Politics & Government

Simitian Says Fixing Education Central to Occupy's Challenge

State Senator sat down with Patch editors for a free-wheeling Q&A in which Occupy dominated much of the conversation.

Patch: An SF Gate poll found that a substantial number of Californians support the Occupy movement. What are your overall impressions?

Senator Joe Simitian: I think there is value in a tangible visible manifestation of anger and frustration, and I think that’s what Occupy has been. This is an odd analogy perhaps, but people sometimes ask, are you persuaded when we send you 300 emails? And what I tell them is, before you persuade someone, you’ve got to get their attention. So, what the 300 emails do is get my attention. They don’t necessarily persuade me, but they make me stop and think, hey, what is it everybody’s all riled up about.

From my standpoint, what Occupy has done is provide this tangible, visible expression of the anger and frustration that I have sensed for quite some time.

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Patch: Do you share that frustration? Do you share that anger?

Simitian: Well now we’re into a personal conversation, but I’m gonna let it get that way. On my father’s side, my grandparents came over on the boat from Armenia. They fled the genocide. They did the best they could to make their way through the Great Depression. They struggled—my grandparents had grade school educations, or the rough equivalent thereof, and they lived and worked in a two-room tailor shop where my father and his sister grew up, and they pulled the curtain down at night, and grandpa and dad would pull out the cots in the front, and grandma and Aunt Virginia would sleep in back, and that’s the way they lived for a long time.

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My father was able to go to college on the G.I. Bill, which meant he got to be a schoolteacher. He taught here in Palo Alto, which meant I got to go to Palo Alto schools, because this was back in the day when a school teacher could afford to buy a home in Palo Alto on a single schoolteacher’s salary. That meant I got to go to a great school district here in Palo Alto. It meant that I got a free—back when U.C. was really free, not pretend free—education, at one of the best law schools in the country. It meant when I wanted to go back to get a Masters in City Planning, I could go back and it was still free. And many years later, when I wanted to go to Stanford, I could afford one year, because I had the two degrees from Berkeley.

But that’s the model. That’s the American model of opportunity. We are in serious danger of losing that opportunity for advancement that we have taken for granted for a very long time.

If you ask me if I’m angry and frustrated that the system is not working as well as it can and should to make sure that where things are worng they are made right, and that everyone has equal oporutnity to advance to the limit of their talent and own hard work, then year?

Patch: Everyone can agree on that… Republicans, Democrats. It’s the framing…

Simitian: Whoa whoa whoa. Everybody can, but not everybody does.

Patch: You don’t think that Republicans would agree that everyone should have equal opportunity to be the best American Horatio Alger success story they can?

Simitian: I don’t want to make it Partisan, but I’ll come back to the Partisan dynamic in a minute. If you really believe that, you gotta put your money where your mouth is. If you really believe that, then you’d fund public education, including higher education, at a level that made that real. And if you don’t fund it, you can’t say that that ‘s a value that you hold.

Talk’s cheap. The question is, are we gonna make that opportunity real. I am in this interview with you today as a member of the state senate who represents 950,000 people because that opportunity was real.

To the extent that we hold ourselves out as a society that values equal opportunity, public education is what makes that real.

The State of California has failed to fund the UC, CSU and community college system adequately, sufficiently with the resources needed to preclude the kinds of fee increases that you’ve seen.

Patch: So you think that’s the fundamental issue? Because you said there’s a lot of issues in Occupy.

Simitian: I think that the occupy movement is many different things to many different people. I think it’s important to understand that. I think it’s important to respect it. That being said, I think over time the movement will have to more clearly articulate a set of goals and aspirations if it’s to have a long-term impact. That hasn’t happened yet.

Some people are critical of that; I have a different view. It’s a process that takes time. You don’t just show up one day and sort of have all that ten-point plan. My hope is that it will emerge with greater clarity and specificity over time. I don’t there’s reasons to be critical just because the anger and frustration right now is precisely targeted.

Do you agree with the framing of their critique of the system, which is that bankers—the people who own, who hold the one percent of the wealth in this country, exert an undue level of control and influence over the apparatus of power that effects the 99%? That ultimately, all of the problems we’ve talked about can be condensed into one primary root, which is that there is too much money being controlled by too few people who wield too much control over everyone else?

Simitian: If you’re asking, do I think that income inequality is a major problem in today’s America, the answer is absolutely yes. Because that income inequality has some pretty adverse consequences both in terms of the opportunity to move forward—because the greater the income inequality becomes, the harder it is to dig yourself out, from my judgment—also, do I think that income inequality leads to a disproportionate political influence by a smaller band of folks who hold a disproportionate share of the resources, the answer is yes, I do.

In terms of the social fabric of the state or the nation, what makes a pluralistic society work is the notion that we’re all in this together. And when you start to see the income inequality that we’ve seen start to develop over the last ten or 20 years, it becomes very hard to make the case that we’re all in this together. And that’s not just a feel-good, warm and fuzzy thing. That really goes to your ability to harness the energies of this state or this nation to some common purpose.

By definition, the growing income inequality means that common purpose is harder to find.

Patch: Do you think that’s where we’ve arrived as a society?

Simitian: I don’t think it’s irreversible.

Patch: Does the American Dream exist?

Simitian: Yes, but it is less-often realized, and we are at risk of it being less-often realized as we go forward.


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