The despicable state of California (and US) public education

The state of public education in the state of California is despicable, and getting worse!

In three to five more years of No Child Left Behind and the lack of state funding our public school system may fail completely. No Child Left Behind is taking away money from the schools that do not do well on the standardized tests - so schools that are failing will have LESS resources!

It is said that 80% of California public schools will face federal take over in 5 years due to NCLB.

Our public schools rank 47 out of 50 states for funding. There is plenty of money in this state - look at the housing prices and cars. People here have money. But not everyone. Which is the problem with a failing public school system. The wealthy can send their kids to private schools or supplement the public schools (many are asking for $3000 per family) in their area with huge fund raisers. But for neighborhoods where income is low the schools are in a world of hurt. and getting worse.

With further cuts we have school districts talking about increasing class sizes more, cutting whatever extra programs are left (extra are the things like art, music, PE - the things private schools like mine realize are as important as the core subjects and for which parents pay $33,000 a year) and they are talking about maybe only having school 4 days a week so they can pay public school teachers even less!

Also with higher public education being slashed California is now poised to take back its pledge to offer a spot in college for all California residents who qualify. And of course with costs going up many can simply not afford to go to college even if there is a spot.

They say Americans, Californians especially, are becoming less educated on average than we were 20 years ago. Our work force is going to have millions more people who have low levels of education looking for work in an environment where automation and outsourcing is going to decrease the number of jobs available to those with low levels of education.

Meanwhile we are the only state that does not tax oil companies for the oil they take out of our ground! They do pay in other ways but as they are setting records for corporate profits and oil is destroying the world anyway, we should be taxing the hell out of it!

Prisons! The United States of America has more prisoners than any country in the world. China is second but as a larger country has 18% our rate of incarceration. California leads the way with hundreds of thousands of prisoners. The "three strikes your out" law doubled our prison population. They are over crowded and increasingly costly. Arnold's solution - outsource them to Mexico, he said it would cost half as much to build prisons and house prisoners in Mexico. This of course is for prisoners from other countries. For US prisoners he wants to have private prisons - prisons for profit. This makes sense! How can it be cheaper to run something for profit? Unless you cut corners. And even if it is, it has been proven that private prisons just put pressure on the system to create prisoners so the corporations have lots of business - not long ago (2 years maybe) in this country a judge was busted for taking pay offs from a private prison for sending innocent youth to prison!

How about investing in education! Perhaps if we educated people they will be able to get jobs instead of going to jail. Perhaps they will be inspired to do good things. Clearly having an educated population would benefit our economy in more ways than one.

California, you get what you pay for. Are you going to invest in your future?

We must change the rule that a 2/3rds majority is needed to pass a budget, then we need to raise taxes so we can pay for these vital programs, public education being only one of them.

And as for Obama's race to the top - I give him an "F" How can it make sense to give more money to the schools that are doing the best???? The schools that are doing the worst are the ones that need the most help.

We need to repeal NCLB for it is penalizing the same schools that need more help. It should be called "poor kids left behind". And of course it is ruining the quality of education by making schools teach their students to take standardized tests rather than teaching them to be creative and informed thinkers, which in turn will prepare them to be positive contributors to our society.

Alright, no time to continue this rant, I must take my private school students on a field trip. One of our fathers helped organize a trip to the Stanford Neurology Lab. We are going to be taught about the brain by Stanford Neurologists, we will handle real brains, learn clinical exams from interns, and see state of the art virtual imaging for brain and skull research. You see my students are being educated very differently than my own children who go to public school, simply because we cannot afford the better education, the kind of education all kids should get!