What are you talking about Don? CA ranks as among the worst public schools systems in the country in almost every metric except money spent. Granted there are good universities there, especially the private universities like Stanford and SC.

There is doubtful causation between school expenditures (ie justification for high taxes) and the performance of schools. Most goes to pensions. If there were a causation, 30 years of massive federal government spending would have increased performance instead of test scores remaining flat or failing over the last few decades.