Important Topics

"Wow, we have electricity and running water!" That line I used on my kids is about perspective. In California, we have so much: beauty, weather, natural resources, money, and people. And our government delivers, too—from the dams providing our power and water, to the highways connecting our state, to our universities and safety nets.

To fund all this, our state collects nearly $300 billion, largely through a highly progressive income tax. The top 1% pay up to half the income tax revenue, and the top 10% pay 75%—a massive share reflecting their massive portion of state income.

A look at how much actual burden is placed on people reveals a more complex reality. When you include regressive costs like sales tax, corporate taxes, and vehicle fees, the burden evens out. The bottom 20% devote about 10.5% of their income to state and local taxes, the middle 20% pay 8.3%, and the top 1% pay 12.4%. Ultimately, the pain of not renting the fancier Airbnb of one's choice doesn't compare to the pain of going dark due to the cost of electricity.

Regulations, too, have had a major impact. In Los Angeles, the air used to be unbreathable; now it is breathable. Renewable energy is thriving here, largely due to California's incentives. We lead the way.

Then again, regulations can be too much of a good thing. The Governor signed almost 800 new bills, just last year! Any citizen can recite the dangers of such overreach, beginning with the staggering cost of the homes we live in, and continuing into the head-scratching confusion of trying to comply with edicts that intrude on our lives in a myriad of ways.

The tradeoffs are constant. To collect resources and deliver benefits effectively—to write rules for public benefit while limiting public harm in such a massive system—is no easy task. I live here, and I signed up for this race in part due to the frustration of these shortcomings. This rearguard campaign is about optimizing that tradeoff.

The administrative aspect of running a university is important, but it can quickly overwhelm. There are certainly heroes (like registrar staff among a host of others), but the compensation for non-academic positions at UC Berkeley is north of $1.3 billion a year. That's over $30,000 for every student, and not a single teacher, TA, lab assistant, or researcher is in that number. It is a widely known issue. At Berkeley, I have petitioned leaders, presented analysis, and joined committees for a decade trying to optimize and redirect these resources back to our core mission. In 2016, my joint analysis with UC Berkeley's Office of Finance showed that if we were as efficient as UC Santa Barbara, we could cut costs by hundreds of millions of dollars. I made many internal efforts, including joining the Divisional Council, to repeatedly share this analysis. They didn’t work. Too many people benefit, and the decision-makers are too close to those people to do anything productive. The inside game justifies every decision.

A recent analysis of UC Salary Data shows it's getting worse, not better: even while "efficiencies" are forced upon the people actually doing the work, highly paid administrators and their helpers are grabbing a bigger share of the pie. Changing this requires real power. Bad press and public shaming are not enough. Any high-salary hiring or promotion needs to be done with careful thought and enforced hesitancy. The days of overpaying for purported "administrative talent" along with their army of helpers must end.

Kids go to school in California to learn, go to recess, make friends, play sports, and do music, drama, art all under the watchful eyes of caring teachers. It's wonderful. Still, our educational outcomes are deeply unequal. Our most vulnerable children read significantly worse than those in Mississippi or Alabama. While some refer to the "Mississippi Miracle”, the miracle is simply understanding that words are made of letters, and learning those first leads to fluently learning words. You have to walk before you run. Somewhere along the line, students were expected to jump to fluency simply by looking at pictures. An entire industry of publishers and academic pretenders profited from the harm they inflicted on our most vulnerable kids.

The math wars are similar. Math starts from 0, 1, 2 and so on. It is simple, amazing, and births the fundamental concept of infinity. From there, we have addition, multiplication, and fractions, as well as properties that allow us to use symbols for numbers. Decimal representation democratized numbers, allowing us all to work with money and free ourselves from would-be overseers. Indeed, these efficient representations are how all computing works today.

As I note to my students, there is truth in math. While math can certainly be useful to apply—especially in finance, where real-world application is complex—some argue that students should start with the complex application and work backward. Students get lost in the complexity of the world being modelled and miss the actual math. This is deeply problematic. It may be fine for the kids whose parents will teach them the fundamentals at home anyway, but it is a disaster for vulnerable kids. The tendency to prioritize the excitement or feeling of learning over actual, foundational learning is disastrous.

I served on the School Site Council for four years at Berkeley High, and I observed the educational pathology firsthand. Program after program—most of which had already failed in other districts across the country—were tried, celebrated, and ultimately failed to move the needle. While the school was undeniably welcoming, that welcome often came in the form of low expectations for certain students. The results were predictable: Berkeley High suffered among the worst achievement gaps in the state.

