Free Fall- Educational opportunities in California

Summary from the new report of UCLA Accord Center:
California Educational Opportunity Report.

Core Findings from our Surveys and Interviews:

• California high schools are providing less time and attention and fewer quality programs. As a consequence, student

engagement, achievement, and progress to graduation and college are suffering;

• School reform has all but sputtered to a halt due to staff cutbacks and the elimination of time for professional development;

• Even as high schools across the state are impacted by declining budgets, inequality is growing across and within schools;

• California’s high schools face growing demands from families experiencing economic crisis; these demands point to the interrelationship

of California’s education and social welfare budgets.

Rogers, J., Bertrand, M., Freelon, R., Fanelli, S. (2011). Free Fall: Educational Opportunities in 2011.

Los Angeles: UCLA IDEA, UC /ACCORD.

To access this report online, please visit http://www.edopp.org

Barbara Ehrenreich: Inequality

from the London Guardian

http://books.guardian.co.uk/interviews/story/0,,2291935,00.html

America's last taboo

Barbara Ehrenreich has been called a Marxist just for writing that the US is not a classless society. But criticism has never stopped her exposing social injustice before. Emma Brockes talks to her about her new book, Barack Obama and the great wealth divide

Monday July 21, 2008
The Guardian

Twenty years ago, Barbara Ehrenreich wrote an article for the New York Times in which she pointed out the growing inequality of American society and was promptly denounced, by a rival paper, as a Marxist. "The Washington Times is an extreme-rightwing publication," she says, so there was no surprise there. But the paper's reaction underlined a general principle: that while one can say "fairly wild" things about race and gender in the US, there persists a certain coyness about class. "There's this powerful myth that America doesn't have classes; that they're an ancient English or European thing that we abolished. And that if you're not rich, it's your own damn fault."

Now 66, Ehrenreich has devoted most of her career to disproving this maxim. Her 2001 bestseller Nickel and Dimed was an account of the year she spent trying to eke out an existence on the minimum wage, which caused affluent readers everywhere to exclaim guiltily: "We had no idea!" She reported that companies cheat their staff of wages (there are 70 lawsuits pending); limit the number of toilet breaks staff take; forbid them from talking to each other or using "profanity" on the premises, and that the cleaner you hired through a "reputable" firm is probably made to clean your house while sick or injured. The book's success owed much to the personal journey of Ehrenreich herself, who suggested the idea to her editor for a younger journalist to take on. But she fitted the profile of the invisible worker - middle-aged, female and knackered. Once in situ, she was bullied by various bosses and forced to retire each night to a motel because she couldn't afford a flat.

Her latest book, which in the US is called This Land Is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation, is the animating force behind all this, a collection of columns that almost amounts to a manifesto. The title comes from a Woody Guthrie song, which Ehrenreich can hardly bear to listen to these days. She writes: "I flinch when I hear Woody Guthrie's line, 'This land belongs to you and me'. Somehow, I don't think it was meant to be sung by a chorus of hedge-fund operators." (The book's UK publisher evidently didn't feel Guthrie's song travelled well, and has opted for the title Going to Extremes instead.)

Ehrenreich's skill, apart from the sheer quality of her writing, is to illustrate her opinions with wave after wave of examples, of unglamorous labour disputes and everyday injustices that don't get much of a look-in elsewhere. Through them she details how wealth in America has transferred from the bottom to the top, thanks to tax cuts for the rich and Bush's reluctance to regulate the markets, and exposes the fallacy that "growth" as measured by GDP is, for the majority of Americans, synonymous with better living.

"It was just so fascinating to me, without being an economist, to see how in the past few years growth has become completely decoupled from wages or the real conditions of what we call working people," she says. "And the reason they were so decoupled is because of the huge inequality. So you could have many [economic] indicators looking very sunny and good, but you're talking about a population that is so divided there's not an average there any more."

