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Dr.
Kevin Starr is a professor of History and Policy, Planning and Development
at the University of Southern California and is currently serving
as the California State librarian. He is the author of the ongoing
six-volume history of California, Americans and the California
Dream. His most recently published volume is entitled The
Dream Endures: California Enters the 1940s. He is a contributing
editor at the Los Angeles Times.
• CALIFORNIA'S GOLDEN AGE • SERRANO
V. PRIEST
• PROPOSITION 13 • IMMIGRATION
• NAEP SCORES
• DOES CALIFORNIA MATTER? |
"California was the cutting edge of the American
Dream... it was the Brave New World, of suburbia, of families,
of swimming pools, and, very interestingly enough, of an educational
utopia..."
"...It's not surprising to me that the public schools
in the 1960s began to pay attention to public education as the primary
vehicle of equal access and upward mobility into the society."
"I don't think any governmental entity in the history
of this nation was ever faced with as complex a social challenge
as the public schools of California were during the 1960s to the
present..."
"I hope and I know that the California experiment is
not for naught, and that somehow a new kind of fusion world culture
is being achieved here, under the auspices of the American Constitution."
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CALIFORNIA'S
GOLDEN AGE
JOHN MERROW
Tell me a little bit about what California was like.
KEVIN STARR
World War Two transformed California. Some 35 billion dollars of federal
money was spent here at a time when that count counted for something.
Hundred of thousands, indeed millions of young men and women passed
through California. So the 1950s mood was a mood of capitalizing on
those transformations of the 1940s. California was on ... en-route
to becoming the most populous state in the nation, which it became
by 1962, when it had 12 million people. Imagine, today in 2003 with
35 million people, but 12 million people made us the most populous
state. It was also preparing for the future, in 1957 it issued a major
freeway plan by the state government. Uh, it was building schools
at an unprecedented rate per day. Suburbs were coming overnight. At
the height of the Cold War there was something like 35 percent of
the aerospace budget of the Department of Defense being spent in Los
Angeles County alone. So you have the acceleration of the economy,
it was on Defense Department steroids, so there was movement, there
was money, there was people.
JOHN MERROW
You said somewhere in your book that there was a kind of California
state of mind.
KEVIN STARR
Yes, there was a sense, and it was shared, that California was the
cutting edge of the American Dream, and that what was going to be
put together here was going to justify all the struggle of the Second
World War, it was the Brave New World, of suburbia, of families, of
swimming pools, and, very interestingly enough, of an educational
utopia, in which each Californian, especially after the passage of
the Master Plan for Higher Education in 1959, each Californian would
have his or her best potential fulfilled through education. Each citizen
would belong to what in effect was an educational utopia.
JOHN MERROW
And this was in effect your birthright as a Californian?
KEVIN STARR
Yes. This was a birthright of California, and because also the economy
was becoming increasingly complex, technology was making its appearance,
there was a mood there that California had to educate the work force
for this great future that awaited it. Public schools were being built
by the hour, and dedicated. Public school architecture was at its
best. An entire generation of talented young men and women went into
public school teaching and administration. There was a sense that
a utopia was being formed in the classroom.
JOHN MERROW
And this was not one set of schools for the rich and one set for the
poor?
KEVIN STARR
No. This was a more egalitarian movement. After all, Lowell High School
in San Francisco, the high school that had produced Josiah Royce,
the great philosopher, and Albert McCaylason, the first American to
win the Nobel Prize, was a public high school. Hollywood High School
was a public high school. Burbank High School was a public high school.
These were all high schools with spectacular, board scores and feeding
into Stanford and Berkeley. In fact, if you looked at the campuses
of Stanford and the elite colleges of the state, and of the University
of California at this time, not many of those students went back east
to Andover, Groton, Saint Paul's, Saint Mark's. They went to their
local public high schools.
JOHN MERROW
Californians, you said they believed in their public schools. Did
they believe that their public school system was the best in the country?
KEVIN STARR
I don't remember there being much comparative sense about other states.
They believed that their public school system was the cutting edge
of their society, and they believed their society was the cutting
edge of American society. They put the public schools and education
out on the front, and this begins with Governor Earl Warren. Governor
Earl Warren in 1949, in the Saturday Evening Post, writes an essay
about the number of schools he's building per day, and how important
this is for the state.
