The Demise of California's Public Schools Reconsidered

Abstract

I’m not sure when I first got interested in this particular line of research—the fact that I have a son who is now 10 and that we had to make a lot of decisions about his educational future probably got me a bit worried, but I think it actually dates back to when we first arrived in California in the fall of ’79. It seemed that all anyone was talking about was Proposition 13, which had passed by a nearly 2-to-1 margin (65 to 35 percent) the previous year. Everywhere we went, it was Proposition 13 this and Proposition 13 that. Some people felt that the voters had just gotten into an angry snit and had irrationally gone on an antigovernment crusade without thinking about the consequences; people on the other side felt that they had been provoked by then-governor Jerry Brown’s inane fiscal policies. I don’t know if we ever sorted that out, but the conventional wisdom, both among public-policy experts and the voters on the street, has been that Proposition 13 was roughly equal to the Sylmar earthquake, except that we inflicted it upon ourselves.