by Michael Matsuda
President, Board of Trustees for the North Orange County Community College District
The father of modern public education, John Dewey once said, “Luck, bad if not good, will always be with us. But it has a way of favoring the intelligent and showing its back to the stupid.” When it comes to the decisions we’ve made about public education, it is doubtful that luck will be on our side. California has slipped to 47th in investing in k-12 education and now spends more on the prison system than on higher education, even though there is a strong correlation between illiteracy and incarceration. Thanks to our elected leaders who continue to posture to be “tough on crime,” California now ranks number one in the world in incarceration rates and per capita spending on prisons.
Consider this: adjusted for inflation, University of California tuition has gone up over 500% since 1980. During the same period, expenditures on corrections have also gone up 500%. As we spend ever more on warehousing prisoners, we're forced to make students pay ever more for their education. The annual cost of incarcerating one inmate in prison is close to $40,000. The cost per youth in California Youth Authority is $90,000 per year. Both have a 70% recidivism rate within three years.
Besides the recent highly publicized decision by the UC regents to raise tuition by 32%, budget cuts proposed last week will cause community colleges to turn away 262,845 current students if implemented, analysis released by the Community College League of California shows. The loss of a quarter of a million students is the equivalent of closing the University of California . The state’s rising unemployment rate and decisions by the California State University to limit enrollment will likely lead to even more students finding the doors to higher education closed.
We used to have the world's greatest k-12 and higher education system and we thrived. Now we have the world's biggest system of prisons and we're broke. That's the decision Californians have made over the past three decades: more prisons and better paid prison guards, but lower taxes and less education. It's hard to think of a stupider allocation of resources.
And speaking of resources, ranked by per capita taxes collected, California comes out 12th in the nation according to the nonprofit nonpartisan California Budget Project. Contrary to what some pundits would have people believe, our tax rates are not overly burdensome for the eighth largest economy in the world. Moreover, the CPB has reported that the bottom fifth of California’s taxpayers -- those earning less than about $18,000 -- paid about 11.7% of family income in state and local taxes. By contrast, the top 1%, earning $430,000 or more, paid only about 7.1% on average, counting the deduction of state and local taxes many could take from their federal tax bill.
The popular view of state government is that it does little beyond handing out welfare payments and free healthcare to the poor. For the wealthy, this is a useful urban myth, for it rationalizes "flattening" state taxes, giving them a tax cut and everyone else an increase. The harsh reality is that the income gap between rich and poor is reaching Grand Canyon proportions and as a growing number of sociologists have warned, huge differences in income can be counter-productive and damaging for economies, and rising income inequality represents a danger to the entire social fabric. Ben Bernanke are you listening?
Over the last several years, the top 1 percent of Americans have received their largest share of national income since 1928. Alarmingly, data on income disparity also shows that the top 300,000 Americans collectively enjoyed almost as much income as the bottom 150 million Americans. In 1980, the ratio of pay between executives and workers was 40:1. It is more than 400:1 today, and real income has remained flat or gone down for more than 80 percent of Americans during the same period.
Education, as Horace Mann said, is the “great equalizer of conditions of men.” In these times of uncertainty and growing gaps between those who have and those who have not, education is perhaps the only means of leveling the field and for saving our great golden state.
But we have to act now because there is little doubt that if our educational system implodes, we may as well just re-arrange the deck chairs. Indeed it is time that our elected leaders speak honesty about the need for investing in our educational system and to break the mantra of "no new taxes" so that once again Californians can dream of a future of hope, prosperity and better times for their children and grandchildren.
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