A book about the joylessness of the American right must struggle to avoid matching it with a litany of dreary, rival orthodoxies. But Ehrenreich has never been dour, nor for that matter predictable. She lives in the historic town of Alexandria, just south of Washington DC, in a jolly chaos of papers and magazines. On the mantelpiece is a card that reads, "I am not, therefore I buy", but she is as suspicious of self-denial as she is of self-indulgence, both of which she sees as affectations. In one unexpected column, Ehrenreich flies at Jane Brody, the health editor of the New York Times, who throughout the 90s championed with great influence the virtues of a low-fat, high-carb diet. As well as questioning the health benefits of Brody's principles, Ehrenreich calls them a way of enabling the well-off to feel virtuous merely by indulging their own narcissism. "The low-fat diet has been the hair shirt under the fur coat - the daily deprivation that offsets the endless greed."

The "tireless preaching" that bedevils modern life elicits a resounding screw-you from Ehrenreich. Her latest bugbear is "positive thinking", the underlying philosophy of much life coaching and motivational speaking, which she came across during the research for Bait and Switch, the follow-up to Nickel and Dimed. In it, she spent a year trying to expose white-collar office life but was scuppered by not being able to get a job. Instead Ehrenreich fell into the hands of the gannets who feed on the unemployed and sell them reassurances that getting a job is just a question of attitude. This was illustrated by cheerful Kimberly, a "co-active coach" whom Ehrenreich employed and ended up wanting to kill. As the economy recedes, you wonder if Kimberly and her ilk will disappear. "I tend to think that the irrational, delusional approaches will persist," she warns.

Ehrenreich is by training a scientist, with a degree in chemistry and a PhD in cell biology. As a child she saw both sides of the economic divide. Her father was a copper miner from Montana who got an education and eventually qualified as a metallurgist and made it on to the corporate ladder at Gillette. "He was a very exceptional person, as he'd be the first to tell you. But he never - nor did my mother - say about people who didn't do as well, 'Oh we did it, so they can do it.' They recognised that theirs was an unusual trajectory."

Did they identify as working-class?

"No. I think they would have said middle-class. But I think my father always thought that he didn't fit in. He was too rough-edged. And he had a lot of contempt for, say, Ivy League types or MBA types."

What she sees as the stigmatisation of the sick in the US is a reaction in part to a "strange little detail" of her childhood. Her mother, who was politically more radical than her father and whom the young Ehrenreich would look at in alarm sometimes and wonder if she was a communist, had been brought up by her Christian Scientist grandparents. "And in no other way was my mother continuing to be a Christian Scientist, except for one thing: health. It was very bad to get sick. I remember when I had trouble seeing the blackboard in about seventh grade, she said, "People in our family don't wear glasses." Ehrenreich smiles ruefully.

Her son is a writer and her daughter a lawyer, (Ehrenreich is divorced; she moved to Alexandria to be near her two grandchildren) and half of her family still lives on low wages; her sister and her husband have just been forced to cancel their health insurance. I wonder if she had ethical qualms about Nickel and Dimed; isn't there something unsavoury about a comfortable journalist pretending to be poor and then being paid a lot of money to write about it?

"Well you know, that never entered my mind . . . what began to bother me a little bit was that there was a deception involved; that I had to tell people that I was working these jobs because I needed the money, which wasn't true. But I always tried at the end to tell people I had got to know what the truth was. And then you can work off the guilt of any money by giving it away. Easily fixed."

Until the success of that book she had been freelance, and the security, she says, has been wonderful. She hasn't had a staff position since her first job working for the New York City government as a health planner, which she left after seven months when she decided that "the government was selling out to private interests" and went to work for a "radical collective" lobbying for better healthcare in the city. "That's where I started writing, because we had a newsletter and I loved to do investigative pieces."

Nowadays, people write to Ehrenreich with their workplace horror stories. The most shocking in the new book came from an ex-employee of one large retailer, who told Ehrenreich that in 2003 the company held him captive for six hours and interrogated him for giving a colleague a discount on a videogame, before getting him to write a false confession and firing him. A former colleague alleged that such incidents were not unusual.

With Obama ascending there is hope of a sea change, although Ehrenreich remains characteristically cautious. She sees him "tacking to the right" and was disheartened by his choice of economic adviser, Jason Furman, "who was to the far right of the Democratic party and made his reputation as a defender of Wal-Mart [one of her principal targets in Nickel and Dimed]. And so in a way, I thought, OK, I'm not going to pay [Obama] any attention for a while."

