Brown moves state away from DC-centric reformers

by Brian Leubitz

Not only is Jerry Brown standing up to Arne Duncan on testing, but he’s also something of a pioneer in tweaking the school funding formulas.  Sure, our per pupil spending is still shockingly low, but with our recovery, we have a little more money to shift around. It’s how that shifting is going to work that has brought the state into the disagreement with so-called education reformers.

As I noted in a post last week, California and Washington have taken distinctly different approaches to achievement gaps that increasingly are most closely associated with economic inequality. Rather than focusing on firing “bad” teachers and closing schools, California has moved to direct more resources to low-income districts and increase local decision-making, with sanctions a last resort after support and technical assistance have failed. …

In March, the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, headed by Brown’s appointee Linda Darling-Hammond, pushed back against the federal predilection to ensure teacher quality by de-emphasizing preparation standards in favor of a holy grail of downstream effectiveness measures. The Commission voted to ramp up pre-service training requirements for interns teaching English learners and in-service supervision requirements for all interns, particularly those teaching ELs. And Washington’s darlings, Teach for America and the charter school lobby, suffered a rare loss when the credentialing commission determined “innovation” can’t excuse putting teachers who know little or nothing about teaching English as a second language in front of English learners.(EdSource)

I had a few friends that went through the TeachForAmerica program, and I know it was an extremely beneficial experience for them. However, it is far from clear that the same can be said to be true for the students. Test results don’t really bear it out, and simple common sense should dictate that enthusiasm alone won’t replace the years of training that helps to make good teachers for our students.

Moreover, the Governor has been one of the bigger supporters of reforming our testing system, as shown through that recent fight with Sec. Duncan over testing and the new Common Core Curriculum. NCLB has been something of a disaster for our long term competitiveness. It made many of our students good test takers and really solid at learning how to jump through hoops. But “fill in the bubbles” testing gives us a very two-dimensional description of our students. Gov. Brown has been focused on testing that covers more ground and emphasizes the skills that the students need.

These tests are a little more difficult to develop, and in the best case scenario aren’t delivered as often. That, of course, doesn’t make the education reformers all that happy. But it is in the best interests of our students and our teachers. While some would argue that “America’s Greatest Eduation Governor 2013” is too close to CTA, it is clear that he is working with the teachers for the benefit of our students. We need to keep good teachers in the classroom, and encourage below average teachers to become better. The Governor is working with CTA to do that, a laudable goal from any perspective.

The whole EdSource article is worth a read, but if nothing else, this is a solid takeaway:

Is it too much to hope that Washington will begin taking notice and start moving toward the anti-poverty educational policies being pursued in the state where one in eight public school students attend school? Or perhaps the best we can hope for is that continued partisan gridlock in D.C. will continue to create opportunities for California to go its own way.(EdSource)

Not only should California be allowed to develop our own reforms, other states should work to emulate our programs where they prove to be successful. Gov. Brown deserves a lot of credit for his continued strong education record.

By Miriam Hernandez, Student Leader with Californians for Justice in Fresno and Senior at Roosevelt High School.

As I wake each morning, I tell myself, “Thank you God for another day, may I encounter smiles on people’s faces.” I walk to school and I run into a lot of students. Sadly, I can tell some are hurting inside. I wonder about their story and if they receive help at school rather than just being taught.

Lately, there have been many articles in the news media about school dropout and truancy rates. Schools have improved, but some issues remain. Programs are also being implemented to solve the problems, but what about the students’ opinion? After all, we know what it’s like in school, what is and isn’t working. Rather than just hearing us out, why can’t actions include our opinions?

I have been in the shoes of these students, wondering and asking myself questions daily. In elementary school, I wondered why students were given different resources and why some didn’t receive any at all. I also wondered why some students would constantly get in trouble and suspended continuously, and why there wasn’t much done to help them stay in school and improve.

Years passed as I transitioned to middle school. The issues and disagreements became physical, harmful fights. The faces of students I once knew in elementary school drifted away. I had no clue who my old classmates had become. I wondered if they were OK, if they attended school and if they were accomplishing their goals.

Now, as a senior in high school, I have seen a great number of students drop out for various reasons. Watching this happen not only affected me, but it made my community unhealthy.

I see so much talent in these students. Some students are unable to know their talents in school because they feel there is no point in going to class if they are just going to be sent out of the classroom. Of course, it may be reasonable to send out a student for acting up, but it is also reasonable to find out why the student is acting up in the first place.

Since freshman year, I have been involved with groups like Californians For Justice, a racial justice student-led organization working for better schools and lower dropout rates. I have also become involved in Building Healthy Communities, a campaign of the California Endowment whose goal is to support the development of communities where kids and youth are healthy, safe and ready to learn.

In BHC, I participate in Project S.U.C.C.E.S.S. (Students United to Create a Climate of Engagement, Support and Safety) where our focus is to ensure that schools provide a supportive environment and reach out to help students stay on target to graduate. Whether it is listening to the issues happening at home, hearing the reasons that lead students to fight or helping students think of better ways to solve conflicts, we should see more students staying in school, not more students suspended or expelled. We need to keep students in school and see them move on to graduation instead of watching them fail.

These programs have helped me build the skills I didn’t know I had inside. Most of all, they help my voice grow and be heard.

The youth voice is worth listening to. We are the most affected by these issues, and we must build a voice with several ideas to find solutions.

We might be portrayed as just “kids,” but they always leave out the fact that we are “just kids with answers.” Why else would we give up our Friday nights, our weekends and even our holidays to discuss how we can help improve education and keep our peers in school? Our voices must be heard, too.  

Note: this is a cross-post from The Realignment Project.

Introduction:

In part 1 of a New Deal for California, I discussed why any effort to rebuild the state must begin with a frontal assault on high unemployment as the only reliable means of achieving budget stability – as opposed to self-defeating quests for balance via austerity. In part 2, I studied how the quest for a more perfect democracy is inextricably linked to a renewal of democratic control over the state's own revenues.

