California can't fund any of its public schools properly because of Prop 13. None of the wealthy homeowners care about this, because they're all too old to have kids in school.
you are utterly wrong here -- public school have gotten, do get, and will get, massive boatloads of money in most urban areas of California. There are many layers of money-consumers in each school system, especially in the Bay Area.
Don't ask me, I was responding to "one of the wealthiest places in the world". Though I think schools with rich enough families attending do have attached foundations and just ask for charitable donations.
The easiest way to live in the area as a schoolteacher is to marry an engineer or someone else with a home, too.
It's not clear to me how SF, the richest city in the country with the lowest percentage of children, and that charges an income tax on residents, doesn't have hands down the best public schools in the country.
They certainly have money, but money doesn't seem to be the problem here. None of the things that the article talks about have any obvious connection with school funding, but with the culture of the school and how it's run. If the school's budget doubled tomorrow, for example, they still wouldn't be able to give a grade less than 50% because they would still have a policy forbidding it.
(I went to a tiny rural elementary school located between a tractor supply store and a goat pen. Three teachers taught six grades, two grades per classroom. Compared to the SF schools, it was incredibly under-resourced -- and yet it was a Good School, academically much higher-performing. I think about this sometimes when people point at money as obviously the reason why Johnny can't read.)
Prop 13 protects people who got in early. Median house prices in SF have been over a million for close to a decade. I'd think they have plenty enough suckers by now paying five-figures in property taxes.
The problem more applies to poorer places like EPA than SF. AFAIK the main problem with SF public schools is nobody wants to use them because they'll assign you to one across the city.
