I was on the couch enjoying my coffee yesterday when the Governor delivered his State of the State address. We're half a dozen inches behind seasonal here in the North State, which supplies water for hundreds of miles in California. I had just come back from San Diego, driving the whole length of the state, passing signs in agricultural fields that read, "Dust Bowl Created By Congress," among others. When Schwarzenegger promised to end the "war on water," I wondered if he was going to do a rain dance. He admitted, "Our economy cannot grow without water. Our population cannot live without water. It is our state's lifeblood." Right now, we need at least fifteen feet of snow to fall on our mountains in order to fill our fields, and we're not even halfway there yet, though we're halfway through the "rainy" season. In a full-on drought of finances and rainwater, California struggles on, but the governor managed to make me feel good about it. Most of the hype about his speech has criticized him for just this particular quirk, that he was "Arnold being too positive"; the rest of the hype (see Los Angeles Times article) focused on how he had reversed his decision on Obama's healthcare platform. I thought I understood Arnold's speech, but I came away from the hype realizing that I had not truly heard the man. Somehow, I understood him to be stating that California needs more return on the dollar from federal programs, including health care; I understood him to say that he had reason to be positive, and he backed up his argument with statistics and more hype from Time magazine; and I understood him to be promising the impossible, better drinking water for California, better education.
Let it rain. Not one organization has assaulted the governor enough for his education fix, tying standardized tests to teacher performance. When class sizes push 35 students or more, academic research shows that student performance falls. No teacher can overcome crowding in the classroom. We need rain, and we need to decrease class sizes. We've got too many people in California, and we cannot support them. Driving home from San Diego, I was happy to escape to my mountain home, but every year that I do, the push northward reveals new housing and development. Our great state has limited pasture. Smart as we are, there is not much we can do about that.
In my final sip, I felt a little bit satisfied that Governor Schwarzenegger had at least mentioned two key points: he wants to protect higher education in the state budget and reduce prison spending; he is concerned about veterans returning home from Iraq and their mental states. These issues are related, but only those of us who work at the three major institutions, prisons, higher education, and veterans' affairs, would really appreciate that. What he didn't say is this: Federal spending on mental health treatment for returning veterans would not only reduce suicides, it would reduce crisis response teams and violent events on our campuses and would reduce the incidents requiring the incarceration of returning veterans. But he cannot do anything about federal funding of veterans' affairs, either. California is interdependent with the rest of the nation. That's what I heard.
Well spake!
Posted by: Lachlan | January 15, 2010 at 11:10 PM