In terms of average wages, a college degree was worth 50 percent more than a regular high school degree in 1980, but by 2008 the college degree was worth 95 percent more.73 In that sense, the edu-cational gains of kids from poor backgrounds have been doubly illusory. They've been struggling to catch up on a down escalator.

Suppose that you were a bright, optimistic young teacher showing up each day to work in this war zone. Idealism might carry you through a year or two, but if you had an opportunity to move to a school with less mayhem and more students eager to learn, you'd jump at the chance. So faculty turnover would be higher, with more rookie teach-ers every year. Moreover, many of the teachers who remained would be timeservers: inured to turmoil, content to baby-sit, "paid to be there," cynical even about helping well-meaning students, dismissing them as "pathetic," lazily assuming that all Latinos speak Spanish.

Although school quality and resources are unequal between top and bottom socioeconomic schools, once we account for nonschool factors (such as family structure, economic insecurity, pa-rental engagement, and even TV watching), school quality and school resources themselves seem to contribute relatively little to class gaps in test scores and other measures of cognitive and socioemotional skills.

Recently, after the 2007 wildfires,rangers at Irvine Canyon Ranch were surprised to notice that the fires exposed a plaque identifying one oaktree as a “Hangman’s Tree” used on “bandits” from Juan Flores’s “gang” in 1857. The plaque was proudlyerected in 1967 by equestrians, but then later forgotten until the fires exposed it. It is remarkable: there is alynching tree in Irvine, a lynching tree that was once memorialized but then forgotten.There is much that is forgotten here, in this semi-amnesiac, often contradictory space. In 1936, when 3,000Latino orange-pickers went on strike, the Orange County sheriff deputized 400 private guards, armed withguns and tear-gas, in a show of force that journalist Carey McWilliams named “fascism in practice.” WhenMcWilliams visited Orange County, he observed, “It is astonishing how quickly social power could crystallizeinto an expression of arrogant brutality in these lovely, seemingly placid, outwardly Christian communities.”That is a particularly ominous foreshadowing of the hyper-militarization and racialized policing that we haveseen more recently in Ferguson

Lampra Jones, a recent graduate of a chiropractic program who has struggled to find work, called herself “a loner” and said she wished she knew more people to help with her job search. “If you don’t know the right people,” said Ms. Jones, 28, “you’re not going to get anywhere.” Michael Novajovsky, a father of three in Gwinnett County with a temporary job as a network engineer, said in an interview that the struggle to build a better life often felt similar to “a lottery.” His job pays $27 an hour but comes with no health insurance for him, his wife and his three children.

Climbing the income ladder occurs less often in the Southeast and industrial Midwest, the data shows, with the odds notably low in Atlanta, Charlotte, Memphis, Raleigh, Indianapolis, Cincinnati and Columbus. By contrast, some of the highest rates occur in the Northeast, Great Plains and West, including in New York, Boston, Salt Lake City, Pittsburgh, Seattle and large swaths of California and Minnesota. “Where you grow up matters,” said Nathaniel Hendren, a Harvard economist and one of the study’s authors. “There is tremendous variation across the U.S. in the extent to which kids can rise out of poverty.”

Fiscal neutrality would thus respect the wishes of local taxpayers, but it would not necessarily meet the needs of local students. Indeed, fiscal neutrality really promised equity for tax-payers, who could be assured that the same tax rates would result in the same amount of funding for schools. It did not guarantee equity for students.

In the past, most states simply provided a flat grant to school districts based on the number of students in the district. Each student received an equal amount of funding, which obviously did nothing to offset the inequalities in local funding

schools were seen as both academic and socializing institutions, where students would learn not only how to read and write but also how to become good citizens. Integration was consistent with this tradition insofar as it held out the hope that white and black students would learn from one another. When Justice I Marshall lamented in his dissenting opinion in Milliken that "unless our chil-dren begin to learn together, there is little hope that our people will ever learn to live together;' he captured the belief that integration could help prepare stu-I dents to live in a diverse, pluralistic society.7

Formany adolescents of color, dropping out of school was the only way to avoid“psychological and cultural demoralization.” By World War II, most studentsof color had come to accept the futility of seeking an education in the hostileand indifferent environment of the Los Angeles educational system.

The board asked districts to give “serious and thought-ful consideration” to the problem of racial imbalances in schools, and inOctober required districts to “exert all effort to avoid and eliminate segrega-tion.”12These directives, however, particularly given their vague nature, weremet mostly with inaction. Consequently, California schools at this time, partic-ularly in Los Angeles, were more segregated than those in Louisiana, Alabama,North Carolina, Virginia, and South Carolina.1

A critical mass of white families left the dis-trict, and in doing so changed the way future parents with school-agechildren would view Los Angeles public schools. Many who were alreadyconsidering leaving the city decided to leave. Many who might otherwisehave chosen to put down roots in Los Angeles saw a school system inupheaval and joined the throngs of new commuters transforming formerorange groves into suburban refuges.