Posted on 10/26/2009 6:53:27 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
California is a mess, but I love it all the same--especially the Bay Area, where I lived for 15 years. I went to Berkeley in 1962--a refugee from Amherst College, which at that time was dominated by frat boys with high SAT scores. I didn't go to Berkeley to go to school, but to be a bus ride away from North Beach and the Jazz Workshop. In a broader sense, I went to California for the same reason that other émigrés had been going since the 1840s. I was knocking on the Golden Door.
Immigrants from Europe had come to America seeking happiness and a break with their unhappy pasts. But many Americans--from the '49ers of the Gold Rush to Mark Twain to a young Ronald Reagan--had gone to California to find renewal. California was part of the American frontier, but, as Carey McWilliams points out in California: The Great Exception, it developed outside the framework of the American frontier. It was not an extension of the East or Midwest, but became a state in 1850 before other Western states. It was an island in the sun without Pilgrim winters or windswept prairies. It nourished its own dream of wealth and well-being. It was the American dream all over again, but dreamt within America.
California has fulfilled many of those dreams. It has extended and enhanced the promise of America--from the discovery of gold to the introduction of the movies and television, the aerospace industry, Silicon Valley, and the Central Valley's giant farms that supply a quarter of America's food. It has also been a political and cultural vanguard--from John C. Fremont, the first presidential candidate of the anti-slavery Republican Party, to Progressive Governor Hiram Johnson, Socialist Upton Sinclair, old-age-pension agitator Francis Townsend, and down to Richard Nixon, Earl Warren, and Reagan. The New Left staged its first mass protests in Berkeley. Gay rights came out of Los Angeles and San Francisco. And the New Right was spurred by California's tax revolt and by the backlash against illegal immigration.
I was drawn to California by Jack Kerouac's On the Road, but, by the time I arrived, the era of the beatniks was over. The Caffé Trieste had become a tourist hangout. Still, within a few years, I was trekking to the Fillmore to hear the Grateful Dead, living in sin, smoking pot, and marching against racial discrimination and the Vietnam war. That heady period, marked by the Free Speech Movement and Haight-Ashbury, faded by the early 1970s, but it helped inspire the rise of Apple, the personal computer, the movement for open-source software, and, later, the virtual community of the Internet and the dot-coms. (This is not some oddball observation of mine: It's documented in Steven Levy's book Hackers and in John Markoff's What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer.)
But could California's days as a politico-cultural vanguard and economic bellwether be coming to an end? The state has endured swings and has come back better than ever. Writing in 1949, with unemployment at 14 percent, McWilliams questioned whether California exceptionalism had finally come to an end, but, with the onset of the cold war, Southern California benefited from an aerospace boom. Again, in the early 1990s, California seemed to be falling into a black hole: Cutbacks in military spending decimated the state's defense industries, and, by the end of 1992, unemployment was 9.9 percent, 2.5 points higher than the national rate; that year, Kemper Securities rated California's economy fifty-first in investment prospects among the 50 states and the District of Columbia. But the growth of dot-coms, a global entertainment industry, and biotech led its rebound.
Last month, California's unemployment rate hit 12.2 percent, a 70-year high. Its bond rating is the lowest of the 50 states. Earlier, the state government had to issue IOUs. Its political system--once the envy of other states--has become dysfunctional. And its educational system, which former University of California president Clark Kerr described as "bait to be dangled in front of industry," is riven by conflict and reeling from budget cuts. Is this déjà vu all over again, or has the California dream finally become a nightmare? There are troubling signs.
I'm not big on traveling, but when I get a chance to visit California, I take it. Last month, I traveled back west as a guest of Stanford's Hoover Institution to attend a conference on educational reform. Education's not a specialty of mine, but I hoped that studying California's tarnished system, which was once the jewel in the state's crown, would provide a window into what is happening in the state. I was not disappointed.
When I first went to California, its elementary and high schools were thought to be among the nation's best. The schools were generously endowed--the fifth-highest in spending per pupil among the states--and about half of California's high school graduates went to college, compared with less than one-third in the rest of the nation. And Kerr and Governor Pat Brown were determined to go further.
The bald, bespectacled Kerr, a labor economist, had a stormy tenure as university president--he was denounced by students as a technocrat who wanted to turn the university into a service center for the military-industrial complex, and by conservatives for refusing to crack down on the student rebels--but he turns out to have been one of the country's great educators. The Master Plan he devised in 1960 for California's higher education, which Brown got the legislature to adopt, represented a high-water mark of American progressivism and of the California dream. Kerr's idea was that every Californian who graduated from high school should be able to attend college. High school graduates in the top 12.5 percent of their class were to be admitted to the university system, headed by Berkeley and ucla. Students in the top third could go to one of the state colleges, and any graduate could gain admission to a community college from which, after graduation, he or she could transfer easily to a four-year college. Community college was virtually free, and the state universities charged very modest fees--$80 per semester when I attended Berkeley. (We of the New Left objected to the tracking implicit in Kerr's system--we insisted, in effect, that everyone should be able to go to Berkeley--but we had a vision of America that bore no resemblance to existing reality.)