SERRANO v. PRIEST
JOHN MERROW
In the Sixties,.. there was an effort to equalize funding in the schools.
Clearly something had gotten out of whack if funding was so unequal
as to warrant folks going to court ...
KEVIN STARR
In the 1950s, there was not that much botheration, if you will, about
equal rights or whether the schools were predominantly peopled by
Anglo-Americans or Euro-Americans because that reflected all of California,
that was the awareness of California. Now, in the 1960s, with Serrano
versus Priest and some of the other similar movements, you also realized
that if you have a society that is struggling for equal rights for
each of its citizens, regardless of race, color, creed or background,
than the public schools, if they were the cutting edge of the society,
had to be the cutting edge of that reform, and so you have the intense
equalization efforts, the bussing efforts, et cetera, moving into
the late 1960s, early 1970s. ...It's not surprising to me that the
public schools in the 1960s began to pay attention to public education
as the primary vehicle of equal access and upward mobility into the
society. Because after all, that's what everybody had been talking
about, and practicing, and paying for, throughout the 1950s.
PROPOSITION 13
JOHN MERROW
Talk to me a little bit about Howard Jarvis and Proposition 13.
KEVIN STARR
The 1970s have always seemed to me a kind of wacky decade. The first
couple of years of the 1970s participate in the mood of the late Sixties,
social rebellion, innovation, opposition to the War in Vietnam. And
then there is a movement, at least in California, into cults, the
SLA, all sorts of communitarian issues, and a retreat of a lot of
the activists into a culture of wine and food and personal fulfillment.
There is also, starting in the mid-1970s, a fatigue factor that's
behind Howard Jarvis and the tax payers revolt, a fatigue factor setting
in, in a society which had had its public sector in overdrive since
the 1940s: The building of 58 community colleges and 20 odd California
State University systems, and the expansion of the University of California
to nine campuses, the construction of a roadway, freeway system the
likes of which has never been seen in the history of the human race.
The completion of the California water plan. The construction of thousands
of public schools. The opening up of countless communities, their
libraries, their fire departments. A fatigue begins to settle in,
and from that fatigue is born the tax revolt.
JOHN MERROW
So it's "I'm tired, I just want to take care of my little place,
my property taxes are going up. Enough is enough"?
KEVIN STARR
There's the fatigue that comes from 30 years of public spending. This
is a population that had fought the war, World War Two, had inherited
post-war California, had built the good life. It was now beginning
to see the final stages of life. Senior citizenship, the retirement
years, it was in late middle age at the least, and many of them were
already in old age, and you have a kind of anthropological revolt
against this constant futurity of California, this constant paying
for public schools, paying for everything because it embodied the
future, and people began to revolt and say, what about now, what about
my time now? And so you had a generational revolt, and ironically,
the very generation which created post-war California was in significant
measure the generation that closed it down in the late Seventies with
the tax revolt.
IMMIGRATION
JOHN MERROW
There's another factor, that was changing California, and that's the
immigration.
KEVIN STARR
If you take a look at magazines covering California in the 1950s and
early 1960s, it's a significantly Anglo-American state. Not necessarily
because there aren't other people of color in the state, but because
the state's image is fixed on this Anglo-American, tan, beach boy,
Gidget figure. But at the same time, in the mid-1960s, we began to
reform our immigration law. The Chinese population, which was down
to as low as three thousand citizens at the turn of the century, rapidly
explodes at the uniting of families and today of course we have one
million Chinese-Americans in California. The Filipino community, which
had been coming into California in significant numbers from the 1930s
and then immediately after World War Two period, you have the reuniting
of Philippine families and then we have a million Filipino-American
Californians.
Then you have a series of successive turmoils in the world. Iran,
Vietnam, Armenia, the break up of the Soviet Union, the starvation
of Ethiopia, each of these international catastrophes brings in even
more immigrants. And so consequently, by the time we enter the 1990s,
Los Angeles is the second largest Mexican city on the planet, the
second largest Korean city on the planet, a ranking Armenian, Iranian
and Ethiopian city. So you have this extraordinary diversification
of California from the mid-1960s reformation of the immigration laws
until it's discernibly there by the time we enter the 1990s.