Out of frustration, I conducted an analysis of the correlation of achievement across liberal and conservative school districts across California. The dataset revealed a stark trend: the achievement gap is positively correlated with the liberal population—a correlation about as high as any demographic variable (such as parental education) in the extensive available datasets. You can view the full methodology and data here.

While this analysis isn't absolute proof, it strongly suggests that ostensibly well-meaning liberal intentions harm students or at least do not automatically translate into successful, equitable outcomes. I shared these findings with educational researchers at Stanford and Berkeley, but they proved to be an inconvenient observation to the established ideology.

Across the board, we often see a coincidence of publishers pushing weird academic theories that generate profits for the publishers and acclaim for the academics. Unfortunately, our state board of education has frequently been supportive of this dynamic. While we debate the basics, my own children have had to carry around 1,200-page physics and chemistry textbooks that almost no high schooler actually reads. Time and time again, the brief and cogent reviews found in test prep books prove far more useful for grasping the core mechanics of these beautiful fields. True depth of understanding comes from a solid understanding of fundamentals, not from enforcing uniform, bloated ideologies.

Truth works in mathematics. In the real world, there is evidence, and proceeding on evidence. "I don't know" is generally the most truthful thing one can say. It's then useful to understand arguments and evidence to evaluate how to proceed, as proceed we must.

But at Berkeley, a leading institution in thought and—one supposes—the pursuit of truth (or at least decision-making largely based on evidence), we enforced tribalism for years. A tribal view on values is perhaps understandable; our mission is to teach all comers and contribute to the welfare of the state. But it extends into the belief on the effectiveness of strategies, and indeed, into quite personal points of view.

The conservative caricature of universities is not exactly right, but in some ways, it is actually even weirder here.

An Example: DEI Statements

There are examples, but I will stick to one, because even I don't care to disrespect my colleagues too much. This is the notion of required Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) statements.

These statements on their face seem okay, particularly in view of ensuring we don't even subtly discriminate against our students and our colleagues. But our duties are in teaching, service, and research, and those values and contributions—on whatever side of the political spectrum—could be argued there.

Instead, we elevated for a decade this particular framing to force applicants into a narrow point of view. In fact, the infamous Berkeley Rubric would seriously downgrade any candidate who suggested that a strategy for overcoming hurdles was to "work hard" in their DEI statements. It's not 100% wrong to say that this statement could be used as a cudgel against those for whom the hurdles are too great, but it is also dangerous to tell people there is no hope. (For further reading, see these perspectives on abandoning or improving DEI statements).

As someone who does participate in discussions on candidates, these statements were taken seriously and required adherence to a certain approach in thinking with little requirements for actually, effectively delivering. It did achieve a purpose in that the faculty of that age were forced to agree to this philosophy, and in doing so, tend to have accepted it internally. Forcing someone to agree in writing to be employed is a (possibly mild) application of force to indoctrinate.

Moreover, these rubrics were generated by the very same army of administrators that consume our budget.

It is damaging to actual dialogue on solutions. And on seeking the truth, or evidence, or counter-evidence, for whatever strategy one might pursue.

I argued consistently and firmly at my university for the last few years that this was wrong. There is a social and employment cost to doing so. See, for example, the reaction to Professor Thompson's objections, where she likened the statements to 1950s anti-communist oaths.

It started as a lark. I noticed that you could get on the ballot for some relatively modest fees and was joking to my friends about it. The campaign message was simple: "Anybody is better than those people, even me. They are not honest. Not at all. They don't even seem to get the basics right. Really, pick anyone off the street. It would be better."

Then I started pulling the trigger. Starting with forms, and then payments. And here I find myself.

I am running to focus on intelligent tradeoff discussions, delivering real value, and backing out of the stupid. We don't need yet another wishlist of promises; we need the promise that all actions are critically evaluated to help more than hurt.

I have hope that focus can be placed on the heartbreaking educational failures and costs we suffer as a state. Roughly 4 billion dollars is spent on profitable curricular materials alone—often based on dodgy philosophies which lead directly to vulnerable kids not being able to read. We can place pressure on administrators in universities to spend that money on actual teaching instead.

For what it's worth, community colleges already have a law requiring that half of their expenditures (in certain categories) are spent in the classroom. So progress can be made. There is precedent.