School money and funding for the CHSRA come from different pockets. But, it’s the same pair of pants. So, the schools, which haven’t been in such great shape for decades, are now about to get worse.

It doesn’t depend on funding, you say? Let’s put it this way, school funding is a necessary but insufficient condition for school operation and improvement. Cut the funds, and it’s guaranteed to lower the quality of an already mediocre education. Just look at the high-school dropout rate.

Meanwhile, all that enthusiasm for spending borrowed money to operate the rail authority and let it contract with consultants by the dozen. Their intended budget for this fiscal year was to be $140 million, but the Senate sub-committee recommended only $60 million until January. Let’s see how that goes. Remember, their intention is to spend from $33 to $35 billion – that’s billion – for the train from SF to LA. Wouldn’t it be lovely to have some of that to make California’s schools among the national leaders, as they once were?

Most of us still don’t realize that a Nation’s most valuable natural resource is its population. What that Nation does with it, such as educate it, is the first mark of the quality of that Nation, not how many trains it has.

As I always say, we are happy to become the state with the high-speed train and the low-speed schools.

Martin