That system, which was emulated by other states, has fallen into disrepair. California now ranks seventeenth of the 20 largest states in the percentage of ninth-graders who go to college--36.3 percent compared with a 41.8 percent national average and 58.2 percent in Minnesota. And it ranks eighteenth among the 20 largest states in the percentage of high school graduates who go directly to college. The problem comes partly from the state government's abandonment of the community college system: Community colleges receive about $5,500 in fees and state funding for each student each year, while the universities get $22,000 and the state colleges $12,000. But the heart of the problem lies in California's K-12 education: According to the Department of Education's National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests, California eighth-graders came in forty-eighth in 2007 among the 50 states and District of Columbia in reading and forty-fifth in math.
At the conference at Stanford, members of Hoover's Task Force on K-12 Education tried to explain why schools in California and elsewhere were performing poorly. The experts generally blamed bad teaching and the refusal of the teachers' unions to do anything about it. They want to improve the teaching through evaluations that weed out bad teachers, through merit pay to reward good ones, and by paying extra to teachers willing to teach in problematic schools. They also want to use school choice and, in some cases, vouchers, and the establishment of charter schools to pressure poorly performing schools. (With support from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has advanced a set of proposals along these lines.) For many reformers, everything begins and ends with bad teachers and union obstinacy.
At the gathering, held in a plush conference room, one of the experts projected tables and graphs comparing various states. It was there that I had my own "AHA!" moment. The states with thriving educational systems were generally northern, predominately white, and with relatively few immigrants: the New England states, North Dakota, and Minnesota. That bore out the late Senator Patrick Moynihan's quip that the strongest factor in predicting SAT scores was proximity to the Canadian border. The states grouped with California on the lower end of the bar graph were Deep South states like Mississippi and Alabama with a legacy of racism and with a relative absence of new-economy jobs; states like West Virginia that have relatively few jobs for college grads; and states like Nevada, New Mexico, and Hawaii that have huge numbers of non-English-speaking, downscale immigrants whose children are entering the schools. California clearly falls into the last group, suggesting that California's poor performance since the 1960s may not have been due to an influx of bad teachers, or the rise of teachers' unions, but to the growth of the state's immigrant population after the 1965 federal legislation on immigration opened the gates.
CLICK ON ABOVE LINK FOR THE REST..... (WISH I HAD GOOD NEWS, BUT IF THINGS DON'T TURN AROUND, I'M NOT SURE IF THIS STATE HAS A FUTURE WE ALL LIKE TO SEE ).
Two words:
Illegal Immigration.
I was born and raised in California and it was very beautiful when I was a child.
No longer.
Cali has been (bleeped) up since the end of WWII. I don't care if they voted GOP in national elections for the first few decades after.
Explanation for the toilet bowl of CA: Corrupt Socialist Liberal RATs (look at CA Assembly and Pelosi, Boxer, and Feinstein; case closed)
Two words:
Democrat Party.
My wife was born and raised in California. I lived there for years and really liked the San Diego area.
My wife is very motivated to move back but I’m putting the brakes on for now. I really don’t trust the state government to respect my private property rights.
Let alone Parental Rights in California. Go figure, they eliminated the terms "Mom" and "Dad".
Can we dissolve California and split it into two or three equal sized states? And in doing so, split up the electoral significance of Kaliforniastan?
The 49rs came to hang out on the beach and “reinvent” themselves?
What a load of crrp.
And it was the Kerouac types that destroyed this state with their poisonous anti-culture.
I read to the end of the article. The author thinks the problem with California is conservative Republicans and Prop 13.
Yawn.
California wouldn’t be such a bad
place if it weren’t for all the jerks
that moved here after 1849.
An excellent idea.
California is on a one-way downhill slide.
Beautiful state, if too arrid (ironic sitting next to the ocean, that CA suffers constant water shortage). However everything productive and positive has been taxed and regulated for so long, the Golden State is becoming the 21st century working example of Atlas Shrugged.
There is a massive growing, mostly uneducated population of residents who do not even self-identify as American. Speak no English. And really see non-Mexicans as interlopers.
The number of these “reconquistas” is growing, even as outward fleeing of productive taxpayers from the state reduces the number of people paying for the mess.
lol too late to do anything about illegal immigration, the Republican Party no longer has the numbers and to be blunt, White People just don’t have many kids, if at all.
California has lost its Culture.
No amount of money, protest, Gov’t planning or sunshine will change that.
Your wife wants to move *back* to California?
Has she been back recently?
I’m here. Loved it. But seriously. Moving (to) CA right now, would be a bit like having bought a McMansion on a variable rate Mortgage for a half million dollars, 5 years ago.
My job currently keeps me here - though clearly that will change at some point as the office has been almost entirely outsourced now.
This poster won’t be staying, after that.
IMHO California is about to fly apart at the seams.
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