Ashlee Williams blog post

Education is one of the most important areas that the government needs to fund. It is important to plan for the future and to make sure that everyone is going to receive a similar education to their peers throughout the nation.
Bilingual education in California is completely necessary and I believe beneficial even for children whose primary language is English. If children learn 2 languages before middle school, it will be easier for them to learn a third language in high school, rather than ‘learning’ a second language in high school and intending to study a third language later. Once bilingual education becomes the norm for schools, the negative stigma that is currently associated with it will fade. I am now disappointed that I did not learn Spanish when I lived in a mainly Hispanic neighborhood and again when I enrolled in French in high school and later became a French minor in college. Though I can learn the language later in life, I feel that it would have been a definite advantage in my life and probably my French language skills to have been taught Spanish in elementary school.
Proposition 13 led to California’s disadvantage in funding and led their ratings to fall from the top schools in the nation to the bottom with 60% the amount of funding that other states’ schools receive. If California’s schools had the population that most other states’ schools have this would be able to be adapted for and schools would be able to function at the high rates of the past. With overcrowding and lack of books, the students that would normally just barely pass end up failing and it shows up as poor ratings for the schools. I think if schools in California were adjusted to fit the same characteristics as schools in other states, including class sizes and fluency of students and the same amount of money per student, the education would be approximately the same but due to three negative factors all at the same time public schools are forced to do the best they can with what they can fundraise or cutting corners.
At this point, even if public school funding was increased to the highest in the nation, it would take close to a full generation for students to catch up with the nation, with the poor preparation that many children receive in elementary school that leads to students struggling in regular classes in high school. While it is a worthwhile pursuit, with Prop.13 and the current economy it is not looking hopeful for schools to improve any time soon.
For me, while public education in California, is a problem I feel that some of the responsibility that we place on the districts should be laced on the students. I graduated from a lower-middle class high school that while it was fairly new, it was severely overcrowded with my graduating class having over 900 students. While our school didn’t have nearly as much money as other schools I still managed to learn enough that I felt prepared for my college classes. Many other students did the same and even though some students slipped through the cracks, this was due to the fact that they did not want to be there and while they may have thrived in smaller classes that unfortunately was not an option unless you wanted to pay for the one private high school in our city. Of course, many parents could not afford this or did not want to send their children to a private Catholic school and the overcrowded schools in the area were their only options. It would have been nice to go to a small close-knit high school but I feel that I learned many valuable lessons
from the large school environment and that students should try their best to learn from the situation rather than giving up because they are not receiving the same perks as a richer school.