Today, I want to discuss two areas of policy that are among the largest spending categories in the California state budget, but which also represent two faces of the state, and two approaches to developing its youth, and two sets of values – namely, education and prisons.

Arnold's recent proposal to put a floor under higher education at 10% of the state budget and a ceiling over prisons at 7% of the state budget is only the most recent example of a long trend of discussing the two in the same breath. As I discussed in the linked article, Schwarzenegger's approach is fundamentally flawed, a mirage of egalitarianism masking a reality of utter callousness. A moral society cannot pay for the future of its most talented youth through the deliberate immiseration of its least advantaged.

However, a New Deal for California will have to grapple with the reality that California will either educate or incarcerate its young, and that the power to choose lies with us.

Higher Education:

In my previous posts on higher education, I've tried to get across the idea that the purpose of public higher education is to expand and improve the functioning of democracy, that higher education is a social and public good, not a private commodity, and that the way a public university is run speaks volumes about the values of the society. If there is an overarching theme here, it's that the choices a state makes on higher education both reflect and shape the nature of its society. A state where the children of the poor and the children of the rich are equally limited only by the boundaries of ambition and ability will be a society is genuinely one of equal opportunity and healthy, meritocratic competition. At the same time, states should also think of higher education as a social investment in a high-road economy, distinguished by high levels of skill and education, high wages, and high living standards.

A New Deal for California is absolutely about making that investment and choosing that high-road, but one of the things you see in public discourse about higher education in California in progressive circles is a certain fuzziness – when it's razor-sharp conviction that wins the day in politics. There's the required genuflections in the direction of the 1960 Master Plan, and perhaps even a statement about how “college should be free!” or how cheap it was to attend the U.C when they were young, but nothing about how we proceed from where we are to were we want to go.

By contrast, I think a New Deal for California had to start with a genuine commitment to a new Master Plan for California that charts a path for gradually reducing tuition to $0 for the U.Cs, CSUs, and Community Colleges over the next 20 years. We should be clear about how much this will cost: it will take about $1.7 billion a year to make the U.C tuition-free, about $2 billion a year to make the CSUs tuition-free (about $5,000 a year in tuition times 417,000 students), and about $1.78 billion a year ($614 a year times 2.9 million students) to make the Community Colleges tuition. Altogether, we're talking about $5.8 billion per year, or an extra $290 million per year.

Assemblyman Torrico's AB 656, which would establish a 10% excise tax on oil extraction to provide about $2 billion a year to higher education (a system already in place in Texas, which funds the University of Texas through an oil excise tax). That gets us about a third of the way to our goal. The rest could be assembled from a variety of revenue sources – this is not beyond the means of one of the richest states in the Union,  and one of the richest economies in the world.

One idea that has been suggested in the United Kingdom by Ed Milliband (Labour M.P, Shadow Energy and Climate Change Secretary) is to replace tuition costs with a “grad tax.” The idea would be that, instead of requiring students to pay tuition and go into debt up-front, which acts as a prohibitive burden for many working-class students and constraints the future career choices of graduates, that we instead ask graduates to pay a progressive surcharge of between “0.25% and 2% of their income over a 20-year period,” enabling graduates to contribute, according to their ability to pay, to higher education whether they work for a non-profit or a Fortune 500 company.

As I have said before, the ultimate goal that we should be thinking about is not 100% of the youth population attending university, but rather that 100% of the youth population being able to achieve whatever level of skill or training that their ability and ambition provides for. This means treating skills training- whether it comes in the form of a union apprenticeship, vocational or technical college, or a professional course in a community college – as just as important as any other form of education. It means paying more attention to helping students get employed as well as enrolled (such as is the case in the German and Japanese education systems). And it means making sure that students graduate high school able to take advantage of higher education/training.

A Word About K-12:

I'll only say a few words onK-12 education, since it's not an area of public policy that I've actually done much work on. As someone who's been a TA at the U.C for four years, I can certainly attest to the fact that California needs to do a better job at preparing students, both for college and employment, because it's quite surprising how many of the top 12.5% of high schoolers in California have real problems with constructing essays or interpreting reading.

Here's what I'll say – I believe that the “Educational Equality Project” reform community has over-emphasized college preparation, has tended to over-emphasize incentives over resources, and relies too much on an economistic model of corporate efficiency. I think primary and secondary schools should emphasize employment as well as college, and experiment with the German and Japanese model of partnering with employers to offer students additional paths for career development; in part, I think this comes from an approach to manifest class and racial inequalities that opts for individual, behavioral intervention (assuming that schools can “solve for” poverty without outside interventions on social conditions, and emphasizing college attendance without consideration for labor market conditions).

Moreover, I think reformers have under-sold the degree of resources that will be needed to correct inequalities in resources (which is why California needs to move to equalization of funding across school districts) as well as social and cultural capital. Things like increasing instruction time, providing tutoring to struggling students, and lowering class sizes are all well and good – I'd even add commitments to expand Head Start to 100% of those within 150% of poverty, and extend it, “Follow Through” style, to prevent “Head Start fade” in primary school –  but they will require a significant commitment of funds to work.

I think the rhetorical emphasis on incentives over resources comes from two sources: first, it comes from the unspoken recognition that a lot of the key policies adopted in heavily-promoted charter schools aren't costless, which raises questions about scaling. KIPP is lauded among EEP-style reformers, but a 60% longer school day/year, 24/7 teacher availability, and weekend work costs, and not just in dollar terms – 50%-plus turnover rates are common in KIPP schools. Second, it comes from what Matt Yglesias refers to as a “Green Lantern” theory about education – if teacher productivity and efficiency are what matters, then you don't have to deal with the fact that California schools are 43rd in the nation in per-pupil spending, because all you have to do is push teachers hard enough. At the end of the day though, resources are real and it is not impossible for California to commit to raising its commitment to the top 10 in the nation over a period of 10-20 years, similar to the commitment to tuition-free higher education as well.

