Originally Posted by
TwinFoxes
I'm a product of California public schools K-12 and then UC Berkeley. The difference between where I live now where our schools are consistently ranked #1 in the country is you just send your kids to whatever school is your neighborhood school, and don't worry about them getting a good education. In LA, my friends are applying to magnets/charters, jumping through all kinds of hoops to get into a good school, or throwing up their hands and going to private schools. I volunteered in LAUSD when I lived there (pre-kids) and I was shocked. They literally didn't have paper in the school I volunteered in. There's no way kids there are on an equal footing to the kids here no matter how much they try to make of it. My kids' school has a nurse, school psychologists, school social workers, band, strings, STEAM, ART, PE, multiple assemblies, we have a big re-enactment of a Colonial village every year. So many things that I know have been done away with in a lot of California schools. Also, if your cousins were in GATE (or whatever it's called now), they get more funding and opportunities than non-GATE kids. I was in GATE growing up and we got music, non-GATE kids didn't. The big thing here is whether or not language-immersion programs will get funded (French, Spanish, German, Korean and Japanese). Even though my kid is in immersion it's really hard for me to get worked up about it when I know what LAUSD is like.