There's no denying that California has a problem with K-12 education due to Prop 13. But I grew up and was educated in Texas, and I can say the government of Texas has always been significantly more dysfunctional than the government of California. The "Texas Miracle" thing during GWB's campaign was obviously an attempt to take credit for the fact that the oil industry attracted the kind of people who care about education, not because of anything related to the government. In fact, attempting to recreate the "Texas Miracle" nationwide led to the disastrous No Child Left Behind law.

I more-likely-than-not won't end up having kids, but if I did, I would want them educated here, not in Texas. The government of Texas plays games with education to score political points in a way that the government of California does not. Besides, I question how sustainable Texas education is going to be without an income tax, and income tax is the third rail of Texas politics.

As to where I’d want my kids educated—I’m thinking from the perspective of having come to this country as an immigrant. We were solidly middle class and moved to a pretty nice neighborhood in Virginia with decent schools, but there is no way we could have afforded it today. If I were in my dad’s position, I’d definitely head to Houston or Dallas rather than San Francisco or LA. Heck, when I bought my house in the DC area, I was apalled at the school situation. I didn’t want my kids to grow up in a place where a million dollar house is the buy-in for a going to a good school district. We ended up moving to a different city and just putting up with a long commute.

My public high school in California's Inland Empire was a lot like a training camp for prison. Learning how to survive while crowded with the violent and insane. Riots happened almost every other week. Just too many kids in too small a place, and no funding to handle the problems from so many poor and broken families. You can't put 3000 kids in a school for 1000 with funding for maybe 1500 and expect anything else.

Chuck DeVore is a partisan hack.

California is a particularly egregious example. It has some of the highest teacher pay in the country while having some of the lowest per-student spending in the country. That math balances on the backs of students. So teachers are happy with pay, and old homeowners are happy with their property taxes, and the students get the short end of the stick. It’s California in a microcosm.

Texas has decent K-12 education in spite of everything the government does, not because of it.

[1]: https://www.statesman.com/NEWS/20170202/Texas-education-boar...

The sad reality is that Texas-style standardized tests measure basic material that students anywhere should be expected to know (take a look at the tests if you're not sure: this is not even the SAT we're dealing with). The primary purpose of them is to identify and remediate the many dysfunctional schools. If a school can't teach their kids this material and have 50% of them pass the test, they have a serious problem.

I'm always reading about attempts to put extreme conservatives on the state school board and restrict discussion of evolution and also avoid discussing uncomfortable issues around slavery and the founding of the country - that must not have had much impact. For housing, I kind of understand why Texas is much less expensive to live in, partly because they have those endless cities across the plains.

I think another thing is that there’s a lot of natural lived diversity. What I mean is, for example, my parents middle middle class neighborhood street looks like: black family, white family, Indian family, Hispanic family, European first generation family, just all in a row. And that’s pretty common. I think in part getting back to the housing thing, it’s within reach of most people.

As for the “extreme conservatives,” I don’t know. I think it’s one of those things that the media likes to pounce on and blows out of proportion. Yeah sometimes they do dumb stuff but generally speaking radically conservative proposals get floated by fringe political folks in red states just like radically liberal proposals get floated in blue states, then never goes anywhere. I think it’s more fodder for the news-tainment industry than actual policy making.