America as Texas vs. California, Part II
blog.american.com
blog.american.com
My response: They're sure as hell better in technical areas. Texas has put a lot of money and effort into funding and licensing STEM teachers at the secondary level (and maybe earlier). At the AP CS exam reading every year, Texas is always very well represented, and I'm always a little jealous of the level of support they get just in terms of state standards and that kind of thing. (Another state you might not expect is Georgia, actually. The state universities there have done a lot to raise awareness in their feeder schools---i.e. the high schools in the state---of the importance of computation and CS.)
PS: What's with the down vote the article talks about each states GDP for a reason, but ignores that difference when comparing education spending. Areas with higher GDP have higher costs as well. People love to dump on California but it's got a higher than average GDP compared to the rest of the USA so it's not completely broken.
In other words. There's good chance, if you're a wealthy Californian, you're an immigrant to California, or you're exploiting it's geographical assets (coast, sunshine, soil). To give the credit to the state government or the school system for those things seems a bit generous.
PS: I was not implying that the government was the reason why they had a higher GDP just that was higher for some reason.
However it is also easy to miss the power of key laws whose influence is so pervasive that nobody even thinks about them. For instance take Silicon Valley. I firmly believe that one of the reasons that took off in California is that California law says that anything you do on your own time with your own equipment is yours. Period. And no, you can't sign that away.
This makes it extremely difficult to contest an employee who gets a startup going then leaves to further their startup. Which stops legal challenges that otherwise would kill the Silicon Valley startup culture.
I am not a lawyer, but my belief is that Texas law is the same as the default in most of the USA - if you are a professional employee with the wrong contract then work you do on your own time with your own equipment that relates to the skills you are hired for belong to your employee. I personally know people in other states who tried the whole "start a startup, then leave you job for it" thing under regulations like that who were flat out told, "You can quit if you want but everything that you've done for that startup belongs to us." Not a fun situation.
That fact is one of the reasons why I, personally, choose to live in California.
So yes, luck. But yes, state law as well.
A higher GDP isn't worth much if you consume it to produce it.
Another aspect of this is the right to work laws vs. pro-Union laws in some states.
It would be sad if this aspect of the USA disappears (with a more powerful federal government).
A counter intuitive aspect of this is that areas which increased government spending on things like police, parks, schools, or roads could attract individuals with a higher income to live and or work. Which can result in a lower tax rate even as the local government continues to spend more money. And rich people tend to cluster by other rich people, and get surrounded by the slightly less affluent etc, so high properly values tend to discourage crime etc.
Schools and teachers are judged very closely on how their students perform on standardized tests and so anything not on the test is generally given a cursory briefing if it's mentioned at all. I definitely like being able to measure things and see charts and graphs but this seems to be one of those things where the presence of these metrics has drastically altered the way the programs operate.
I think this was actually the whole point.
Of course, Texas is the state who (at one time at least) had the educational program that focused on "The Three Rs" (Reading, Riting, and Rithmetic). Ugh. And they wonder why the US is behind.
Are there any states where this is not the case?
Except that that's not true.
Income and sales taxes are, in principle, unlimited. (Prop 13 is actually keeping city and county revenues from cratering - my property taxes went UP this year thanks to prop 13.) And the amount spent on voter mandated services doesn't dominate the budget. (There's a 50% on education requirement, but that's just a tax on spending on other things.)
CA added a lot of programs and spending since the golden era, almost all by legislative action. How much of it made things better?
CA's govt is incapable of prioritizing within the constraints laid out by voters. Yes, if voters say spend money on something, that means that the legislature may have to go without some program that they'd like.
This wealth gap also makes it difficult to educate disadvantaged kids because similarly, the rich districts poach teachers from the poor districts. Again, first-hand experience in NYC, and I see the same factors at play here in the Bay Area. Only up in SF where you have an abundance of lifestyle (cough hipsters cough) folks do you have schools that are much better than their funding levels ought to indicate.
All said, it's probably not a good idea to raise your kid in a state where the economics are tilted against the education system. So yea, Texas wins... but that's a pretty stupid win.