It's a different kind of culture altogether.
JOHN MERROW
What's the impact on the schools of this wave after wave of young
people?
KEVIN STARR
I don't think any governmental entity in the history of this nation
was ever faced with as complex a social challenge as the public schools
of California were during the 1960s to the present, saying, absorb
the peoples of the world, bring them into your classroom, deals with
the 60 to 70 languages, deal with the whole range of behavioral patterns,
codes, cultural gestures, and somehow meld that together into a workable
classroom. That is an extraordinary challenge, which the public schools
of California accepted.
JOHN MERROW
You said they accepted it. Do you have a judgment about how well or
how poorly they've done?
KEVIN STARR
I personally am not one to be apocalyptic or apoplectic regarding
test scores in California, given the incredible social challenge encountered
by our public schools. Because it's without precedent in human history
to take this many people, to bring them together into a common culture,
to extend to them a common language, a common system of public values
and citizenship. I think that it's possibly admirable that the test
scores are as high as they are, given the challenge. Name me any other
public school system that had to encounter this kind of work of assimilation.
JOHN MERROW
So if I say to you, well, what are the schools like today?
KEVIN STARR
If I look at the public schools today, I'd say, here's the cutting
edge of our culture. They don't get blue ribbons, there's many things
that have to be worked on, the scores in many cases have to be worked
on. Questions of classroom discipline have to be worked on. But in
all the cluster of all those challenges is the fact and the symbol
of the civilization we're trying to build. An unprecedented world
civilization, that is not just multi-cultural but ecumenical, which
is to say it's not just other people's moving side by side, rubbing
up against each other like tectonic plates, but coming together. So
I think the present challenge is apparent, the scores are apparent,
but the scores don't say everything about what might be an even more
powerful ongoing cultural transformation that is centered in the public
schools of this state.
JOHN MERROW
Are you optimistic?
KEVIN STARR
I have to be optimistic. We have to be optimistic because hope, you
know, faith, hope and charity are the three theological virtues. We
have to have faith, we have to believe in the future. We have to have
charity, loving kindness to each other. And we have to have hope.
Hope is a form of knowledge. We must hope for the best for our culture.
I think it's too early to throw in the towel because of a board score
here or a test here without going into classrooms, as I do as state
librarian, and seeing hundreds and hundreds of bright eyed little
kids and their little sparkling brown eyes and watching them, knowing
that their native language is Spanish, watching them follow the intricacies
of a Dr. Seuss lyric and laugh in the right places. That's an achievement.
Go look at our children in the school yards. Go look at the dedication
of our teachers. You know, we human beings don't live just for quantification.
We have to blend quantification with other modes of knowledge and
hope is a mode of knowledge. I hope and I know that the California
experiment is not for naught, and that somehow a new kind of fusion
world culture is being achieved here, under the auspices of the American
Constitution.
JOHN MERROW
The California experiment is ongoing?
KEVIN STARR
California experiment has only just begun. You know, Karen Carpenter,
the Carpenters sing that wonderful song, "We've Only Just Begun"?
We've only just begun. We're only 30 years into this more or less
enthusiastic embracing of this internationalist destiny that history
has given us.
JOHN MERROW
Is it part and parcel of California this tendency to go whole hog
one way and then whole hog another way?
KEVIN STARR
Well, there's sort of two polarities in the California psyche. There's
a very conservative California. You can encounter it in our suburbs,
in Pasadena and San Marino, and in the fact that San Francisco was
the tenth largest city in the United States as early as 1870. This
is not a new state from that point of view. However, and at the risk
of contradicting myself, there is also a faddism in California, there's
a volatility, there's an embracing of ideas, sometimes kooky ideas,
and maybe that's what California does. Maybe part of what the east
coast does is to submit experience to a more critical analysis, maybe
California's job is to put it up the flag pole and see if anybody
salutes it. And sometimes great mistakes are made when you act without
that kind of critical intelligence that Californians are sometimes
deficient in.
NAEP SCORES
JOHN MERROW
What did it do, if anything, to California's sense of itself when
in 1994, the National Assessment of Educational Progress revealed
that California's scores ranked at the very bottom of the United States?
KEVIN STARR
Well, in 1994, California was ranked at the very bottom in terms of
its national scores, that's the same time that its economy was totally
in the tank, that it was losing its population for the first time.
