By Peter Schrag
Reforming California’s convoluted school finance system – what former Sen. Joe Simitian called the Winchester Mystery House of school funding – has become one of the issues du jour in Sacramento. This spring we’ll find out how easy it is to pick at it (again) and how hard it is to really restructure it.
Part of the difficulty is that we don’t really know how much it costs to adequately educate each of the 6 million students in the great mix of kids in California’s schools.
Nor can we agree on what we want of our schools – can’t agree about testing, about homework, about teaching evolution, about social promotion, about bilingual education, about teacher evaluation, about standards or much of anything else.