Like Dutchy, I support federal education standards. I also support state-run funding, rather than local, but it needs to be done right. Being a former teacher who lives in California, I feel like I need to chime in here. In most, if not all states, public schools are funded by property taxes. In the late 70s, CA passed legislation [Proposition 13] that did two things: 1) Property taxes would be collected by Sacramento and funding for education would be handled by the state rather than local government 2) Property taxes would never increase I don't specifically have much of a problem with Part 1. If the revenue from property taxes on multi-million dollar homes will now be distributed to all public schools, instead of just the ones local to those wealthy areas, everybody wins. However, making it impossible to ever raise property taxes really fuc­ked us. Now, some of you may not know about the diversity of California's residents. Because of the sheer size of California, there's some pretty rural areas and a good number of low income and poor people. On the flip side, there's also outrageous millionaires with their mansions and garages full of Ferraris. In combination with these expansive homes, there was a huge real estate boom throughout most of SoCal in the 90's. For example, my parents bought their 4 bedroom, 4 bathroom, 3 car garage house for $250k in 1992. It is now worth over $1m. As a result of Prop 13, we couldn't take much advantage of this housing boom in order to better fund the schools. Instead of expanding their education and raising the quality, a great many CA schools have been cutting courses and programs. In the school district I taught in, which was in a pretty affluent area, the music, art, and science programs were funded entirely through a non-profit organization created specifically to raise money for the schools, instead of being funded by local property taxes which would have more than covered our bases.