Finally, as I've said before, I think the debate over accountability and results has become poisoned by the link between the models of accountability used by reformers and ideas about corporate efficiency, leading to a massive level of distrust among teachers and their unions. I've said it before, but it bears repeating – I'd be very interested to see how EEP reformers would react to an offer to have accountability and performance targets negotiated right into collective bargaining contracts, and put the unions in charge of and responsible for teacher quality.

Prisons:

All of this discussion of resources brings us to the piggy bank that both Schwarzenegger and I are hoping to use to improve the quality of education – California's overstuffed prison population, the second-largest in the nation. Right now, California imprisons 616/100,000 persons, and its prison population has been growing 500% over the last twenty years. This expansion has led to a growing budgetary burden, overcrowding, and a series of lawsuits over health and safety standards. No one particularly disputes that something needs to be done, but there are different ways to go about it.

Schwarzenegger's vision is to combine privatizationand outsourcing – essentially to shove our prisons off our books and avoid changing the way we deal with our offenders. This is morally unacceptable for any sane society. Private prisons are rightly notorious for corruption, abuse, and the further cutting of corners on medical care, living conditions, and safety standards. Shifting our prisons to Mexico is simply an attempt to do privatization without getting tripped up by lawsuits filed in American courts when the inevitable lawsuits alleging subhuman standards emerge. California should certainly commit to keeping prison spending below 7% of the state budget, but this is not a just way to do it.

However, there are ways to solve our prison problems. California's shift to drug courts and rehabilitation has paid dividends in the form of 10,000 fewer prisoners on drugs charges than in the 1990s, but there are still 30,000 prisoners on non-violent drugs charges who could be better dealt with outside the prison system. The bigger target is California's broken parole system – about 70% of parolees are re-incarcerated (the vast majority of cases being not new criminal violations but rather some technical violation of the terms of parole), at a rate that has increased six-fold in the last 20 years. As a result, about two-thirds of prison admissions are parolees rather than new offenders. There are better ways to handle our parolee problem than the current system of catch and release, and solving our parole problem would largely solve our overcrowding problem.

Dealing with these two factors would allow California's criminal justice system, including the police, courts, prisons, and parole systems, to focus on doing a better job with the prisoners we've got. This means more, not less, effort directed at deterring violent crime and higher rates of arrest; this means freeing up resources to separate out first-time and non-violent offenders from hard-core criminals and violent offenders, with an eye towards reducing our state's abysmally high recidivism rate. In the end, being smart about crime works better than toughness for toughness' sake.

On an ironic note, one of the few truly successful anti-recidivism strategies in the U.S has been the oft-targeted, poorly-funded college education programs. Expanding the commitment of college for all to the prisons might itself help to solve our prison problem.

Side-note – on Interdependent Parts:

In earlier segments of this series, I talked about the need for an overarching vision for California, beyond just the policy-specific pieces. To that end, it's important to see how education and prison policy fit as parts of a larger whole. For example, let's examine the impact of full employment policy and changes to democratic governance and revenue on these two areas of public policy.

To begin with, full employment would greatly increase the public revenues available for K-12 and higher education. It would also add on a crucial back-stop to our system of educational development, ensuring that U.C and CSU and CCC graduates who've received incredibly expensive training don't get thrown on to an overcrowded labor market (as is happening now) where they can't find work, leaving their training to go to waste. It also means that rather than focusing solely on college attendance as our only strategy for getting kids out of poverty that we can offer them a chance at high-wage full time employment. Prior to the unraveling of high-wage labor in the 1980s, a high school graduate who had neither interest nor aptitude for an academic career could get a job for life as a skilled, semi-skilled, or even unskilled worker and be assured of economic security and a middle-class standard of living. With full employment, there's no reason that we can't build our way to an economy that provides opportunity to those kids as well as the college-bound.

Full employment would also greatly reduce our prison burden. We know that anywhere from one-third to two-thirds of prison admissions are unemployed at the time of incarceration, that many property crimes are associated with unemployment, and that the increased difficulty of finding employment as an ex-offender is a major cause of recidivism. While certainly not a silver bullet (violent crime is not particularly correlated with employment rates), full employment can only help. (On a slightly more cynical note, one of the reasons why prison guard unions have resisted parole reform, decriminalization, and other efforts that might reduce the prison population is out of a desire to protect the jobs of their members. In a full employment economy, where workers could be assured of having a job, this political inertia could be more easily overcome).

A similar case is true for democracy and revenues. A more functional democracy, where legislators could more easily match our revenues to the level and kind of goods and services demanded by the people, is one where the kinds of commitments we want to make to both higher and primary education can be made, and where reforms to our prisons systems can be more transparently and directly debated and carried out.

Conclusion:

There are 159,000 students at the University of California. They are among the top 12.5% of our youth, the most talented, the best educated, with the greatest likelihood to succeed. There are 170,000 prisoners in the California prison system – they are disproportionately young, non-white, and less-educated. Even when they are released, they will find it more difficult to find employment, housing, and credit. To place the burden of the best prepared on the least prepared is to compound injustice with unfairness.

Note: this is a cross-post from The Realignment Project. 

Introduction:

(Note: finding precise figures and statistics about Blue Gold is not particularly easy. If my numbers here are off, I will gladly revise the piece)

My previous post about the U.C’s policy towards post-docs and other researchers whetted my interest in the travails of the public university, especially as it deals with the universal budgetary crisis faced by higher education during the recession and the underlying process of privatization faced by many public institutions.

The result is a new mini-series of posts about how to rebuild the public university going forward. And a good place to begin will be to make an important distinction about what isn’t a viable strategy for the renewal of the public university – the much-ballyhooed Blue Gold Opportunity Program that U.C President Marc Yudof has made his calling card.

