Texas makes up for the lack of income tax with fairly sizable property taxes. School funding is based off that which led to the "Robin Hood" approach in equalization (aka districts in wealthier/larger tax-base areas help finance tax-poor districts).
Yeah, and Wyoming spends more per capita on healthcare than New York. That doesn't necessarily mean it's better.
Higher-population states can better take advantage of economies of scale. Overhead costs can be spread across a larger number of taxpayers, and for this reason alone, higher-population states will often have lower per-capita costs.
Sorry, I wasn't denying that Texas spends more money per capita on textbooks. As you point out, it certainly does, according to the article.
I was worried that someone might read that Texas's per-capita spending is higher than California's and draw the conclusion that this is a big reason for why California's schools suck. I've heard a lot of people make arguments like that. "Small Country X spends so much more per capita on Y! (Implied: That must be why Y sucks for us, and our lives would be better if our country would spend more on it.)"
So I gave one reason why the returns California and Texas get from their respective textbook purchases are probably not proportional to their per-capita budgets.
Yes. I don't have rigorous data in front in me, but as a society we've become wealthier over, say, the last 60 years. In every community I've every been a part of, talked with others about, or reviewed data on, taxes for schools, as percentages of property values, income, or sales, have gone up. Greater wealth * higher tax percentages = more money/resources spent on schools.
And declining since when?
Though I'm skeptical of using test score data, the US results haven't been pretty from at least the 1970s onward. Anecdotally, however, this seems confirmed by consensus opinion. Education quality and loss of competitiveness of the median high school graduate relative to the rest of the world has been a continuing political issue for decades.
And how much?
There's no way for me or anyone to precisely quantify either part.
As for your skepticism, I simply assumed that readers knowledgeable about modern US history could appreciate the truth of my point based on the weight of their own observations.
I don't know what taxes are in Texas but I doubt they're lower than California. Because of Prop 13 California has extremely low taxes. Warren Buffett for instance pays more taxes on his $500,000 home in Nebraska than he does on his $4,000,000 home in California.
