"When Lewis Carroll's Alice tumbled down the rabbit hole into Wonderland, she was ensconced in a bizarre world where nothing was what it seemed.
Anyone who ventures into California school finance enters a similarly confusing parallel universe, where day is night, black is white, up is down, and square is round, to pen a bit of doggerel.
It centers on Proposition 98, a 1988 ballot measure purported to give schools a 'fair share' of revenue. It's so complicated that its principal drafter, education consultant John Mockler, often joked – perhaps truthfully – that he deliberately made it obtuse so that stakeholders would hire him to interpret it, thereby allowing his children to attend expensive universities."