The Browns of California

by Miriam Pawel

  Tax increases still required a two-thirds majority; that translated to at least four Republican votes in the 2011 legislature. Jerry appealed for bipartisan support to extend temporary taxes by placing a proposal on the November 2011 ballot. When that failed, he was forced to go the petition route instead. Proposition 30 on the November 2012 ballot would raise the sales tax a quarter of a cent and set higher income tax rates for the wealthiest residents in order to restore funds to school districts, public colleges, and universities. California, the state that had launched tax cut fever, would vote on a tax increase. Jerry rejected efforts to craft solutions that would avoid a popular vote. He believed that the consent of the governed was critical.

  Back on the campaign trail, Jerry relied again on his own instincts. He enlisted support from business groups, coordinated with labor allies, and crisscrossed the state speaking on college campuses. Jerry made a clear, stark case to the audience that would be most affected: Either these new taxes pass, or there will be another $600 million in cuts to education. Tertium non datum. There is no third way. To balance the budget and satisfy the bond market, the budget had “trigger cuts” that would by law go into effect if Proposition 30 failed. He kept close tabs on a student voter registration drive that took advantage of a new online option. More than six hundred thousand voters signed up online, about a third of them under twenty-five.

  “Proposition 30 is an opportunity for the people themselves not only to fix California, but to send a message16 to the rest of the country that we as a people can invest together in our schools, in our community colleges, and in the great University of California,” Jerry said at a rally on the UCLA campus. “A lot is riding on this election. A lot for you as students, but also for the people of California.”

  A lot for his own political future as well. He portrayed the campaign as the second act of an Aristotelian-structured drama, built around the suspense of a hero’s attempts to extricate himself from danger. He framed the decision as a moral, economic, and political choice, another step in the return to the Philosophy of Loyalty of Josiah Royce, a willingness to rise above self-interest for the greater good. He quoted, by chapter and verse, the Gospel of Luke: Of those to whom much is given, much is required. In an era of profound inequality, only individuals making more than $250,000 and couples earning more than $500,000 would pay more income tax.

  While Jerry made the case around the state, labor unions, especially those representing teachers, mobilized members to spread the message and worked with the campaign to build an infrastructure in every community. Still, Anne Gust Brown worried. Compared to a traditional election, polling in an initiative campaign was notoriously unreliable. External polls showed support for Prop 30 was wobbly at best. Anne used multiple tracking polls, online as well as by phone, as many as five at once. In the end, Prop 30 passed easily, with 55 percent of the vote. Although the taxes were temporary, they were easily extended by a second referendum four years later.

  The vote represented an inflection point in California. For decades, harkening back to Prop 13, an older, white electorate had been unwilling to pay for state services that increasingly benefited a growing young Latino and Asian population. Prop 30 reflected both an increased commitment to the Party of California and a shift in the electorate. Although whites still voted at disproportionately higher rates, the Latino share of the vote17 had jumped from 6.6 percent in 1980 to 23.5 percent in 2012. The electorate was beginning to match more closely the people who depended on public schools, colleges, health care, and social services.

  “You helped make that happen, as did so many others in colleges and schools across the state,” Jerry told political science majors in a graduation speech18 at Cal, referring to the passage of Prop 30. “And, lo and behold, voter surveys indicate that many more people in California feel good about the direction of their state. For an important moment, democracy came alive. I am not saying that the big issues are going to be settled easily, that greenhouse gases will soon be curbed or that inequality will be quickly reversed. But I do affirm, based on my experience, that people can exercise power wherever they are in society. Certainly not on every occasion, but at crucial moments, imaginative and bold people make a difference.”

  22

  Fiat Lux Redux

  Amid thousands of acres of fields, vineyards, and wetlands, the first new research university in the United States since the millennium arose in a region best known for poverty and sweet potatoes. The University of California, Merced, deep in the Central Valley between Modesto and Fresno, became both harbinger and symbol of changing times.

  During the Great Recession, the city of Merced had made national headlines as a foreclosure capital of the United States. Homes lost half their value. Unemployment, a perennial problem in the largely agricultural area, was among the highest in the state. The recession and concomitant budget cuts complicated construction of the first University of California campus built since Pat Brown was governor. Planned over the course of twenty years and four gubernatorial administrations, the school was designed to bring higher education to a region badly in need. The Central Valley had both the lowest median income in the state and the greatest degree of income inequality.

