CA's educational system fell apart long before that, jfern. They were the first to adopt the experimental education methods from the 60s and early 70s. They are now among the last to drop these widely discredited programs.
What experimental education methods? I've haeard that CA had pretty good schools before Prop. 13 was passed in 1978.
Personal grammar (there is no proper grammar, write how you want), personal spelling (same as above, for spelling), hands off science instruction (let the kids loose in a field so they can learn biology) and a variety of other hair-brained, highly unsuccessful programs got their start in California before Prop 13 ever saw the ballot box. Some schools still practice them.
Tredrick, I agree with you 100%. Many hare-brained liberal ideas took over the educational establishment in the 1970s and served to dumb down education. Liberals of course think the quality of education begins and ends with the level of money spent, and somehow what is spent is never enough for these people.
But the types of ideas that you describe have a lot to do with the decline of education. It doesn't matter how much money you're spending, if you ignore spelling, grammar and science in favor of social indoctriation.
I remember those "science" programs well. My 7th grade science class was in a chemistry lab, and we were supposed to do experiements, I guess, but that was never made clear, so we crumpled up paper balls and played modified golf, using the holes in the tables as our holes. The teacher sat there and watched us. We were "expressing our individuality" and of course, learning nothing. This is the liberal approach to education in full bloom. And this was an affluent school district with excellent facilities and a high per-pupil spending rate on education.
I remember at my brother's school there was a federally funded program called WEDGE - "writing every day generates excellence." The essence of it was that nothing should impede a child's writing creativity, and by nothing, I mean things like spelling, grammar, sentence structure, etc. My mom was outraged about the program, and cited the fact that it was federally funded, and that it was used in New York City schools, as proof that it was no good (she was right). The district eventually had to get rid of it, but they first implemented it because it allowed them to get a federal grant. This is the insidious nature of misguided federal involvement.
ESL is another boondoggle. Kids are maintained and taught in a foreign language at the precise time when they could learn English most easily with a more aggressive immersion program. In New York, the program is so bad that kids whose native language isn't even Spanish are placed in programs where they are taught in Spanish. There's an ugly political agenda at play here, with "community activists" trying to prevent latinos from being assimilated, because they're easier to control when they're isolated, as well as the more venial and petty desire to maintain and expand the funding for these worse-than-useless programs as a pork barrel measure.
Keep preaching the truth, man.
