SBGold said:
The thing is Wifey posed the question exactly to turn it into a left-right political culture war. That was the plan and he got what he wanted.
The sneaky guy
Oh the ultimate culture war guy with the 50 threads a day is being snarky.
I know this is a little nuanced for you, but with declining enrollment you have to look at the root causes. You can't reduce it to a clever one liner about MAGA or whatever.
People leaving the public system for privates are doing so because they want their kids to have private education for reasons that can be religious, political or personal. There may or may not be a cultural war aspect to it. While private schooling is growing relative to public schooling in CA, private schooling (including home schooling) still encompasses a relatively small portion of the student population. And yes, it is the public school enrollment which is dropping, which has all sorts of consequences: financial, employment, education quality and to some degree inequality. Some of this clearly is cultural. I don't see how you discuss the issue without some of that. A lot of this isn't, but the usual cultural warriors here chose to focus on the cultural. For example, no where in my OP did I mention teachers other than they were getting laid off. Yet teachers are turning into a cultural war battle here, and it is because people like you make it one. I imagine this will ultimately somehow become a MAGA fight, knowing this board.
There are demographical changes as a factor, and if you dig deeper, in many areas, it is about out-migration of younger families and declining birth rates in many areas of CA (particularly large urban areas). Some of this has to be affordability from a common sense perspective, and affordability is a legitimate political issue in this State that people should be able to discuss without resorting to being shrill and snarky. The decline in population is intuitively less migration and lower birth rates, and I think the data bears that out. Migration is a separate issue, and I suppose can lend itself to culture wars, but it is a factor. Looking at Europe, which has had a shirking birth rate for some time, this has consequences even beyond schools, due to a shrinking tax base, governments having difficulty paying pensions and maintaining infrastructure/public health plans as the population ages. It also has meant higher taxes on the younger population (this is somewhat mitigated in certain EU countries due to migration). An example that is likely to happen in this country in the future is funding for medicare. I suppose looking at the causes of a reduced birth rate raises political and cultural issues, which is certainly beyond my knowledge base to discuss. But if there is war about that, that is on the posters here.
You are never going to discuss education and demographics without some discussion of culture. How you discuss that depends on the people here. You can do so with reasoned analysis and give and take with learned Cal grads, which I think was the original intent of off topic, or with snarky remarks. Take a look in the mirror.