  When the first freshman class entered UC Merced, only the library and one housing complex were open. Four years later, the Class of 2009 made history: The first graduates persuaded First Lady Michelle Obama to deliver her first commencement speech on their campus. They had wooed her with hundreds of letters, valentines, and videos that stressed their commitment to public service, a message she found so inspiring she agreed almost at once. Attorney General Jerry Brown was in the crowd of twelve thousand that gathered on the field in hundred-degree heat on Commencement Day. Remember where you came from, Michelle Obama told the graduates. Like most of them, she said, she, too, had been the first in her family to earn a college degree. “You must bend down and let someone stand on your shoulders so they can see a better future,” she said. “Make your legacy a lasting one. Dream big.”1

  The firsts continued. The university anchored an economic boom; unemployment in Merced dipped to 8.5 percent, the lowest level since the 1980s. The 750 apartment units under construction nearby would help house the ten thousand students expected by 2020, when UC Merced would double in size. A Laotian immigrant who had arrived in the Central Valley as a toddler became the school’s police chief, the first person of Hmong descent to lead a university safety agency. A Mexican American who had been brought to Merced as a five-year-old was awarded a doctorate in biology, the first undocumented immigrant in the Valley to earn a PhD.

  For high school students in Central Valley communities where the primary option had historically been community college, a university education became an accessible aspiration, if not yet a tradition. Siblings of the first graduates enrolled at UC Merced. The school’s young alumni, far from the wealthiest cohort, donated to their alma mater at higher rates than their counterparts at the legacy campuses. During the first decade that UC Merced was open, applications to all University of California schools from Central Valley students doubled, and admissions jumped 78 percent.

  UC Merced drew students in about equal thirds from the Central Valley, Southern, and Northern California. Some were startled to see cows grazing nearby. Others came to hike the Sierra foothills and take part in programs at Yosemite, less than two hours away. About 60 percent came from low-income families, 70 percent from families in which neither parent had graduated from college. Although those numbers were higher than at other campuses, they reflected trends across a university system in transition. More than half the students at UC Merced were Latino; about 20 percent were Asian. The campus looked a lot like the rest of California. Its success or failure would go a long way toward shaping the future of the state.

  Around the time Jerry was reelected in 2014, California passed a demographic milestone as significant as the one Pat Brown had celebrated in 1963 when the Golden State became the nation’s m
ost populous: Latinos passed Anglos to became the largest ethnic group in the state.

  The approximately 15 million Latinos in California were predominantly ethnic Mexicans. Compared with statewide averages, they were significantly younger, lived in larger, extended families, and had more children. Latinos in California earned less, were more likely to work in blue-collar jobs, and were less likely to own their homes. In 2015, more than one fourth of the Latinos in California lived in poverty, twice the rate among whites.

  As California’s economy rebounded, the state restored some of the earlier draconian cuts to social services. But even as the state’s wealth climbed, the gap between rich and poor remained cavernous. California had the most of everything, including poverty. In 2016, one in five Californians lived below the poverty line, adjusted for the higher cost of living in the Golden State. Another one in five lived perilously close to it.

  Jerry favored policies that directed money to people rather than providers. The state adopted an earned income tax credit for the poorest families. California aggressively expanded its Medi-Cal program when the Affordable Care Act went into effect, reducing the percentage of residents without health insurance from almost 20 percent to a historic low of under 7 percent. By some measures, the combined social safety net kept more than 8 percent of Californians out of poverty.2

  California became the first state to phase in a $15-an-hour minimum wage.3 Jerry called the modest increase “economic justice,” though he preferred to dwell on the second half of that equation. “Economics is about dollars and cents. It’s very mechanical. It’s rather heartless. Justice is about giving people their due. Those aren’t the same things,” he said as he signed the bill to raise the minimum wage. Justice “derives from morality, from fraternity, from the Bible, from prophetic traditions, and everything that gives meaning to our lives.” He acknowledged both the import and the insignificance of the new law, at a time when so many struggled. “It’s about creating a little, tiny balance, in a system that every day becomes more unbalanced.”

  In the long run, efforts to bridge that inequality would depend to a large extent on education. Among Californians with a college degree, the poverty rate4 was 8.2 percent; for those without a high school diploma, it was 35.5 percent. Put another way, workers with a bachelor’s degree5 earned about 70 percent more than those with a high school diploma. Poverty rates were highest among the largest, least well-educated group of young adults, Latinos.

  The disparity was rooted in California’s public schools, which had never regained their former luster after Prop 13. More than half the students were Latino. They scored significantly lower on standardized tests than the state averages, which were low to begin with. The percentages of Latinos graduating6 from high school and college had been increasing, but still lagged far behind those of whites and Asians. In 2017, only 12 percent of Latinos over the age of twenty-five had a bachelor’s degree. African Americans were twice as likely to have degrees, whites and Asians four times as likely. Latino students who pursued higher education were most likely to enroll in community college and least likely to be eligible for admission to the University of California. While the vast majority of high school graduates attended some college, studies suggested fewer than a third7 would ever earn a bachelor’s degree under the current system, relegating most to lower-paying jobs and leaving California in need of more than a million college graduates.

