Personally I hope that the two Republican candidates in California both win the jungle primary - maybe that will lead to some soul searching on how bad the Democratic politicians have become in the state.
The problem for me is that when you go out in the rest of the country the dislike bordering on hate for California is really common. It is insane to me that you can send Marines to Los Angeles and almost no one cares. California is a such a huge chunk of the US economy, not just tech but agriculture, trade and yes even manufacturing.
The partisanship is poison for everyone and it holds back reform in California. We're all the same country.
Uh..
I'd do Massachusetts K-12. Texas is pretty bad.
Massachusetts consistently ranks in the top 10 in the world on PISA. An exam which removes all the political "BS"-ability from the results and comparisons. It's just your students taking the same test as all the other students in the world, and the resultant scores being ranked.
Texas K-12 is horrible. Lived there from Katrina to a few years past Harvey. Our PISA scores were consistently horrible when we were ranked internationally.
Though, curiously enough, we were not "horrible" if you only compared us to the same test results in other US states. We were nowhere near Massachusetts. But we weren't Alabama/Florida/Mississippi either. Which means education in general in the US is pretty bad outside maybe the top 3 to 5 states by performance on the PISA exams.
Texas, California, and Florida are all fairly similar, with California doing somewhat worse than Texas and Florida. Unfortunately, the dedication of California to effective education is going down over time, while even the Deep South, which has consistently been at the bottom, is going up.
Well their PISA scores haven't been going up. In fact they've been going down. So if their education is getting better, it's not showing up in the ability of their students to answer questions that other students seem to be able to answer.
That's kind of what I meant by PISA removing "BS"-ability from the equation. For some reason, on American standardized tests, all our children do great. Then we take PISA with all the other kids in the world, and the truth comes out.
That's also why I think we should all just take Massachusetts' education curriculum and implement it across the nation. Because you talk about demographics, but even when you control for income and race, kids in Massachusetts just flat out do better than our kids. Even just taking all kids at the bottom of the rankings in Massachusetts, they are still doing better than kids at the median of the rankings of many, many other states. (And think about the demographics of kids at the bottom in Boston, Brockton, or Springfield. Come on, admit it man. I'll try to stay politically correct here and just state that those very likely aren't professors' kids at the bottom of the rankings in Massachusetts.)
Massachusetts is so far ahead of all of us that I think I'd be comfortable just saying that they seem to have gotten it right, and we should simply copy it. Because right now, the gap is just getting wider and wider with every round of PISA testing.
We should, it would replace significant amounts of natural gas usage for space heating. Not doing so is literally cooking the planet.
It’s an appeal to absurdity that falls flat because nuclear plants and oil refineries have been built near population centers in the US (including in California) without problem.
California had had more issues from under investment in industry (see it’s ancient electrical infra that lit the state on fire) than from collocation of industry and people.
Both of the largest ports are right in SoCal and that’s going pretty well. Building another one would never make it past the permitting stage in today’s California.