Outlets? Trailers? How very brick and mortar.

But at a recent $250-a-head backyard fundraiser in Woodside, Calif., John Doerr, the Valley's best-known venture capitalist, and John Chambers, the CEO of Cisco Systems, stumped for the passage of a state initiative that's humbly anchored in the non-virtual world. Before a rapt crowd of more than 200 well-capitalized doyens of the local tech biz, the two Valley icons lamented the sorry state of California schools.

"Half of the classrooms don't have the electricity to plug in a computer. It just makes you sick," rallied Doerr.

"We live in one of the richest valleys in the world. And we understand that's just not right," boomed Chambers.

The subject at hand: California's dilapidated public schools, and a state proposition on November's ballot that aims to make it easier to raise funds to fix them. The details of the measure are arcane, but they boil down to this: Under California's constitution, local school bonds -- whether they're to repair aging facilities or build new classrooms -- have to win a two-thirds majority to pass. Proposition 39 would lower that threshold to 55 percent. (A similar measure that would have lowered the threshold to 50 percent failed to pass in March.)

"In California, you can build a prison for a 50 percent vote, but a local school bond takes two-thirds," says Reed Hastings, the CEO of NetFlix.

Doerr and Chambers aren't the only high-powered Valley executives on the political warpath; their proposition isn't even the only initiative aimed at fixing California schools. Proposition 38, takes on arguably the most controversial issue on the ballot. It seeks to introduce free-market competition into the public school system by extending a $4,000 voucher to each of California's 6.6 million schoolchildren for use at a private or parochial school. Proposition 38 is probably the most far-reaching voucher plan ever to come before U.S. voters, but the $20 million campaign supporting it is funded almost entirely by one man, venture capitalist Tim Draper of Draper, Fisher, Jurvetson.

Both measures can be seen as responses to the funding problems California schools have faced ever since the tax revolt of Proposition 13 more than 20 years ago. The bond measure would essentially try to undo the rollbacks of the 1978 tax revolt, while the Draper measure would steer the school system into a free-market solution. What's surprising is the widely varying success of the two measures in generating support in Silicon Valley. Given the Valley's reputation as an anti-government, privatize-everything, free-markets-conquer-all mecca for Ayn Randophiles, one might expect Draper's voucher initiative to be steamrolling ahead. Instead, it's the campaign to spend more money to fix public schools that's found Valley support, not the plan to bring the wonders of the market into public education. Proposition 38 has failed to find broad support in the local tech community; indeed, its main proponent, Draper, has now become a national poster boy for Silicon Valley new-economy political naiveté.

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