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.
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.