"Public education lies at the vortex of California 's swirling currents of rapid population growth, sweeping cultural change and fundamental economic evolution.
Simultaneously, schools must handle an ever-expanding load of students from an ever-widening array of ethnic, cultural and linguistic backgrounds, and try to educate them for the ever-changing requirements of employers.
Those are daunting circumstances at best - unique in their variety and intensity - but they are overlaid, as well, by California's increasingly polarized politics, and its deep ideological divisions over what public schools should be doing, how much money they should be spending, and who should be paying for them.
It may be a minor miracle - and a testament to educators' persistence - that the state's 6 million-student public education system, which consumes nearly half of the state budget, plus tens of billions of dollars more in local tax dollars and federal funds, hasn't collapsed altogether. But even though it continues to function on a day-to-day basis, it is mired in a state of perpetual crisis, as a new Rand Corp. study underscores.
Rand, a Santa Monica think tank, conducted an overview of the system for the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and concluded - not surprisingly - that California schools, once among the nation's best, have slipped to the lower ranks among the states in terms of academic test results, high school dropout rates, relative financing, class sizes and other measures of quality.
"The thing that struck me the most was the uniformly bleak picture," Rand analyst Stephen Carroll was quoted as saying in one newspaper account of the study's findings. "It's not so much bad here and there, it's unfortunate across the board."
There's a huge element of historic irony in the plight of California schools. Proposition 13, enacted by voters in 1978, capped local property taxes and shifted the primary financial burden for education to the state.
In part, the vote reflected the fact that at the time, student enrollments were falling and schools were closing as the baby boom bulge worked through the system.
But just as school financing was being constricted, California was beginning to experience the surge in population from a new wave of immigration and an immigrant-driven baby boom, an explosion of cultural diversity and a shift in the economy.
Ever since, there's been a fundamental conflict between the post-Proposition 13 financial underpinnings of public education and its increasingly complex mission. The 1988 enactment of Proposition 98, sponsored by the California Teachers Association and other elements of the "Education Coalition," locked in the schools' minimum share of the state treasury, but didn't do anything about the more fundamental conflict, which has been the Capitol's dominant issue for more than a quarter-century.
The politics of education have been dicey. Although governors and legislators routinely declare it to be their highest priority, the schools compete with other demands for dollars and as the state's white population has aged, the proportion of voters with children in schools has shrunk, thus creating one of the us-vs.-them conflicts that permeate the state's politics - notwithstanding the immense clout that the CTA and other school unions wield within the Capitol.
Now it's Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's turn to confront the education conundrum that has befuddled his predecessors. He has called for loosening some of the Proposition 98 requirements, introducing merit pay for teachers, creating more charter schools and giving new emphasis to vocational education - and indicated that his version of education reform will be placed before voters if the Legislature balks, which is very likely.
"My friends, this is going to be a big political fight," he said in his State of the State address to the Legislature last week, recounting many of the negative statistics found in the Rand report. "This is a battle of the special interests vs. the children's interests. Which will you choose?"
Whether Schwarzenegger succeeds or fails at administering his prescription for the schools' ills, their state of perpetual crisis is likely to continue, a powerful symbol of the contradictory, perhaps unsolvable conflicts that arise out of such a fast-changing, fast-growing and complex society.