by Andrea Seastrand in The Tribune

December 11,2017

Whenever progressives talk about public education, the conversation inevitably goes to the need for more money because our schools are chronically underfunded. And of course we can just tax the rich to pay for it.

That was exactly the argument presented to voters when California passed Proposition 30 in 2012, which raised sales and income taxes in response to Gov. Brown’s threat of large cuts to the public education if it failed.

Since then, the state budget has provided tens of billions of extra dollars to K-12 schools with much of it directed to districts with high numbers of disadvantaged students. So what improvements to our education system are Californians getting for the higher taxes they approved? Five years later, the latest results from state testing shows that taxpayers are getting a horrible return on their investment.

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