LA Education, Taxes and Visiting Students

Every year my Rotary club hosts a group of students from New Zealand who are studying abroad for their senior year of high school. The club's done this for some 30 years or so and it is a great experience meeting these kids who have the courage and sense of adventure to leave their home and go half-way across the world for a year. Think about that for a second.

For the first time, my club is hosting one of the students. Everyone is pretty excited, especially the HB as one of the New Zealand students (hence known as the NZS) will be staying at our house starting around September 15th. As the organizer of all this I've gone back and forth with the folks in NZ and at Rotary to get things all lined up. Including enrolling him in school.

There's no other way to say it than the local high school is a fucking disaster. In the state's standardized exam the school consistently scores in the lowest 20%. Occasionally fights spill out onto the street and the basketball team consistently get more press (both for championships and getting put on probation for illegally recruiting players) than any of its academic programs. It does have small oasis for kids in its magnet program and my Rotary club sponsors a group who seem to have their act together. But, overall, it stinks and unless a miracle happens I cannot see us sending the HB there.

So, in talking to a few people, I decided to enroll the NZS into another high school which is reasonably close by. There are other people I know in my part of LA who have enrolled their kids in that school system as well. The kids that my club sponsors at the local high school thought this was a bit of a slap in the face, which I suppose it was. There are also some people in the club who are big supporters of public education in LA who have pointedly asked me why the NZS is enrolled in the other high school. I've told them that if that school isn't good enough for our kids (almost none of our club members have sent their kids to that school in the last 10 years), why on earth would I enroll someone else's kid in it? He's a student, not a social experiment.

So, you are probably asking yourself why is the high school in a middle class area of LA so bad? It's a little complicated and requires a bit of history.

Until the late 70s, California public schools were primarily funded by local property taxes which were based on the appraised value of homes. However, the inflation of the early 70s sent the value of homes skyrocketing along with the taxes. People were having a hard time paying taxes on this non-liquid asset. This, combined with the usual legit complaints of government waste led to Proposition 13. Prop 13 pegged property taxes at 1% of the houses sale price, with a 2% annual increase. The proposition also required a 2/3 majority to raise the tax.

The effect of Prop 13 was that local governments really had to cut back services because they lost revenue and the 2% annual increase was no where near enough to keep up with inflation. Local cities were no longer able to properly fund schools, so the quality of education dropped in most areas, especially those where parents could not afford to supplement the school budget.
The state started stepping in more and more to fund education, but the public schools were just another line item in a huge budget, so funding is not consistent from year to year. Even though Rob Reiner led another proposition to guarantee state funding as a percentage of the budget, when the state's revenue goes down (like it's going to do this year because of the collapse of the mortgage market) funding for schools goes down.

Thrown into all of this was the the LA school system started a busing program to integrate schools in 1978. This, along with the public schools losing funding, led to a huge migration of middle-class and affluent families taking their kids out LAUSD. And make no mistake, Latino, African-American and Asian-American families with the means do not send their kids to LAUSD schools either.

Something like Prop 13 was necessary. People shouldn't have to sell their houses because they can't afford the taxes. At the same time, it leaves local government zero flexibility in dealing with their revenues. Let's be real...67% of voters couldn't agree on whether something is black or white. Good public education takes three things: parent commitment, competent teachers/administrators and money. The state can't mandate parent commitment to education and parents are revolting against the LAUSD bureaucracy by forming charter schools and using private schools. But our public schools are starved for money and our current tax system can't fix that.

Enough for this soap box, perhaps more another time. Like about Huckabee's sales tax idea (here's a hint...I LIKE it).