Assessing Schwarzenegger’s Amendment:

Before I explore the nature of the Blue Gold program, it would be remiss of me to overlook the kind of late-breaking news that rarely happens in the world of policy blogging. In his State of the State Address, Gov. Schwarzenegger proposed a new constitutional amendment that would ensure that state spending on prisons would be limited to no more than 7% of the general fund budget and that state spending on higher education would be expanded to no less than 10% of the general fund budget. This policy would be gradually enacted beginning in the 2010-1 budget and culminating in the 2014-5 budget, by which point the transition from current spending would be complete.

It is unusual in the extreme too see a political 180° like this from the same man who created the 2004 compact with the U.C Regents that decreased state support for the U.C, increased student fees by 10% per year (directly creating the need for a Blue Gold program), and committed the U.C to privatizing its funding to compensate for the loss in state funding. More than 190,000 students and 103,000 faculty and staff no doubt wish that Governor Schwarzenegger had thought of his constitutional amendment six years ago.

So, what are we to make of Gov. Schwarzenegger’s road to Damascus moment? On one level, a commitment of this kind would be the profound change in public higher education in California since the creation of the Master Plan in 1960. As this chart notes, the state’s fiscal commitment to the Plan’s vision for universal, free public higher education has slipped inexorably downwards. For just this year alone, the proposed constitutional amendment would have meant $1.7 billion more for the University of California, easily outstripping the $813 million cut it received instead.

All is not sweetness and light, however.

• First of all, this proposed constitutional amendment does not answer the larger chronic revenue shortage that the U.C’s budget faces; 10% of a budget that has tumbled almost $60 billion since the beginning of the economic downturn, in a state in which revenue bills require a 2/3rds vote to pass the legislature, may not be worth very much.
• Second, a constitutional amendment that requires minimum funding would exacerbate California’s budgeting problems – given that Propositions 98, 49, and other so-called “auto-pilot” provisions such as Medicare spending and debt repayment eat up 90% California’s budget, carving out another 10%, even if that’s balanced by a reduction in prisons spending only further limits the ability of the state legislature to set policy priorities.
• Third, there’s a nasty little razor blade in the candyfloss: the privatization of California’s prisons. If you read the text of the proposed constitutional amendment, the California Department of Corrections is empowered to “contract with a private entity for the building of, operation of, transfer of inmates to or placement of inmates in private correctional facilities,” including staffing of all correctional facilities (both in terms of medical and security personnel), and the state is actually statutorily prohibited from reaching the 7% goal by releasing prisoners. Given the documented abuses committed in and around for-profit prisons, there is something morally monstrous with the idea that the futures of the top 1/3 of California’s young will be paid for by the destruction of the futures of its least successful youth. While this power is not mandatory – the Department of Corrections can choose to privatize or not – the text of the amendment does everything possible to make prison privatization an inextricable part of the whole.

In these circumstances, progressives cannot in good conscience support the privatization measures of the amendment as written – and even stripped of these measures, the measure remains a positive step but hardly a silver bullet either for higher education or the state budget. By contrast, conservatives in the Legislature are extremely unlikely to vote for anything that protects public higher education. Given that the governor knows this, it’s likely that this amendment (which Schwarzenegger has insisted will go through the legislature first) is but one more infuriating stratagem in a political career that has successfully alienated the left, center, and right of California politics.

Inside Blue Gold:

If something so seemingly progressive as a constitutional amendment that protects spending on higher education can turn out to be so complicated, what can we say about the Blue Gold Opportunity Program- a program designed to ensure that “”if your family makes less than $70,000 a year and you have financial need, scholarships and grants will cover your fees”? A free college education for poor and middle class kids, paid for by increasing fees on more affluent students sounds like an incredibly progressive thing – and people like William Bagley and Ian Ayres have argued the exact same thing.

The reality is that the Blue Gold Opportunity Program is nothing of the kind.

To begin with, it should be understood that the Blue Gold program doesn’t represent a commitment of the U.C to contribute more to less well-off students as it does a commitment of the U.C to shift as much of its costs onto outside sources as possible. The Blue Gold program is contingent on applying for Federal financial aid and state CalGrants – as their own website notes, “The plan combines all sources of scholarship and grant awards you receive (federal, state, UC and private) to count toward covering your fees.” The Blue Gold program only kicks in when all of your other sources of aid fail to cover the cost of education.

Second, Blue Gold only applies to covering the educational fees the U.C charges (over $10,000 after the rate increase) – which is only 37% of the estimated total cost of education, which the U.C estimates to be $27,000. The difference between the total cost of education and the fees works out to $17,000 a year or $68,000 over four years. However, the U.C may well be underestimating the cost of living – for example, U.C’s estimates for graduate student food costs ($5,000 per academic year) are twice what they estimate for undergraduates living off campus; likewise, transportation costs for graduate students are costed out at over twice what they estimate for off-campus undergraduates.

However, even if we assume that the U.C’s estimates are correct, their sample budgets for families are quite instructive. For example, a family earning $20,000 a year will have to come up with $9,100 a year (or 45.5% of yearly income), a family making $40,000 will have to come up with $11,600 (or 29% of yearly income), a family making $60,000 will have to come up with $16,100 (26.8%), and a family making $80,000 will have to come up with $22,600 (or 28.25%). A system where families making $20k or $40k a year are responsible for a higher proportion of their income than families making $60 or $80k a year is hardly progressive.

Supporters of the system will note that the same budgets assume a much lower family contribution for poor or working class families – but this hardly makes up for the fact that the difference will be made up for by their children. The U.C’s charts show that this model only becomes affordable if students find part-time work during the school year and full-time work during the summer, and take on loans of at least $5,000 a year. Thus, in the best circumstances, a U.C student will graduate with about $20,000 in educational debt, which takes years to pay back.

Should the student be unlucky enough to not find part-time jobs that allow them to save $266 a month during the school year, and $566 a month during the summer, over the cost of living, the actual debt load could soar much higher, potentially to $36-90,000 by graduation.  At a time when the state of California has a youth unemployment rate well in excess of 20%, assuming that students will automatically find employment is not realistic.

