Peter Schrag

Peter Schrag, a longtime education writer and editor, is the co-author of When Europe Was a Prison Camp: Father and Son Memoirs, 1940-41 (Indiana University Press, 2015) and author of Paradise Lost: California's Experience, America's Future, and California: America's High-Stakes Experiment. He is a former editorial page editor of the Sacramento Bee.

Recent Articles

Blackout

Peter SchragDec 19, 2001

I f California's misbegotten electricity deregulation scheme is ever reduced to canvas or film, the artist would have to be some cross between Hieronymus Bosch and Federico Fellini. At one level, it's a surreal story of grossly compounded economic errors; at another, a gruesome morality tale--not only about corporate greed and political stupidity, but about the illusions of a new economy floating, detached, in some space of its own, unburdened by the problems of old-economy infrastructure and government. The resulting disaster has caused John Bryson--the CEO of Edison International, in whose offices much of this deal cooked up, to declare it a mistake and call for re-regulation. It is prompting serious talk about having the state seize the whole California power system and construct its own generating facilities. And it has succeeded in making Gray Davis, California's ever cautious New Democratic governor, sound like William Jennings Bryan. "California's deregulation scheme is a...

Regressive Recovery

If California's present is the nation's future, then the Golden State's split-level prosperity is an ominous social indicator.

Peter SchragJuly-August 1997

B y now it has become a truism that the California economy, which fell further than the rest of the nation in the recession of the early 1990s, and took longer to recover, has come back vigorously and is now outpacing the national economy. That's true whether one measures the rise in jobs, personal income, or the state's overall output in goods and services. California's unemployment rate is still a full point higher than the national rate, but as the Center for the Continuing Study of the California Economy (CCSCE) summarized early in 1997, "the state has regained all the jobs lost between 1990 and 1994 [and] most economists expect that the California economy will grow in 1997 and 1998—outpacing the nation each year." More impressively, the recovery was led by what CCSCE calls "future high growth sectors": high technology; foreign trade, particularly with Latin America and the nations of the Pacific Rim; tourism and entertainment; and professional services—all sectors regarded as...

School Vouchers

Peter SchragDec 10, 2001

Read more about School Vouchers

When Preferences Disappear

Proposition 209 signals the end of gender and racial favoritism in California, but it may also be the beginning of affirmative action by other means.

Peter SchragJanuary-February 1997

B y now, there can no longer be much doubt that the days of formal race preference programs, at least in the public sector, are numbered. On November 5, California voters did what everyone had long expected, approving Proposition 209, the California Civil Rights Initiative, which prohibits any consideration of race or gender in California public education, employment, and contracting. The vote was narrower than had once been expected (and might have been narrower still had CCRI opponents not used an inflammatory and offensive television commercial, complete with a burning KKK cross, in the last weeks of the campaign). But, with a margin of 54 percent to 46 percent, it was decisive enough. CCRI is only the most recent assault on affirmative action measures. And while Proposition 209 still faces legal challenges in federal court that may take years to resolve fully, the drift is clear. In the summer of 1995, the regents of the University of California, under heavy pressure from a...

Affirmative Actions' California Afterlife

The debate about affirmative action at the University of California isn't over yet.

Peter SchragFall 1995

F or all the controversy it has generated, the decision of the University of California regents to prohibit race and gender preferences in admissions is likely to become better known for its unintended consequences than for what its backers said they meant to do. For Governor Pete Wilson, of course, it was an effort to jump-start a moribund presidential campaign, and for the moment it paid off handsomely in a windfall of free media attention. Wilson, as one shrewd observer pointed out, is a colorless politician who derives far more political juice from the negative charge of his opponents than from any passion he can create on his own behalf. On that score, both Jesse Jackson and the Clinton administration were eager volunteers, the first by vowing to go to jail, if necessary, to stop passage of the regents' resolution, the other by threatening Justice Department investigations (subsequently withdrawn) to determine whether Wilson and the board had violated federal civil rights laws...