Some people don't seem to understand the gravity of the problem

Take the Sacramento Bee's Dan Walters. In a column entitled " Budget gap spotlights public school funding "

starts out:

Inevitably, every debate about California's deficit-riddled budget morphs into a fight over how much money we should be spending on public schools and how that money should be spent.
It's happening again as the Capitol's political figures wrestle with a deficit that's worse than usual and as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposes – semiseriously – a $4.8 billion whack in state aid to schools.

I'm don't know where he got the idea that Arnold was semiserious in his budget. But the best(or worse) of this column comes at end

Cutting school financing, as Schwarzenegger proposes, certainly doesn't make the task of improving performance any easier but, as the Stanford researchers implied, merely spending money doesn't, unto itself, guarantee a better outcome. There is virtually no statistical correlation between a state's level of per-pupil spending and its standing in national academic tests or high school graduation rates.

Other factors such as poverty, peer and familial pressure, and cultural values all play roles in academic outcomes that merely spending more money doesn't alter. Unfortunately, however, the Capitol is incapable of debating education in any terms other than money.

Words fail me. Across California, School Districts(and, more importantly, the children they serve) are facing disastrous cuts in services, and Mr. Walters, one of the most widely read columnists in Sacramento, is ignoring the fact that we are already ranked 47th in the country in spending per pupil. Arnold's cuts would put us seriously below Mississippi in spending per pupil.
His email address is dwalters@sacbee.com. I encourage everyone to write him and encourage him to consider moving to Mississippi where educational spending is more to his liking.