At the same time, the Blue Gold program only applies to in-state legal residents. This means that DREAM Act students (i.e, undocumented students) have to pay the full freight, no matter what their economic status. International students, who never become in-state residents, also have to pay the full freight whatever their economics status.

Beyond the Numbers:

While the under-the-hood statistics of the Blue Gold program are hardly progressive, the problem with with the Blue Gold Program runs deeper than just the financial issues. At its root, Blue Gold erodes the essential ideological justification of public higher education: that higher education is a fundamental right of citizenship because an educated citizenry is essential for a well-ordered republic, and because “Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men, — the balance-wheel of the social machinery...it gives each man the independence and the means by which he can resist the selfishness of other men.” In a republic, where the mental and material basis for independence are so important for empowering active citizens and where great concentrations of wealth can easily become anti-democratic concentrations of power, public higher education is essential.

By emphasizing higher education as an economic good with a market rate, where the benefit accrues to the individual wage-earner, Blue Gold undermines the case for why the public should support higher education at all. In its own literature, the Blue Gold program analogizes paying for education with paying for automobiles, and emphasizes that the major objective of a college education is a higher salary. If a college degree is the same as a car, just another consumer good, there is no public purpose for providing it. (Although a more radical argument might be to say that perhaps consumer goods should be publicly provided/subsidized.)

At the same time, by setting the middle class who must pay Blue Gold’s costs against the working class and poor who benefit from it, Blue Gold erodes the cross-class political coalition that is essential for shepherding public higher education through the legislative process. In this fashion, Blue Gold resembles not a progressive tax (which benefits the poor, the working class, and the middle class alike) but targeted welfare programs that superficially benefit the poor but in reality create huge political vulnerabilities that turn programs for poor people into poor programs.

Finally, we must understand what political role the Blue Gold program plays for the U.C Regents. It’s hardly an accident that the U.C’s 32% increase was paired by an increase in the Blue Gold program’s eligibility and funding; the Blue Gold program functions as political cover, allowing Yudof and the Regents to portray an unprecedented fee increase as essentially painless – look, poor kids aren’t going to get hurt, and we’ll even help out the middle class. Nevermind that in an environment of declining resources, higher tuition creates an incentive for the U.C to enroll rich out of state students who can pay the full freight over poorer students who will require extra resources to attend the U.C, Yudof says he’ll raise an extra billion for financial aid!

In other words, Blue Gold is the “human face” for the privatization of the U.C. A tuition-free institution meant to provide a right of citizenship is becoming an institution that approaches charging a market rate for a private commodity, but Blue Gold provides the appearance that nothing has changed. That’s why it’s wrong.

An Alternate Route:

As an inveterate optimist, I don’t like to condemn any structure without providing a blueprint of what we should put up in its place.

My suggestion is this – we should replace Blue Gold with a new Master Plan designed to gradually reduce tuition to $0 over a period of ten to twenty years, eventually re-establishing the social contract of public higher education in California. This would amount to decreasing tuition by a thousand (or five hundred) dollars a year, which is hardly a small order – it means that each year, we need to come up with an additional $159 million in revenue (to make up for $1,000 in tuition less per student) from somewhere. In other words, in order to make the U.C tuition-free, we need to find $1.59 billion a year in additional financing.

In the grand scheme of things, this isn’t impossible. For example, a constitutional amendment that established a 10%/7% requirement without Schwarzenegger’s privatization poison pill, even after compensating for the $813 million cut this year, would have provided an additional $887 million in revenues, or 55% of the total needed to make the U.C tuition-free. In future years, an additional $1.7 billion a year would easily set

Assemblymember Torrico’s AB 656, which would establish a 10% excise tax on oil (California is the only oil-producing state that does not tax oil) to fund higher education, would raise $1 billion a year for higher education and the U.C’s 1/3 share of that would come out to $300 million a year (or 18% of the total needed to make the U.C tuition free). That’s enough on its own to drop U.C tuition by almost $2,000 a year. While that’s obviously not enough on its own, AB 656 does show that it is possible to make the U.C a free public university by creating some form of independent financing stream.

Ultimately, the re-establishment of the free public university is an ideological statement about the kind of California we want to have. The resources are there – the question is whether we have the political will.

Note: this a cross-post from my group blog, the Realignment Project.

“Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men, — the balance-wheel of the social machinery. I do not here mean that it so elevates the moral nature as to make men disdain and abhor the oppression of their fellow-men. This idea pertains to another of its attributes. But I mean that it gives each man the independence and the means by which he can resist the selfishness of other men. It does better than to disarm the poor of their hostility towards the rich: it prevents being poor.”

– Horace Mann, 12th Annual Report to the Massachusetts State Board of Education (1848)

In my previous post about education, I mentioned that the education reform debate has largely skirted the problem of affordability of higher education, preferring to direct their attention more towards college preparation and the K-12 system. As I said at the time, one of the things that unsettles me about the “Educational Equality Project” type of education “reformer” is the extreme economistic trend of their thought – education is about getting jobs and making the workforce more production, hence the extreme emphasis on reading, writing, math, and science, as opposed to anything about art and music, or history. I may be overly broad here in my description, and if I am, I apologize, but it's to a point. The purpose of public education is not to meet the needs of the labor market – it is to meet the needs of democracy.

 

 

Obama's recent proposal to pump an additional $12 billion over the next ten years into community colleges speaks to something of this tension. On the one hand, he makes the economic argument that “We will not fill those jobs, or keep those jobs on our shores, without the training offered by community colleges;” on the other, he ties the public investment in education to the broader goal of democratizing the economy. “Time and again, when we placed our bet for the future on education, we have prospered as a result …that's what happened when President Lincoln signed into law legislation creating the land grant colleges, which not only transformed higher education, but also our entire economy.  That's what took place when President Roosevelt signed the GI Bill which helped educate a generation, and ushered in an era of unprecedented prosperity.  That was the foundation for the American middle class.”

