From: NewsScan Daily, 20 March 2002 ("Above The Fold")
#WORTH THINKING ABOUT: CALIFORNIA SUNSET
Peter Schrag, recently retired editorial page editor of The
Sacramento Bee, paints a dismal portrait of what was once a "sunny"
California:
"In the generation immediately following World War II, and to some
extent even before, California was widely regarded as both model and magnet
for the nation--in its economic opportunities, its social outlook, and its
high-quality public services and institutions. With a nearly free and
universally accessible system of public higher education, a well-supported
public school system, an ambitious agenda of public works projects--in
irrigation and flood control; in highway construction and park
development--and a wide array of social services and human rights
guarantees that had no parallel in any other state, California seemed to
have an optimism about its population, possibilities, and future whose
largest flaw was the very excess of expectations on which it rested.
"Now, forty years on, having come through the sharp recession of the
early 1990s, the state, with a robust but substantially different economic
base, is again at the world's economic and technological frontiers: in
electronics and software, in biotechnology and a vast array of other
scientifically based industries, in foreign trade, and in the convergence
of the old Hollywood and the new computer-based graphics and design
ventures that have grown up around it. It is even enjoying a revival of the
aerospace industries that were devastated by the recession and defense
cutbacks of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
"But California, even with a large burst of new postrecession
revenue, is no longer the progressive model in its public institutions and
services, or in its social ethic, that it once was--had indeed ceased to
hold that position long before the last recession began. California's
schools, which, thirty years ago, had been among the most generously funded
in the nation, are now in the bottom quarter among the states in virtually
every major indicator--in their physical condition, in public funding, in
test scores--closer in most of them to Mississippi than to New York or
Connecticut or New Jersey. The state, which has almost doubled in
population since the early 1960s, has built some twenty new prisons in the
past two decades. But it has not opened one new campus of the University of
California for nearly three decades. Its once-celebrated freeway system is
now rated as among the most dilapidated road networks in the country. Many
of its public libraries operate on reduced hours, and some have closed
altogether. The state and county parks charge hefty admission fees. The
state's social benefits, once among the nation's most generous, have been
cut, and cut again, and then cut again. And what had once been a
tuition-free college and university system, while still among the world's
great public educational institutions, struggles for funds and charges as
much as every other state university system, and in some cases more."
See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1565843576/newsscancom/ for
Peter Schrag's "Paradise Lost: California's Experience, America's Future"
- or look for it in your favorite library. (We donate all revenue from our
book recommendations to adult literacy action programs.)
