The Uneducated Californian

Paul Krugman offers a very good summary of shocking educational declines that are familiar to readers of this blog, but it's always worth once again summarizing the sheer craziness:

• in the 19th century, the US stopped being poor and backward by leading in universal basic education.  Now that progress requires universal higher education, it is disinvesting in that.
• US educational levels are going down, not up. Younger people are becoming less well educated than older.  (The same is true in research, which suffers as public universities suffer.)
  
• The US is now below average in attainment (with California tanked into the bottom 10)
• the public sector has now joined the private sector in cutting jobs, insuring rising unemployment
  
• the US has no obvious mechanisms to reverse the decline.  Knucklehead cure-alls like "work more" are the opposite of what we need to improve educational outcomes: US students already lose way too much time "in school" on paid outside jobs.
• the stakes are huge: there "will be lifetime damage to many students’ prospects — and a large, gratuitous waste of human potential."

The waste of so many people, and not only in economic terms, is the core of the dumbness and immorality of this entire situation.

Krugman's solutions are another stimulus and a general awakening to our perversity.   I favor both of these. But this doesn't reckon with the people who will oppose another stimulus - every single House Republican, all of whom voted against the first one, and every Sacramento Republican, who have a lock on the Legislature. It doesn't reckon with people whose careers depend on maintaining perversity - single-issue politicians such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose public policy vision consists of cutting taxes.  Arnold has done enormous damage to UC.  Nothing is going to change until the university community - including UCOP and the Regents - are willing to hold him accountable for the effects of his ideology and his acts.