Background:

Obama's invocation of the Morrill land grant colleges and the GI bill should remind us that one of the great American virtues, almost from the beginning, is a faith in the virtue of democratic education. George Washington was a lifetime proponent of a National University, the purpose of which, he said, was “the education of our Youth in the science of Government. In a Republic, what species of knowledge can be equally important? And what duty, more pressing on its Legislature, than to patronize a plan for communicating it to those, who are to be the future guardians of the liberties of the Country?” In his repeated addresses to Congress on the topic, Washington linked the establishment of a national public institution of higher education with the future of the Union itself: “In the general, juvenile period of life, when friendships are formed and habits established that will stick by one, the youth from different parts of the United States would be assembled together and would, by degree, discover that there was not just cause for those jealousies and prejudices, which one part of the union imbided against one another.”

The Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862 was not merely about establishing agricultural programs. Co-written by a merchant's clerk who never attended college and a schoolteacher and signed into law by a President who had perhaps one year of formal education at a time when only the sons of gentlemen attended college, it was also an aspirational statement about the kind of society that the party of “free soil, free labor, and free men” wanted to build – one where higher education would be “accessible to all, but especially to the sons of toil.” In its own way, too, the City College of New York, the oldest free public institution of higher education, was a radical institution from the very beginning. Its founder called upon the state of New York to “Open the doors to all… Let the children of the rich and the poor take their seats together and know of no distinction save that of industry, good conduct and intellect;” its first president summarized CCNY's mission thusly – “The experiment is to be tried, whether the children of the people, the children of the whole people, can be educated; and whether an institution of the highest grade, can be successfully controlled by the popular will, not by the privileged few.”

And of course, in 1960, Governor Pat Brown's Master Plan for Higher Education in California grounded its call for a revolutionary three-stage system of the University of California, California State University, and Community Colleges on the principle that “state colleges and the University of California shall be tuition free to all residents of the state.”

The point of this extensive exegesis is that the purpose of public higher education has always been about, contrary to Obama's speech, more than even just democratizing the economy.  It has always been about making a more democratic society, whether it be forging a national identity, abolishing social distinctions, state provision of a universal public good, or providing a vehicle for the children of the poor to seek their education freely.

Current Situation:

So where does this noble legacy of democratic education stand today? Well, two weeks ago I received the following email from UC President Mark Yudof, effectively sending out a fiscal SOS to the UC community:

“In the past 20 years, the amount of money allotted to the University through the state budget has fallen dramatically: General Fund support for a UC student stood at $15,860 in 1990. If current budget projections hold, it will drop this year to $7,680.

Moreover, it now appears likely the UC system, in this current fiscal crisis, will be ordered by Sacramento to absorb yet another $800-plus million in additional cuts. Its 2009-10 core budget will be reduced by an estimated 20 percent. This will bring the amount of state investment in the University down to $2.4 billion – exactly where it was in real dollars a decade ago.”

This then is the bitter fruit of the compact signed between Governor Schwarzenegger and then-UC President Dynes, which supposedly at the time was going to “bring the promise of renewed fiscal stability for public universities in California.” The ultimate result, however, has been a near-perfect execution of Shock Doctrine, effectively destroying a decade's worth of efforts to improve and expand public funding for higher education – a slow-motion privatization, if you will. At the same time that the U.C has been struggling with one funding crisis after another, despite the promises of the compact, the result has been a massive shift of economic burdens from the state and the university onto the student body. As I noted previously, the cost of attending the U.C has now doubled, from the less than $4000 per year in 2003 to more than $8000 in 2009. At the current rate of progress (10% increase in tuition per year), the U.C's in-state tuition will be indistinguishable from the private university average in twelve years. In my eyes, this constitutes an enormous tax on the student body and their families.

And this is hardly just a California story. As this article points out, the University of Washington's 26% cut also drops its state funding back by a decade, the University of Illinois' fee increases are on-pace with the U.C's, and SUNY is even outpacing the U.C with a 14%. The larger problem is that the limited fiscal capacity of states to deal with recessions, the Federal inattention to the cost of higher education for the last eight years, and the broader anti-tax politics that have gripped this nation have meant tha public university is an easy target. State and federal legislators looking to make cuts-only budgets see institutions that can raise private funds and increase fees and hand down cuts that would be unthinkable in other areas, banking on fund raising and tuition hikes to keep the public universities running.

This crates two larger problems. The first is the privatization of the public university – a public university is a public trust, a place that is supposed to cultivate democratic citizenship, to create the expertise that governments can make use of in making public policy decisions, and a place which embodies the ideals of a better society. The second is ever-increasing inequality –  as the burden of education increases on students, the result is a generation whose future life choices are increasingly determined by the pressures of ever-mounting debt, and increasing class inequality between those whose families can pull the full freight and those who must support themselves. As research has shown, the children of the affluent go to college at a higher rate than the children of the poor – even when the children of the poor perform higher academically than the children of the rich. Compare, for example, the difference in attendance rates between the 4th quintile (highest-achieving) students from families making less than $20k a year and students from the 3rd or 2nd quintiles from families making more than $100k a year. Clearly, it is better to be born lucky than smart.

Solution:

While the gross disparities between the richest and the poorest ought to shock the conscience of any American who cherishes our national mythos of opportunity, egalitarianism, and meritocracy, it's also true that people everywhere often show a less sharp concern for the plights of others than their own misfortunes. But take a second look at that chart, and you see than class inequality goes all the way down the line, with the children of the merely affluent doing less well than the children of the rich, and the children of the middle class less well than the children of the affluent, and so on – even with children of roughly equal ability and achievement. Rarely have I seen a more clear case for a cross-class community of interest.

So how do we move, as it were, forward to the past?

