Too fancy for some California schools.
As part of an HHMI-funded initiative, I do some outreach to a high school in a poorer part of San Jose. Basically a bunch of us run some hands on genetics experiments to try to get the kids to see how fun science really is. Hopefully this will get a few excited enough to want to learn more on their own and maybe one or two will even want to become scientists themselves.
Going to this high school has been an eye-opening experience. You don’t really appreciate how much California (and by extension Californians) have given up on equal education until you spend some time in a poorer district.
Most voters probably don’t have a sense of how resource-starved these schools can be. Yes, we hear all the time about the cuts in the education budget and the adverse effects they are having on schools. And the school districts where most of us live have gone a bit downhill in the last few years but most of us are satisfied enough with our schools. If we’re not, we send our kids off to private schools where, in the eighth grade, they can test whether foods are genetically modified or not (I kid you not).
But to understand how bad it really is, visit one of the nearby poorer schools. For example, last semester, the school I go to ran out of paper and had no money to buy more. No, really…they had no paper.