California public school enrollment sees big drops

It depends heavily on your location. Public schools are generally assigned based on the student's primary address, so houses in good school districts tend to attract a premium. This leaves schools in poor areas chronically underfunded and understaffed

super location dependent. There are many reasons, from the absurd to the cruel (CA for example doesn't allow property taxes/council rates to track market value, largely because of campaigning in the 70s after the Supreme Court said CA had to fund schools in poor neighborhoods to the same extent as those in rich neighborhoods).

I'm from NZ, so my US partner's Oakland, CA high school experience was horrifying:

  * They had metal detectors on entrances
  * They had armed police (or something similar: a precursor to the modern US "school resource officers")
  * They had drug dogs, one of which OD'd
  * The toilet stalls did not have doors

On the other hand, if you drove 15 minutes up the road into Berkeley, their public high schools have their own swimming pools.

I grew up in Virginia, an hour south of DC. Public schools there were large campuses, generally built within the past 30 years, with what seemed to be a good balance of teachers who actually lived near the schools they taught at. There wasn’t much of a concept in my family or anybody I knew growing up of “choosing a house near a good school” and the county would redraw the school districts from time to time to help with the bus routes or spreading load or something and it never seemed like a huge deal.

I now live in Southern California and am always surprised to see schools as 1-story buildings from the 1960s with so many trailers outside. I have no idea how far the teachers have to drive to get to them as the houses around nice schools cost so much.

Like others have mentioned, public schooling in the U.S. is heavily location-dependent. Many affluent suburbs with wealthy, involved parents have great public schools. You don't hear about them because of reporting bias: if the schools are good, the last thing you want is lots of other people coming to your town to take advantage of them, but if they're bad it makes for a good outrage piece.

American schools are fine. They are not underfunded: we spend the OECD average on K-12 as a percentage of GDP, and since we are so rich it ends up on the high end in absolute terms. Our class sizes are right around the OECD average, smaller than Germany or France: http://oecdedutoday.com/how-does-class-size-vary-around-the-....

The problem is that American kids are bad—poorly behaved and uninterested in education.

The drop in attendance is not because schools are under funded, or the staff is burnt. It's pretty clear the biggest changes that have happened in US schools in the last years.

It’s a huge country and there are a lot of public schools, so you see a lot of variance. They all (99% anyway) have the funding and infrastructure to be fine especially large cities. The problem is large swaths of parents who don’t get involved in their kids education or behavior at all, and those kids become a nightmare for teachers and other students to the point where it becomes a safety issue. It’s always in poorer areas of mostly cities. You can throw all the money you want at those schools and it won’t work because too many of the parents are just trash.

It depends on where you are city wise. If you are in an affluent area, like my cousins, then you have after school programs, Scout troops, available tutoring, excellent teachers, little to no violence and safe transportation to/from.

If you live in an area with lots of halfway houses like I did as a kid (We called it murder valley), you can expect: Violence, blatant racism, drugs, gangs, sexual assault, weekly riots, casual fights, attempted murders, one or two actual murders a year, burnt out teachers, closed after school programs, dangerous busses, and police harassing you constantly.

I was constantly getting hauled up to the office because I had the same name as a career criminal at the age of 13. Substitutes would refer kids to the office who looked sleepy for the nurse to check us for drug use. I was in constant fights with black and hispanic kids trying to prove something to their friends by beating up the white kids. Drug dogs would patrol the school. The place was run like a prison. Walking home, one of the girls in my high school went missing and her pelvis was found in a ditch a few years later...

So yeah, some of them are pretty bad. But at least we have the most overfunded military in the world.

The public schools in the nicer American neighborhoods run leaps and bounds ahead of public schools in comparable neighborhoods in other countries.

In nicer neighborhoods, the local high school is frequently comparable to a small college, with the academic (and athletic) facilities and staff to match.

You have a full spectrum from the very worst to the very best and no consistency from zip code to zip code.

School finding is primary via property taxes, so rich districts get good schools and poor ones struggle.

There is not single answer to your question. In general, they are okay if averaged out. US schools get a bad rap compared to other rich countries mostly due to some very tragic situations that make it impossible for some schools to do their jobs. For instance, there is a not insignificant portion of the student population in some places that do not speak English as a first language and sometimes at all. This is not necessarily the worst problem with our schools, I chose it simply as an illustration of something that can lead to low performing schools even if the school and staff are otherwise doing their jobs exceptionally well.

On the other hand, the US also has some of the best public schools in the world. In a lot of cases, public schools beat out very expensive private schools in metrics like average AP score, average number of AP tests taken, average SAT, percentage of students at or above grade level, etc. At this high end, the US school system outperforms peer countries significantly. Its often the case that these high performing schools are relatively accessible for non wealthy people as well. You just need to rent an apartment nearby. You don't need to buy a property in Martha's vineyard. If these types of schools didn't exist, and the US public school system was as bad overall as it appears in the media, I suspect we would not have as many ambitious and highly educated immigrants wanting to live here.