[ryandamm]

The root cause of the collapse in math education in California is one bad researcher's work, combined with politics.

Briefly, a Stanford-affiliated "researcher" named Jo Boaler produced two deeply underpowered studies claiming to show that putting all students in the same grade-level math course led to better outcomes for everyone — even the kids that would've normally been tracked into advanced math. But she only tested results on grade-level math — of course the would-be advanced kids did better on "grade level" math if they've taken it recently. The loss is the advanced math they didn't take.

Here's an article: https://stanfordreview.org/jo-boaler-and-the-woke-math-death...

I fought with my son's middle school administration about this precise issue. It is the stated policy of CA's state level education department to de-emphasize advanced math and tracking, in favor of these deeply suspect ideas. I'm pretty progressive in general, but this is braindead stupid, alarming, and self-defeating. (If you care about equity, you NEED to have options in the public school for the underprivileged gifted kids! the rich kids have lots of options and will be fine.)

It's deeply depressing, but education has long been a weak spot for California; since Prop 13 in the 1970s, California has been 49th or 50th in per-pupil funding for public education (excluding college, I think). But to compound that with this wrongheaded, moronic, politically suspect and quantitatively incorrect policy is... infuriating.

[kyboren]

I agree with everything you wrote about maladministration of California's math curricula, but:

> since Prop 13 in the 1970s, California has been 49th or 50th in per-pupil funding for public education (excluding college, I think).

This is totally incorrect. California ranked 6th in total per-pupil spending in 2023[0].

California has a formulaic mandate on K-12 funding amounts (Prop 98) and schools are funded through both property taxes (affected by Prop 13) and general funds via the LCFF, which directs extra funds towards schools with more disadvantaged students.

In fact, funding levels keep hitting record after record, with only mandatory Prop 98 spending rising from $59B in 2013-14[1] to $127.1B in 2026-27[2], despite an enrollment decline of ~7% over that period[3].

[0]: https://reason.org/k12-ed-spending/2025-spotlight/

[1]: https://ebudget.ca.gov/2024-25/pdf/BudgetSummary/K-12Educati...

[2]: https://ebudget.ca.gov/2026-27/pdf/Revised/BudgetSummary/TK-...

[3]: https://www.ppic.org/publication/californias-k-12-students/

[ryandamm]

This is interesting news to me, thank you. I'm curious if the per-pupil spending includes locally raised funds; the reality in California is that the state level funding is poor, and districts that are above some threshold don't get enough funding to operate. So public schools function as local charities and inevitably have fundraising arms to make up the shortfall. This has been true since at least the 1980s when I was in school, and is definitely still true today.

[kyboren]

> the reality in California is that the state level funding is poor

No, it really isn't. Again, just mandated Prop 98 state spending on K-12 is $127.1B for next year, with this year's enrollment at just about 5.8 million students. That works out to $21k per pupil not including all discretionary state spending, federal spending, and other local funding (like the fundraising you're talking about).

> districts that are above some threshold don't get enough funding to operate

Since 2013, under the LCFF, districts with a very high amount of property tax revenue only get "basic aid" from the state, but this is only a small fraction of school districts. Anyway the funding disparity is the entire point of the LCFF: The idea is to give rich districts less and poor districts more.

It's frustratingly difficult to get my fellow Californians to understand that our schools are, if anything, over-funded, and that throwing ever more money into the black hole is unlikely to improve our abysmal outcomes.

[ryandamm]

Well I live in a basic aid district; Bay Area but firmly middle class. We’re just above the cutoff for federally subsidized school lunches iirc, and the schools are chronically short on money.

Part of it is declining enrollment, part of it is Baumol’s cost disease (a living wage is pretty high here! Teachers get paid well on a national scale and very poorly on a local scale).

But yeah… education is simply not well-run in California. I find that pretty indisputable.

[kyboren]

Your situation is a good argument against the equity-focused LCFF. It's such a HCOL area that despite having high property tax revenue vs. the rest of the state, your district really should be funded at a higher level. Unfortunately I have little hope of Californians abandoning their zeal for punitive equity any time soon.

It is indeed indisputable that education is not well-run here. But it's not going to be easy to fix. For starters, nearly 100% of the people I talk to about this issue believe, like you, that the problem is Prop 13 and underfunded schools. I don't know where this idea came from but it's remarkably pervasive and consistent across demographics.

But the biggest problem IMO is that the education administration mafia has a stranglehold on our one-party state and things are broken just the way they like it.

[ryandamm]

Your comment prompted to look into this further, thank you. The funding situation in California is complicated and weird, but yes, CA does spend a lot of money on public education.

There are weird relics of the underfunded past, but you can’t blame the educational failures on lack of budget.