Morrill 2.0 – Universal, Public Higher Education for All:

• Federal/State Endowment Assistance – given the many failures of the existing per-student assistance system and the way that it has bogged us down in a patchwork of student loans and aid, and the vulnerability of this system to economic shocks, instead we should establish a system whereby the Federal governments and the states collaborate to provide a one-time $5 billion addition to the endowment (to be held in long-term T-Bills, no investing the money in derivatives or other fashionable ventures) of each state university, gradually phasing it in university by university over the next ten years (yearly cost – $25 billion). This money should be based on a guarantee of tuition-free education based on in-state rates, with modest fees for out-of-state students.
• Independent Financing of State Universities – along the same lines,  moving the state universities from a miserly yearly appropriations to a steady source of public funds, one alternative that presents itself is A.B 656 in the California state legislature (or whatever version of A.B 656 might become a proposition), which proposes an oil excise tax to fund higher education in California, similar to the way that oil taxes fund the University of Texas. Obviously, not all states have major oil revenue, but most states do have some industry that is the center of the economy, and it is only fair for the industry in question to kick in some money to pay for the education of the college graduates it needs. Hence, I could see a small tax on stock transactions to fund SUNY, since Wall Street needs huge numbers of college grads, and so on and so forth. This industry excise tax should also be balanced with a guarantee to keep tuition low and enrollment expanding (as well as the number of campuses) to maintain access to public higher education.
• Exporting the Brown Model – the evolution of the Morrill land grant colleges has meant that, in a country supposedly dominated by federalism, we actually have a rather standard pattern of having a single state university that more often than not is a large, Research 1 institution. However, I would argue that we need to, over the long term, popularize the three-tier system of state universities, state colleges, and a unified system of community colleges across the 50 states, if we are to truly expand higher education to all students who are ready and interested in furthering their education.
• Higher Education Means Vocational Education Too – in my previous post, I talked in general terms abou the lack of attention paid to vocational training and technical education and the somewhat veiled contempt that some education reformers seem to have for non-academic higher education. Simply put, not everyone wants to go to college or will ever be happy in college, and while generally our economy is becoming more reliant on education, it would be a mistake to assume that we are going to move to 100% of the population with a college diploma and a white-collar job. To begin with, the current situation masks the extent to which problems with our K-12 education system has led employers to use bachelor's degrees to substitute for high school diplomas in straining their candidate pools for people who are literate, numerate, and know how to do basic tasks like use a computer, write a memo, operate a spreadsheet, read technical documents, give a presentation, etc. Secondly, as the American economy develops, we are going to need more and more skilled labor  that require some form of certification that is not college-oriented – as we develop a “green economy” based on “alternative energy,” we're going to need a lot of electricians to install new grids, new wiring systems, solar panels and wind farms, and so forth, and you don't go to a traditional 4-year college to learn to be an electrician. Hence, I would recommend extending our guarantee of higher education for all to be a guarantee to technical education, vocational education, and apprenticeship/job training programs, paying the way at, say, state college or community college rate for any student who agrees to stick through the program. But the point is that the choice to go into academic or technical education should be freely chosen, without the consideration of cost.

Note: this is a cross-post from my group-blog, The Realignment Project.

Background:

Yesterday, the Economic Policy Institute held an event, co-sponsored by the “Broader, Bolder” education reform group, on reforming No Child Left Behind. This fact was commented on in a post on Crooked Timber, and within eight poss, you could read that ” The goal of NCLB was not to improve education, it was to destroy the teacher’s unions and take away the hard won rights including tenure and the ability to act as professionals…One group sees education as a way to instruct the young with the essentials of the society and turn them into docile citizens who will provide the workforce and consumer base that the elite depends upon. This group favors an authoritarian, top down, approach to instruction,” and “the “Broader, Bolder Coalition”—whose manifesto openly embraces using education policy as a stalking horse for a broad political agenda…has little to do with educational standards.”

And there, in a microcosm, is the state of our current education reform debate: one group, loosely grouped around the “Broader, Bolder” coalition, and another group, loosely grouped around the Education Equality Project and they hate each other worse than Communists hate Trotskyists, and with the same sectarian flair. Apparently the Broader, Bolder folks are either your standard left-of-center education policy wonks and activists who emphasize the need to tackle the social environment of schools or a stalking horse for the teachers unions out to destroy education reform. Likewise, the Educational Equality Project people are either a very similar group of wonks who focus on the achievement gap between white students and students of color, or a neoliberal plot to destroy teachers unions, force students into becoming standardized-tested drones, and privatize the public education system. Oh, and they’re both the only true “reformers.”

Problems With Existing Reform Groups:

Personally, I think that the state of debate has become so poisonous, so tainted by mistrust and (more importantly) unspoken ideology wrapped in the flag of “science-ism” that I’m reluctant to dip a toe into these waters. But I feel that something is being missed here and in some important ways both sides are wrong. (I know that comes off as a hideous high-Broderite splitting the difference, but I actually have a point here)

I think the overarching issue here is that we have two different views about what education should be about: making kids into good citizens, and making kids into good workers. And while the knee-jerk reaction might be to say, in fine Deweyian fashion, that education should only be about the latter, that’s actually wrong. You can’t have a Deweyian citizen (someone capable of engaging in democratic discourse, of using their powers of pragmatic reasoning to sort through the pros and cons of elections and public policy, someone who reads the newspaper and writes letters to the editor, and who can stand on a street corner or go door to door) if they’re illiterate and innumerate. Especially if you believe in John Dewey’s views about the importance of education for democracy, you need people who have the training to be “virtuous” citizens – and that training requires a rigorous grounding in academic skills, because in Dewey’s view social change, the kind of social change actually needed to transform the social environment around the schools that the “Broader, Bolder” folks see as the major problem in education, requires active citizens to do the work of changing it.

