How to make California schools excellent again

From today's Mercury News opinion page:

Thank you for reporting on Gov. Jerry Brown's proposed California school budget. The increase in school funding is good news for many Californians and shows Brown to be a strong supporter of education.

Your paper, however, reported that the California average per-pupil funding is projected to increase from $8,469 a year to $9,194 without providing any context of what that increase means for California. Top-performing education states in the U.S. spend $16,000 to $22,000 per student. The U.S. average per pupil spending is $12,000.

A generation ago, California schools ranked in the top five, fully funded and top performing. Now, California ranks 49th in per pupil spending and its schools are bottom performing in math, science and reading. Since 1980, we've built 19 prisons. By disinvesting in our schools, we're killing our economy and creating "tax-takers" instead of "tax makers."
That's why many organizations and school boards advocate restoring commercial property taxes to fund our schools again. While our school system fails, huge California commercial property owners pay 1976 commercial property rates -- commercial property taxes that once funded our top-tier public school system and created tomorrow's workforce.

Nancy Krop

Palo Alto