Overpriced Underperformance

In the brief history of this blog and the CAN THE LOTTERY website, we've focused quite a bit of attention on California's public education system. When it comes to state and local governments, I believe there are two duties that stand above all others: provide superb protection for the public's safety and provide superlative education for the state's youth. Regarding the latter, it is not just a moral obligation to California's youth. Sterling education gives the youth the opportunity to become highly functioning members of an increasingly difficult world economy. Along with being a matter of values and civil rights, education is a matter of concern for the economy and public safety. If we do not have an educated population, we can not expect to remain a world power.

So, to get to specifics, where does California rank? According to Morgan Quinto Press's "Education State Rankings", California is 47th in the nation (and, unfortunately for us, that's on a 1-50 scale with 1 being the best and 50 being the worst). The state rankings are based on 21 different points of criteria, listed on their site.

The American Legislative Exchange Council moves California all the way up to 38th...still, of course, in the bottom 1/4 of all states. Part of the reason for the "high" score there is that ALEC takes into account teachers' salaries, for which CA is ranked 3rd in the nation. NOTE: I have absolutely no issue with good teachers receiving high salaries. Indeed, I think it is completely warranted. My problem is with the other figures. For expenditures per pupil, we are ranked 34th. Pupil-teacher ratio, 49th. Eighth grade mathematics, we are ranked 45th, and eighth grade reading we are 47th.

We must all ask ourselves: What is the purpose of the public education system? It certainly should not exist to serve the politicians, lobbyists or special interest groups. It should not exist to serve administrative boards. It should not even exist to serve teachers or parents. It should and must exist to serve the students. Beyond any other measure of success, if students are not learning then our public schools are failures. These studies make it abundantly clear that too many of our students indeed are not learning, and too many schools are failing.

The budget plan passed through yesterday does nothing to address this failure. Not one politician stepped up as a leader to speak out against low reading and math proficiencies. Not one of our elected officials acted as a true representative, promising to take responsibility to right the ship. All they did was demand that the taxpayers fork over more money.

California must change the way it perceives education and redirect the flow of money directly into the classroom to be spent as the local schools, in conjunction with the PTAs, best see fit. If the schools fail the children, then the children must be given an opportunity to attend a school where they have at least a fair shot at gaining a proper education.

We would never keep going to mechanics who continually fail to fix our cars properly. We wouldn't patronize restaurants that consistently bring us the wrong dishes, poorly prepared at that. Yet, we have no problem sending our children to schools with low graduation rates (some under 50%), where they have a less than 25% chance of gaining math and reading skills above proficiency levels.

It is safe to say that our priorities, much like the budget, are completely out of line.