  In an effort to improve the odds and break the cycle, Jerry initiated the first significant overhaul of school funding in four decades. The change grew out of a paper co-written by Stanford professor Michael Kirst, who had advised Jerry on education issues since 1974. They met when Kirst was invited to a brainstorming retreat at a Los Angeles convent to help the gubernatorial candidate formulate positions. When Jerry was elected, he appointed Kirst to chair the state Board of Education. Jerry had not focused much on education his first time around. That changed after Oakland. He remained closely involved in the two charter schools he founded. Based on his own experience, his Jesuit education, and the influence of scholars like Ivan Illich and Paul Goodman, Jerry formed strong opinions that ran counter to the prevailing emphasis on standardized tests. As attorney general, he protested a U.S. Education Department requirement to link teacher pay to test scores: “There are so many unknowns about what produces educational success that a little humility8 would be in order.”

  As an example of learning that could not be captured on standardized tests, Jerry occasionally cited one of his high school English assignments: Write your impression of a leaf. “Boy, did I have trouble with that,” he told a teachers’ convention almost six decades later. “After I wrote the damn essay I realized, I didn’t even have an impression of a green leaf. I’d never thought about green leaves. And now for the rest of my life, every time I pass a tree I think of that exam. What is my impression? Do I have one? Do I need to develop a new aspect of my character or my sensibility? So, that’s a good teacher. And that’s a good test.”9

  When Jerry appointed Kirst to chair the state Board of Education again in 2011, his mandate was to deemphasize standardized tests, develop alternate measures to evaluate schools, and help reshape the way the state funded primary and secondary education. Kirst’s 2008 paper, which proposed an education funding formula weighted to drive more dollars to districts with students who needed the most help, formed the basis of a radical change.

  Like so many parts of the budget, the tangled roots of education financing went back to Prop 13. In the wake of the tax cut measure, the state had taken over allocating funds to more than a thousand school districts. The formulas grew progressively more complex as the state apportioned aid based on an increasing number of categories, each tied to a specific program or mandate. Each time a constituency felt its needs were ignored, it lobbied for a new categorical aid. The regulations took up hundreds of pages. More than a third of the total aid was earmarked for specific purposes.

  The idea behind what became the Local Control Funding Formula was basic: Money should be allocated in accordance with students’ needs. The execution was complex and controversial. The new formula adopted in 2013 gave districts flexibility to determine priorities by abolishing almost all the categorical aid requirements. Each district received a base amount per pupil; those with higher percentages of low-income students, English learners, or foster children received an additional increment per student. Districts with high concentrations of students in those categories received more. In the initial years, about one third of the students were low-income and one quarter were English language learners. In 2016, that translated into 1.3 million students who entered school speaking sixty-five languages, the overwhelming majority Spanish.

  Jerry saw the new formula as integral to his quest for subsidiarity and dismissed concerns that relaxing specific mandates might weaken education for students who most needed help. “Now, local districts might screw up.10 I understand that,” he said at a think tank gala in Los Angeles. “But if the parent screwed up things, and if the principal’s no good, if the principal can’t lead, if the superintendent isn’t very good, if the local school board isn’t so good, what makes you think that the legislature can fix it? Think about that. If the culture is such that we’re not stressing discipline and learning and curiosity and all the things we have to do to train our people, it’s not going to happen. So I do think we have to set goals, we have to have accountability, but we have to respect the fact that those closest to the problem are the ones most capable of dealing with it.”

  One of the goals was to provide more equal access to the University of California. The gaps had shrunk consistently over the past decade. Yet of all the Latino students in the high school class of 2015, only 8.5 percent had the requisite grades11 and coursework to apply to the university, compared with 13.9 percent of all students. In big swaths of the state like the Central Valley, with high concentrations of English language learners and poverty, the disparities were greater. Students from so
cioeconomically disadvantaged homes were less than half as likely to be eligible to apply.

  Even after years of budget cuts and turmoil that had hurt its reputation and reach, the university continued to be a primary route to upward mobility. With more than a million UC alumni in California, a big chunk of the population had a direct or indirect tie to the university. By 2015, more than 40 percent of UC undergraduates were the first in their family to attend college. About the same share came from families with incomes of less than $50,000. Within five years of graduating, those students earned more than their parents’ combined income. The university was not just “the engine of growth,”12 Jerry said. “It’s also the foundation of citizenship in our community. So I can’t think of anything much more important than a vibrant, accessible university system.”

  There were those who would never forgive Jerry Brown for how he had treated the university the first time around, not because of his disrespect or challenge to the entrenched bureaucracy but because his lack of support had inflicted real, lasting harm—at a time when the state was flush with money. Much antipathy lingered. (When Jerry had sought to place his gubernatorial papers from the 1970s in the Bancroft Library at Berkeley, which housed the Pat Brown papers, the library declined to provide funds to accession the collection.) Jerry recalled what then university president David Saxon had said during an argument in the 1970s: The university was here before you arrived, and we’ll be here after you’re gone. The governor tried, this time, to be more diplomatic, cognizant that Saxon’s words had proved true. “Before when I used to go to the Regents, I’d go armed and I was attacking. But it’s totally marginal, you can’t influence,” he said. “You’ve got to be more subtle, you need more allies. You need a long-term game plan.13 So I have a longer term game plan than I had thirty years ago, even though I’ve got less time because I’m seventy-four, I’m not thirty-six.”