I think we had out-migration for the first time in 140 something years.
We had an epidemic of gangland slayings in southern California. We
had, only two years earlier, one of the most horrendous urban riots
in May, 1992, in Los Angeles. We had some of the most damaging earthquakes
in the history of this country. The 1990s show a general collapse
and challenge to California's sense of itself. The state recovered
somewhat, and now here we are, in the year 2003, faced with the paradox
of a 1.4 trillion dollar economy in the private sector, and an impoverished
public sector. This California experiment is not easy to handle. It
experiences the public equivalent of mood swings and that polarity
is part of the immaturity and the volatility of California, but it's
also what makes it a bellwether state, because you can read symptoms
rather quickly here.
JOHN MERROW
So the 1994 bottoming out in public education was part of a general
bottoming out. The California experiment is not a steady upward climb?
KEVIN STARR
I would say that in the early to mid-1990s, California experienced
the greatest challenge to its sense of itself in its entire history
as an American state. And education was one of those components, the
collapse of the defense industry, the, series of natural catastrophes
that occurred. Everywhere you look you find signs of deep trouble.
In fact, Time magazine, in October of 1991, was announcing that California's
over. It's over. Time magazine said, "California the vanishing
dream."
JOHN MERROW
Peter Shrag and others have said that race becomes part of the story
because white Californians were the majority of voters and didn’t
support public services that were used more by minorities.
KEVIN STARR
I'd like to challenge anyone who sees the California electorate as
racially biased in its educational policy. After all, this is the
state that passed a proposition that says some outrageous amount of
the state budget must automatically go into public education. This
is a state which designed itself as an educational utopia as far back
as 1959, before the civil rights movement. I think there are cultural
and sociological problems that can be compounded by racial identity,
but I don't see institutional racism at the core of any of these problems.
DOES CALIFORNIA MATTER?
JOHN MERROW
Does this story of California's educational utopia and its gradual
decline, does it have any significance for the rest of the country?
KEVIN STARR
Well, absolutely. Wallace Stegner, our great Stanford University based
writer, said California is like the rest of the United States only
more so. For the time being, California is a way of probing the nature
of this country: Can American institutions, American bonds, the mystic
bonds that pull us together, hold up under a rapid infusion of the
peoples of the world? And how long will this take to reassimilate
people? And I think that California is performing a work on behalf
of the emergent American civilization of the twenty first century
and doing its part. We're not sectional, we're not regional. It's
not north and south, it's not Midwest. All the elements came here
in the nineteenth and twentieth century, and peopled this state in
its American phase, and now all the peoples of the world are peopling
it in its international phase.
JOHN MERROW
But why should the quality of public schools in California matter
a hill of beans to someone in Hartford? In Roanoke?
KEVIN STARR
Well, there's one demographic mode of analysis that might see up to
a third of the population of the nation in California by the next
century. And there is another school of thought that says that what
California is today, America is tomorrow. And in California, in terms
of the public schools, this battle that we're fighting to redesign
really a new civilization, or help it come into being, that's of importance
to everyone. After all, if you look at populations, there are Hispanic
peoples now in Iowa. Maine has a significant Latino population. And
when you look at the great states like Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota,
South Dakota, that have lost so much of their Euro-American population,
they will regain immigrant populations in the years to come. There
will be east Asian Indian communities in North Dakota. There will
be Latino cities in Iowa.
We should say that the whole country is going to be, as Governor Jerry
Brown announced to us more than a quarter of a century ago, this whole
country is going to be a world experiment, it's going to be about
four percent of the population of the world and yet will contain within
it every element of human culture. And that's not just California.
It's temporarily located here, because that's our job, is to get things
out first and see how they're working, to go through maybe some of
the more naive, early phases of this kind of cultural development.
JOHN MERROW
You keep saying experiement. Any scientist will tell you most experiments
fail.
KEVIN STARR
I think California's an experiment within the larger experiment of
the United States of America. At the core of the word experiment is
experience, to experience something and live through it, and that's
what we have to do day by day. In the crisis facing public schools,
we're living through that in order to see something else, which is
on the other side, which is this new American civilization, which
is struggling to be born, in California and everywhere else as well.
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