats working hard and going to college.
Thousands of foreign exchange students travel to California on any given year. They all attend public schools and pay nothing for it. However most, if not, all of them come from very wealthy families in Asia, Europe and Latin America. They pay foreign exchange organizations thousands of dollars to come to the US yet the school system receives nothing out of it.
California should charge these foreign students tuition. Canada did it some years ago and now raises millions of dollars every year.
The school system in California could definitely get a lot of funding using this system.
One commenter already challenges the statement that California has "the largest classrooms in the country, with 23.4 students per teacher in 2008, almost twice the national average." As a parent of a public school student in Washington state, this seemed rather off, too.
The latest information I was able to find at the US Department of Education's site (=372) says that the ratio is 15.2 for public schools. Information elsewhere on the site shows a large range, however, with tiny schools having small ratios, and the larger schools typical of large districts in California being closer to 20 nationwide.
Private schools have a 12.8:1 ratio, which is perhaps what your writer was mistaking here.
My son is in a classroom in Seattle with an actual 19:1 ratio, which is remarkable. Schools nationally lower their classroom ratios, which can be as high as 26 to 30 per class even in Seattle, by having part- and full-time specialists that are factored in. This allows a student spending perhaps 1/2 to 3/4rds of his or her day in a very large classroom, but part of the day in a smaller group to be averaged into an overall smaller ratio. Not entirely dishonest, but neither reflecting the majority of classroom experience.
For someone observing from outside the narrow provincial confines of the United States, the most bizarre aspect of US education is the arbitrary legislative role of the Supreme Court. This tiny, unelected, unrepresentative club of lawyers has undermined one of the most effective forms of competition in the schooling system.
Many other countries are free to create competition in education through the direct funding of religious schools. Religious schools harness a peculiar - possibly unique - motivation that is distinct from both public schools and profit-maximising private schools. In other countries, governments may provide direct funding to religious schools to maintain competition in a way that taps into this motivation and is cost-effective for the public purse.
With an alternative government-supported religious school system snapping at its heels, the public schooling establishment never acquires the market power that it has in the United States.
But in the United States this has been prevented - and prevented in all States - by the idiosyncratic and arbitrary preferences of a clique of unelected lawyers who happen to sit on US Supreme Court bench. They have chosen to interpret the First and Fourteenth Amendments in ways that forbids it. As a result, parents who wish to move into the religious schooling system must forgo the government support available to students in state schools.
There is no “Charter from Heaven” which dictates that the establishment provision of the First Amendment be interpreted thus. On the face of it, one might think that the First Amendment ought not to apply to State schooling at all. Its wording expressly limits it to laws made by Congress (“Congress shall make no law . . .”). It was a choice of lawyers sitting on the Supreme Court bench to interpret the Fourteenth Amendment in such a way as to extend the First Amendment to the States.
(Indeed, for decades Supreme Court judges resisted the incorporation of the Bill of Rights into State law . . . but then suddenly changed their minds.)
But even if one does accept that extension, there is no Charter from Heaven that requires the establishment provision to be interpreted according to the “strict separation principle”. It is quite open to the lawyers sitting on the Supreme Court bench to adopt the alternative “non-discrimination principle” which would allow public funding of religious schools provided that such funding did not discriminate between religions, or between religious schools and secular schools.
For anyone outside the laboratory of the United States, it seems bizarre that a school committed to strictly secular education may receive public funds, but one which includes some religious curriculum is disqualified.
"They wrap up their veto in a protective veil of adjectives such as 'arbitrary', 'artificial', 'normal', 'reasonable', 'inherent', 'fundamental', or 'essential', whose office usually, though quite innocently, is to disguise what they are doing and impute to it a derivation far more impressive than their personal preferences, which are all that in fact lie behind the decision."
It could well be that the People of the United States support the principle of “strict separation”. But that is surely something for them to decide, either directly or through elected legislators. There is absolutely no self-evident reason why the “personal preferences” of an eccentric club of black-robed lawyers – mostly old, mostly male, mostly white, mostly from elite universities - ought to prevail over those of legislators, let alone over the People.
Moreover, this interference by the Supreme Court was rejected by the politicians who drafted the Constitution. The matter of judicial review was explicitly debated in the Convention, with a proposal for review immediately upon enactment (a little like the Conseil Constitutionnel in France today). That proposal would have required a bill to be re-passed by a two-thirds vote if either the President or the Supreme Court vetoed it, or by three-fourths if both had vetoed it. The proposal was considered and rejected in favour of a presidential veto only.
The current form of judicial supremacy was established de facto by John Marshall only in Marbury v Madison (1803), well after the Constitution was ratified.
Of course, for paternalists the role of the Supreme Court is an irritating distraction. For paternalists, the solution to every social problem is everywhere and always the same: restrict the ability of the People to govern themselves democratically, and grant more power to a bevy of Platonic Guardians who – they fondly believe – will usher in the utopian paradise.