I meant to post this the other night, along with my beautiful FIg Garden piece, but my daughter's birthday party snuck up on me instead. I wrote this a while back, about Fresno generally sucking according to objective standards, but I couldn't get anyone to publish it. So for your own edification then...
Fresno – It Really Does Suck Here
While living in Los Angeles a few years ago, I came across a shirt that said, “Fresno: It Really Does Suck Here.” I bought it for my sister as a joke, and she wore it to school at Edison High a couple of times. She even has pictures of a friend wearing it while dining with Fresno’s mayor, the illustrious Alan Autry. It was mostly a joke, parodying the rest of the state’s view of us as horribly backward and isolated from cultural norms, but it contained an element of truth that has been confirmed by a recent study.
The American Human Development Project revealed recently that the San Joaquin Valley ranks dead last among the U.S.’s 436 Congressional districts in terms of overall “well-being,” a diagnostic that measures “three basic building blocks” of life: income, education, and health. In its evaluation of the Valley, it basically concurred with the 2005 Congressional Research Survey (CRS), which reported that 22% of the population in the San Joaquin Valley lived in poverty in 2002, and that, “of the 10 occupations in Fresno and Madera counties with the most workers, only 2 – nurses and elementary school teachers – have average wages above $29,000.”
In terms of education, we are significantly behind the curve as well, as people with less than a high school education represent over 30% of the adult population in most Valley counties, compared with 24% in California as a whole. Furthermore, while 24% of California residents had a bachelor’s degree in 2000, the San Joaquin Valley boasted an abysmal 12.5% in this category, and only 6.5% had graduated from college.
To top it all off, life expectancy in the Valley is on the low end, with residents living on average four and a half years less than the study’s top-ranking district, Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
Much of this boils down to poverty. In a number of studies of the relationship between income and education, poverty tended to explain around 50% of a school’s performance as measured by California’s Academic Performance Index, which is based primarily on standardized test scores, attendance, and graduation rates. As the CRS noted, the nature of agricultural work in the Valley, and its heavy reliance on immigrant labor for seasonal employment, is a constant source of economic strife in the region, creating a cycle of poverty and educational underachievement that perpetuates this population’s place at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. Dubbing these groups “illegals” and denying them basic public services merely exacerbates these conditions and does little to improve the region in any tangible way. This further leaves us trapped in the zero sum game of competing for resources in an already underserved region.
This gets at another important matter, which is the state’s ineffectual system for allocating funds to schools. In particular, California’s reliance on per-pupil revenue limits is short-sighted at best, overlooking the fact that certain pupils (e.g., those in California’s 20th) enter the school system at a significant disadvantage – whether it be from a lack of prior family education, language barriers, or enrollment in a historically underserved district – and these students both need and deserve more of the state’s funds.
There is no quick fix for this state of affairs, and anyone who offers one is selling snake oil to the desperate masses. Instead, what we need is a comprehensive approach that recognizes the interconnections between the different areas that have combined to land us at the very bottom of the national heap. A revamped school finance program would be a useful start, but a broad-based anti-poverty campaign aimed at helping immigrant workers in the agricultural sector would be a virtual prerequisite. If we want to vindicate our region from the T-shirted jokers out there, it’s time we offered more than silk-screened solutions.