I wonder if the huge success of Nickel and Dimed, and the tax bill that presumably came with it, hasn't sent Ehrenreich skidding off a bit in that direction. "Ha! I have to watch that kind of stuff. But no. I always say, if I could pay more taxes and be in turn told for sure that there would be decent schools for my grandchildren, that there would be healthcare for them, that there would be social security, if there was something in return, other than wars, it would be a wonderful thing." She cackles. "As it is, I just get angrier and angrier"

· Going to Extremes: Notes From A Divided Nation is published by Granta (£8.99).To order a copy for £8.99 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875

In the U.S. the book is : This Land is Their Land; Notes from a Divided Nation.
Barbara Ehrenreich is an Honorary Chair of Democratic Socialists of America

State of Delusion

State Of Delusion

Robert L. Borosage

January 24, 2007

Robert L. Borosage is co-director of the Campaign For America's Future .

Last night’s State of the Union address revealed that the state of this president is still delusional. He can’t level with the American people because he can’t or won’t recognize the reality that we face.

The best part of the speech wasn’t anything the president said. It was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sitting over his shoulder, signaling the change that Americans voted for. The president also got a lift from the “ordinary heroes” that he recognized at the end of the speech. But when it came to substance, the president seemed bored with his own words as he trotted out his pledge for more of the same.

For this president, the economy is great and we need to stay the course. The Democratic response by freshman Virginia Sen. Jim Webb offered a glimpse of the reality that the president doesn’t get—that this economy isn’t working for most Americans. No wonder fewer than a third of Americans think the president has any clue about the problems they face.

For this president, we have a strategy for moving forward in Iraq, and we’re garnering global support for our foreign policies. Maybe he's back on the sauce; he certainly isn’t reading his briefing papers or listening to his own generals. The president called for bipartisanship, apparently not aware that senators from both parties are already coming together—in opposition to the president’s escalation of the war in Iraq. Again, Webb offered a dose of reality in his response, stating flatly that it was time to bring the president’s war to an end, and that if he couldn’t understand that, “we will be showing him the way.”

Even where it has dawned on the president that there is a problem to be addressed, his proposals are gestures, if not mockeries. The health care system is broken. The president’s reforms, by his own exaggerated numbers, might provide health insurance for maybe 3 million of the 47 million that now go without, while taking a whack at workers who have decent plans (read unions) and public hospitals (read Hillary Clinton’s New York, which takes 40 percent of the hit).

Catastrophic climate change and our dependence on foreign oil are a clear and present threat to our security. The president recycles his ethanol enthusiasms (substituting “woodchips” for last year’s “switch grass” as a potential source). But his plans won’t even cover the projected increase in U.S. oil demand over the next decades. He still defaults on the imperative for a dramatic national drive for energy independence—like that called for by the Apollo Alliance , which can generate jobs even as it helps address global warming.

Our education system is not providing the basics—children with the nutrition and access to health care to be ready to learn, universal pre-school, smaller classes in the early grades, skilled teachers, affordable college and advanced training. The president offers only to continue the No Child Left Behind reforms that he has failed to fund.

Immigration reform is a vital necessity. The president calls for comprehensive reform, in the face of growing right-wing opposition. But he insists on a guest worker program, simply a subsidy for exploitative employers, insuring them a pool of second-class workers.

The president’s speech was more striking for what it omitted than for what it contained. No mention of our unsustainable trade deficits, the loss of 17 percent of our manufacturing jobs, the growing indebtedness to foreign creditors, particularly the Chinese and Japanese central bankers. No talk of the worst corporate crime wave in modern history, with executives cooking the books and plundering their own companies. Not a word about the worst inequality since the Gilded Age or the rise of families in poverty. Obscenely, the president said not a word about the beleaguered survivors of Katrina, who, having weathered that hurricane’s winds now must struggle to survive the administration’s broken promises.

Speaker Pelosi’s presence and Sen. Webb’s response offered the only solace for Americans watching last night. This president remains in his bubble, divorced from a reality he can’t see, committed to a course at home and abroad that won’t work. But it matters less and less. Americans have already tuned him out, and the Congress no longer dances to his fancies. From now on, it is the new leadership in Congress that “will be showing him the way.”