[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.