California has some of the worst-performing public schools in the nation. Pre-coronapanic data from the New York Times:
California kids were nearly a year behind Texas kids, adjusted for demographics, even before California urban schools shut down for 1.5 years while Texas schools remained open.
One of the excuses that my California friends give for the poor quality of government services is that the state is starved for property tax revenue due to Proposition 13. Yet in this ranking of states by property tax collected per capita, California is at #14:
In addition to a state income tax that can reach 13.3 percent of income, in other words, California has a robust property tax revenue stream and a total state and local income tax burden of 13.5 percent (Tax Foundation), which is close to the highest in the nation.
Why is this interesting? Californians are the folks who like to say that they’ve figured out how government should work!
The lion kingdom is living proof of Calif* public school being worthless but it’s probably not significantly more worthless than any other public school. It would be more interesting to compare to private school. The Calif* natives are basically a homeless tribe watching a different wave of entrepreneurs from MIT sweep through every 7 years.
California has good (pre-coronavirus) PSAT Merit Scholarship qualifying scores, 3rd behind International and New Jersey (??? NJ probably due to private boarding schools that attract out-of-staters) and International qualifying scores https://publicuniversityhonors.com/2013/12/11/psat-national-merit-scholar-qualifying-scores-by-state/
If this is due to Silicon Valley – based schools and many good private schools?
California excels in other subjects like 2SLBGTQQIA+:
https://www.cde.ca.gov/re/di/eo/faqs.asp
Interestingly, the page contains heteronormative hate speech:
“The student’s school may make the initial determination whether a student may participate in interscholastic athletics in a gender that does not match the gender assigned to him or her at birth.”
This blog’s pronoun guidelines are superior to California in terms of inclusiveness!
Meanwhile in Florida: “DeSantis’ Florida Blows Away Entire Country In Competition For People And Their Wealth”
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/desantis-florida-blows-away-entire-country-competition-people-and-their-wealth
“Florida is the big winner when it comes to the state-to-state competition for migrating Americans and their money. California and Illinois, meanwhile, remain two of the nation’s biggest losers.”
So if I understand correctly, Texas does very well if graded with affirmative action. I wonder how the governor there feels about this.
As an ex Texan now in NY, I have to wonder: why should my chosen state be dinged for raising more people out of poverty than Texas? We pay high state and city income taxes, on top of high sales taxes, invest in transit and not only a state but city university system, to get people good jobs and transport them there etc, only to see Texas get credit for making some bigger dent in the apparently objectively worse misery it created for its people by favoring zero state income tax over actual human services?
If that’s the game our schools should get bonus credit in the coming years for overcoming all the misery they created by remaining closed. Let’s grade all local governments for last minute effort, on a curve that rewards their mistakes.
(Is this a trick by Texas to turn me into a Republican?)
Many people who receive affirmative action are priced out of the housing market by the virtue signaling champagne socialists in California and are moving to Texas. The percentage of Black people has decreased from 11% to 7% in San Francisco:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/01/14/black-migration-south/
(The article is an uninteresting, meandering human interest piece that artfully obfuscates the real economic reasons, but there is a graphic at the top.)
Ryan, you a rightfully feel dignified for paying high taxes in NY and in parallel saving Texas for making bad decisions. Your taxes (and all ours after Biden give away) are lifting NY school dropouts out from property, given that NY is not right to work state and high school drop-outs have very low chances of joining labor union
For years 2011-2012, now distinction is deeper:
New York high school drop-out rate is 3.8%, Texan – 2.5%. https://ballotpedia.org/Public_high_school_dropout_rates_by_state (Florida 2.1%)
Also, given the fact that NY has significant population groups with highest average IQ and NY and Texas had same Merit Scholarship PSAT score cut – off of 220 https://blog.prepscholar.com/psat-score-needed-for-national-merit-scholarship and that mostly those academically inclined bother to take PSAT it is clear that NY socialist system does a hell of a job to lower median scholastic achievements.
(I am of course referring to these details on the adjustment from the NYT story: “ A report released Monday by the Urban Institute has adjusted the raw scores for each state to account for student demographics, including poverty, race, native language and the share of students in special education.”)
I assume this is the study referred to in the post with updated data:
https://apps.urban.org/features/naep/
Interestingly there are data for 4th and 8th grades. My personal theory: the higher the grade, the more obvious the effect of school.
For example, since people seem to focus on Texas so let’s consider their case. In 2019, Texas has high raw score for 4th grade, I can’t count but seem to be in the top 15 but for 8th grade, Texas has lower raw score, around the median. My take is that schools in Texas are good, but perhaps not as good as the story suggest.
I wonder if illegal immigration has an impact on the performance of public schools in California?
According to the Census Bureau, 44.6 percent of people five years of age and older do not speak English at home. 18.6 percent of California residents 5 and older do not speak English “very well.” In the US, California ranks No.1 in both of these categories.
Children from many immigrant groups that tend not to speak English at home or at all frequently outperform native English speakers scholastically. You can not take schools and general public climate and government out of explanation why children do not achieve proficiency in math and English.
Joe: I think that the NYT article described an attempt to adjust for the percentage of students who didn’t speak English and other demographic factors. California is an outlier (in the bad direction) whether or not any adjustments are applied.
“44.6 percent of people five years of age and older do not speak English at home. ”
This is a nonsensical data point.
Our daughter has never spoken English at home because we ignored her attempts at doing so. Yet, this trivial circumstance did not affect her school or college studies at all. Humans in general are capable of speaking more than one language. Perhaps, California is different.
@Ivan, good point.
Beside English, I speak 3 languages. I learned them before immigrating — legally — to the USA. They were the secondary languages we spoke at home, community and church. My kids who are born in the USA, speak 2 languish English and Arabic and understand Armenian, because Arabic is what we speak at home. But I know a good number of immigrants who’s kids don’t speak English that well even after being in the USA for over 5 years and going to public school. The reason? Their parents do not take the English language seriously to demand it from their kids.
As an example. We came to the USA in 1981 with simple English knowledge (a kindergarten level at best for me and my brother and for my parents only recognizing ABC and simple words). They took night classes, my brother and I went to public school and took extra ESL classes. In 3 years, my father opened his own tailoring shop, still with broken English, and I was doing our bookkeeping and annual tax filing!
I have to give credit to my parents as well as my ESL teach for going out of her way to help immigrants who took her help seriously.
So is it your belief that children of illegal immigrants with poor to non-existent English skills do not skew the performance of public schools in California? We have the largest population of illegal immigrants in the nation.
@Joe Rouse, @Philg, I don’t have scientific data (maybe there is something out there) but it has been my direct experience that children and parents of illegal immigrants are NOT as motivated as children and parents of legal immigrants to excel at school or work.
Isn’t Texas too has large share of illegal immigration? Not as large as CA but Texas is too a border state with very long and porous border.
@perplexed, could it be that immigrants don’t want to say in TX because in CA they get more of their “entitled” benefits?
I am a simple guy so I ask dumb questions. Yes, there are immigrant groups that excel in the United States. My mother didn’t speak English when she landed on our shores and yet she went on to graduate from college. (she spoke Spanish, Greek, and French) Is it a cultural thing? I don’t know.
It is leftist “liberal” state and Democrat governing and electoral plans thing. If people are not able to read this blog they would not be able to find out about pitfalls of one party rule in Massachusetts! No immigrant group is completely new to the United States. The difference seems to be in US governance and public culture, not alien immigrant culture.