That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [150]
Public education—think Berkeley—was once the jewel in California’s crown and the key to its prosperity. By 2011, however, the state’s primary and secondary schools, as measured by the test scores of their students, were among the country’s weakest, and its system of higher education, which once set the standard for the rest of the country, even the world, had to raise tuition sharply, provoking protests from students on several campuses.
On March 23, 2011, the San Francisco Chronicle summarized what was happening to state’s higher education system:
About 10,000 students will be turned away, and an untold number of employees will lose their jobs next fall across California State University’s 23 campuses. That was the grim news Tuesday out of Long Beach, where CSU trustees discussed how the university that serves more than 400,000 students will shrink amid devastating budget news from the state. “We’re facing the worst financial situation the CSU has ever had,” said Trustee Bill Hauck, chairman of the university system’s finance committee.
While California’s population has continued to grow, approaching forty million, the growth no longer comes from internal migration from other parts of the United States. In fact, more people now choose to leave California each year than move there from other states, an unthinkable trend during the Golden State’s golden era. If it has not died, the California dream is now on life support.
There is more than one reason for this. The end of the Cold War reduced the size of America’s defense industry, many of whose firms were located in the state. California is home to more immigrants, many of whom enter the United States illegally, than any other state, straining its public facilities. Its crazy-quilt governmental system, in which public referenda can tie the hands of the legislature and override, or complicate, an already complicated state constitution, makes it difficult to govern even in the best of times.
The state’s basic failure, however, has been a political one. Its problems require collective action to solve. That can only come through the political system, but California’s political system has not coped with the challenges the state faces. Californians, of course, know this. An article by Bill Whalen in The Weekly Standard (December 27, 2010) reported that “according to the Public Policy Institute of California, only 13 percent of voters approve of the two branches of state government’s working arrangement. Only 2 percent of Californians trust the state to always do right. Just 3 percent have a great deal of faith in Sacramento’s decision-making process.”
We cite California’s present condition because it is an all-too-plausible harbinger of America’s future. The political failures of the Golden State and of the United States are much too close for comfort. Like the national political system, California’s politics are polarized along partisan lines to such an extent that the state has become virtually ungovernable. Democrats and Republicans have such radically different public philosophies, and have become so hostile to each other, that they have not been able to find mutually acceptable solutions to the state’s most basic problems of education, taxation, health, infrastructure, prisons, and pensions. For example, California’s conservative anti-tax activists have set the gold standard for