Read an interesting comment yesterday in my alumni magazine. An earlier issue had an article ("Struggling for Words") in which English Professor Jonathan Lovell rued the effects Prop 13 has had on education since it passed in 1978.

Oh, really? (or words to that effect) was the comment.

While the state of public education is deplorable, Prop 13 is certainly not one of the causes. Assessed values, tax receipts and school funding have all increased at faster rates than inflation since its passage in 1978. The provisions of Prop 13, which create a more stable tax base, will provide a relatively "soft" landing during the recession, as not all assessed values will fall from the grossly inflated market values of recent years. Without Prop 13, the decrease in property tax revenues would be even more dramatic than what we're actually seeing. -- Pete Conrad, '82 Business

Something to think about.

Another benefit of Prop 13 for education, which I've never heard mentioned, is that it created an incentive for families to stay put, not to trade up to a bigger house. As a result, our children went from K-12 with pretty much the same set of kids. The parents worked together for years and were gung-ho about working with the schools. We knew each other, our quirks, our pet peeves, our strengths. Instead of people moving in and out and up, we had a stable foundation for volunteerism and fundraising.

But, yeah. I hadn't thought about the precipitous fall in property tax revenues that there would've been without Prop 13.

Oh, you say? But wouldn't we'd've had a mess more money if Prop. 13 hadn't been around? Yeah. We would've. Year to year. And we would've spent every frickin' dime and be left now with unsustainable programs and no funds to run them. Rainy day funds are an anomaly in this state. Alas.

Labels: California, economy, education, politics

   posted by Sal Towse at  11:59 AM|| |

Dept. of Science: Don’t! -- Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

The 18May2009 issue of The New Yorker has a loooong article by Jonah Lehrer that begins with Walter Mischel's 1960s research at the Bing Nursery School on the Stanford campus (AKA "the marshmallow experiment") and other research along similar lines.

The questions researchers and others are asking are, is the ability to delay gratification a far better predictor of academic performance and adult "success" than I.Q.? Is the ability to delay gratification a genetic trait? Will brain scans show gratification delayers' brains function differently than instant gratifiers' brains? Can one be trained to be more future-oriented and less into instant gratification? Would this help children struggling with school?

Interesting article.

Jonah Lehrer weaves his words well. These two sentences are part of Lehrer's description of Walter Mischel:

Mischel was born in Vienna, in 1930. His father was a modestly successful businessman with a fondness for café society and Esperanto, while his mother spent many of her days lying on the couch with an ice pack on her forehead, trying to soothe her frail nerves

How much is packed into those few words!

Labels: education, psychology, science

   posted by Sal Towse at  6:04 PM|| |