Likewise, the Educational Equality folks, for all that their emphasis on abolishing the achievement gap is laudable, have a giant gaping hole in their theory of educational reform. (At this point, it doesn’t matter whether they’re genuinely progressive or neoliberal) No matter how well you drill your students, no matter how many students you get to college level, unless you actually change the socio-economic order, you’re just trying to bail the ocean with a sieve. The idea of education as the leveling force in American society is an attractive illusion, buttressed by our constructed histories of worthy marginalized communities (be it Jewish-Americans, Asian-Americans, or even the black middle class) pulling themselves out of the ghetto by pushing for educational excellence. But it is just an illusion. There are larger social forces  – the structure of persistent discrimination in the real estate and employment markets, the structure of housing and job availability (whether there are enough affordable homes close to living-wage jobs out there to go around), and the way that the credit and financial system exacerbate these problems – that education policy is not strong enough of a lever to shift by itself.  At best, what you’ll end up with is a situation where you have a larger black and Latino middle class, who still face an income/wealth/promotion/housing/education gap with whites, who are still perched in a fragile economic situation in segregated middle-class black or Latino suburbs,  and the people left in a shrinking ghetto will be in an even more dire situation, and their schools will get even worse.

As a last note in this section, I would also add that the label of “reform” is being used in a very evil way here, in that it is being used to create a narrative of the heroic, selfless reformer (on the side of the poor, downtrodden, and passive minorities) against the evil institution, no matter which side is using it. The problem is that “reform” can be applied to anything, any change no matter how good or how bad, so calling for recruits to the cause of “education reform” is in my mind a highly suspect political effort.

Why This Is Important:

What makes this sorry state of affairs all the worse is that we actually desperately need a society that is actively democratic. You take a look at any major poll,and you can find signs that the electorate think that you can have a free lunch,, or are willing to toss away or defend civil liberties depending on the phrasing of a question. We need a citizenry that can actually parse through the spin – although I will say that the growth of the internet and the blogosphere is a reassuring trend, and I believe that if John Dewey was alive today, he would be one of the leading bloggers in America in his spare time.

At the same time, however, we also need a society that is more economically egalitarian, both for economic and democratic reasons. Dewey’s vision of an active democratic society was also a world in which working people were economically secure enough that they could take the time to read the paper, self-educate through public libraries and evening courses, go to political meetings and engage in debate. And as much as it is a thin reed, education does seem to be one route to boosting wage income. I would still dispute whether the college wage gap is a function of supply vs. demand, and whether expanding college graduates towards 100% of the population will actually lead us to a more egalitarian economy or just depress the wages of college graduates.

How to get past the mistrust is something I still haven’t worked out. The EEP people have a nasty tendency to bash unions and be far too cosy to conservative privatizers and voucher-floggers, and at least to this union member (UAW 2865, representing 12,000 teaching assistants, tutors, and readers of the University of California) that makes me leery of them. The Broader, Bolder people get accused of wanting to whitewash the manifest problems of a racially and socially unjust system, and that their political efforts lend towards the preservation of the status quo. I’m biased in their favor, but I at least want to recognize the claims.

Where To Go:

Regardless of whether these two groups can get past their problems with each other, I think there are some issues that have fallen off of the education agenda that I believe are crucially important for making education “reform” genuine reform sans scare-quotes.

• The Affordability Question Has Fallen Off the Radar – here at the University of California, which was at its inception a truly Deweyian institution dedicated to the proposition that higher education was a right of all citizens, the price of a college education has doubled in the last six years, from less than $4000 per-year (in-state undergraduate) in 2003, to over $8000 per-year in 2009. This situation is replicating itself across the public universities across the country, as cash-starved legislatures de-fund and privatize their state universities to balance their budgets. And yet, we don’t hear anything much coming from the EEP folks (who should be outraged at the fact that  a major reason why the poor students and students of color that they strive to place into college don’t graduate on time is because of money issues) or the Broader, Bolder folks (who should be absolutely on the ball about such an obvious social problem) about this. Simply put, this should be at the top of the education reform agenda: public higher education should be free of charge.
• We Need to Do Something About Vocational Education – while I fully believe in college for all, I also know that there are plenty of good careers that don’t involve going to college, and I’ve known people who were frankly miserable in college because they didn’t want to be there. One of the problems in American education that’s not being addressed is that we treat vocational education like the last resort for people who’ve failed, at the same time that technical schools are exploding in numbers, largely because they’re replacing the kind of career tracks that used to be represented by a union apprenticeship. Yet neither side is talking about ensuring that technical colleges and training programs should be regulated or evaluated to ensure that they’re not just fly-by-night diploma mills, and neither side is talking about how we need to restore the social status of skilled labor, that becoming an electrician or a welder or a plumber is a viable and honorable means of economic mobility. Bottom line – vocational education needs the same kind of resources and oversight that academic education gets now.
• If We’re Going to Train Citizens, Let’s Bloody Well Train Citizens – there’s often a lot of talk from the Broader, Bolder style of reformers that our education systems should be training students to be citizens, but not a lot of follow-through. The fact is that we need to be teaching real civics – by which I mean teaching people how to form political groups, how to use Roberts Rules to structure a meeting, how to put out a press release or a flier, how to use the media and spin your story, how to organize a protest and put pressure on the political system, how to run a block-by-block get out the vote campaign, how to blog – the nuts and bolts of how to exercise political power. But beyond that, we need to inculcate a certain attitude towards power and authority, namely a proprietary one. As citizens of a democratic republic, we own the state and we employ its officers, and that begins by teaching our students that when you see someone breaking the rules, you don’t just accept it, you blow the whistle and go to the media; that when someone abuses their power, you should push back by using every right you have available to you.
• A Radical Suggestion – MORE Union Control of Education – one idea that has occurred to me in the past is that one of the fundamental blocks to reform is that the teachers, through their democratically-chosen unions, don’t trust their administrators, governments, or outside reformers (which they see as, well, management). They view the teacher quality “movement” as a cover for union-busting. By contrast, the EEP people see unions as inherently anti-reform. One suggestion: if the EEP really care above teacher quality above all else, let’s make a different bargain. Why not put the unions in charge of hiring, firing, and promotion through the time-honored method of the union hiring hall, with a quid pro quo of improved outcomes (in return for higher salaries and union job protection)? That way, the unions would have to deliver, and the EEP people would have to choose whether they cared more about teacher quality or administrator’s ability to hire and fire at will.