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Peter Schrag: Our growing income gap: Is education the fix?
By Peter Schrag -- Bee Columnist
Published 2:15 am PST Wednesday, March 8, 2006
It's a familiar theme, and it's half true: The best way to deal with the nation's growing income gap is through education. California Chamber of Commerce President Allen Zaremberg echoed it last month at a discussion about raising the state's minimum wage.
"The bottom line," he said, "is education."

A few days earlier Ben Bernanke, the incoming chairman of the Federal Reserve, told a House committee almost the same thing. "The most important factor" in rising inequality, he said "is the rising skill premium, the increased return to education." For President Bush, discussing outsourcing to India last week, education is the all-purpose solution.

But even if every American child went to college, someone would still have to fill the millions of jobs in the kitchens, the fields and the garment factories that often pay little more than minimum wage, and sometimes less.

And as thousands of kids get the schooling their parents missed, economic pressures will suck in another generation from the Third World, Mexico particularly, willing to take those dirty, low-wage jobs. As UC Davis economist Phil Martin points out, the second generation rarely goes to work in the fields. Tomorrow's ag workers are growing up in Mexico.

The crazy uncle in this attic, of course, is immigration, an issue that's generating no end of heat, both here and in Washington, but that almost nobody wants to discuss seriously.

The nativists think mass deportation, bigger walls and more Border Patrol agents will fix it. The farmers and the hotel and restaurant industry complain that they have a terrible labor shortage, even as they pay those crummy wages that force people to live four to a room or in ratty sheds and garages.

Many on the left and in the immigrant rights groups worry - correctly - about the exploitation of illegal aliens and the conditions they have to work in. But as Berkeley historian David Hollinger said, when the discussion gets serious about immigration control, "Everybody leaves the room."

In his state of education speech last month, Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell stressed the economic importance of better educational opportunities both for California's future workers and for the economic competitiveness of the state and the nation.

On that score, the most obvious item on the immigration reform agenda would be passage of the bipartisan federal Dream Act, which would legalize the status of young people brought to this country illegally as children, had graduated from high school here and met certain other requirements. They committed no illegal act and, if they can come out of the shadows, represent a major asset to the economy.

(O'Connell would have been right to add that quality education is also crucial for the social and cultural health of the community. The state needs not only trained workers, but also engaged citizens and civic leaders.)

Nonetheless, education alone will not close the widening fissures in the country's economic and social fabric. The main reason for the growing income gap between high school and college graduates is not the growing wages of the latter, but the shrinking incomes of the former. According to economists Ian Dew-Becker and Robert Gordon of Northwestern University, "the top one-tenth of 1 percent of the income distribution earned as much of the real 1997-2001 gain in wage and salary income as the bottom 50 percent. ...

"Median real wage and salary income barely grew at all," they wrote. "Average wage and salary kept pace with productivity growth because half of the income gains went to the top 10 percent of the income distribution, leaving little left over for the bottom 90 percent."

So college makes a difference, but it doesn't cut the average graduate in on the large gains in the economy, doesn't guarantee health care, a reliable pension or a reliable lifetime job, much less a fair tax system or decent public services.

Presumably, only a small minority of people work minimum wage jobs all their lives - many are teenagers in part-time jobs - nor do most workers in the lowest income ranks remain stuck there indefinitely.

But the time-honored notion, dating back to romantics such as Horace Mann, that education is the all-purpose solution - the "great equalizer" - is an invitation to neglect almost everything else a good society should offer, from affordable housing, to health care, to youth counseling, to humane wages, hours and worker safety laws.

Schooling is a useful rallying cry for all manner of interest groups, conservatives especially, and thus one of our favorite shibboleths, but it's not enough.

Successful education itself frequently depends on the availability of a range of other services - and, of course, on engaged parents. The kids who lack the latter need the services even more urgently.

The schools have to act as if they alone can make the difference for every child, but any honest teacher or principal will be quick to tell you that often they can't. It's not an excuse, but it's a fact.


About the writer:
Peter Schrag can be reached at Box 15779, Sacramento, CA 95852-0779 or at pschrag@sacbee.com.