Two-Tier Economy Feared as Dead End for Unskilled

Top economists, reacting to a study out of UCLA that described a startling gap between the rich and poor in Los Angeles, say that the disparity points to a looming mismatch between the region’s new white-collar jobs and undereducated workers, a phenomenon that they warn could lead the city to economic crisis.

The dilemma is a result of Southern California’s extreme duality: a city that is at once a booming manufacturing and financial center thirsty for qualified workers, and a magnet for immigrants and urban poor who are educated only for blue-collar and unskilled jobs.

Unless dramatic changes are made in the way the minority and immigrant-dominated student population is educated, economists and educational researchers predicted, Los Angeles will be flooded with underachievers who cannot supply the job boom, and the area could face a generation of economic decline.

According to Stephen Levy, director and senior economist of the Palo Alto-based Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy, the region’s students must be trained “not for the sake of altruism, but frankly to make the economy work.

“The problem is that the dental hygienist, computer repair person, physical therapist and secretarial jobs are growing--jobs in an office setting that require good English, meeting the public and interpersonal skills,” Levy said. “We have to move the institutions to train young people for this new type of middle-class job, because if we fail that, we will move toward the bipolar society. And this is not an issue we can be divisive about.”

The comments of Levy and others followed release of a UCLA study last week. In a nine-month study sponsored by the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning, Professor Paul Ong and nine graduate students analyzed various federal economic, housing and demographic surveys.

They found that, despite an ongoing economic boom, the gap between mostly Anglo “haves” and minority “have nots” is worsening in Los Angeles, driven in part by a surge in low-paying jobs that mire full-time workers in poverty, and by inferior urban schooling that prevents the young from moving up the economic ladder.

Frank Levy, a noted economist, (no relation to Stephen Levy), professor of public affairs at the University of Maryland, and consultant to the Urban Institute, said the UCLA study appears to mirror a national trend in which American families have been trapped at or below the same standard of living for the last decade.

For the first time since World War II, a robust economy and rising employment levels are failing to lift the poor out of poverty or to boost the middle class, Levy said.

“If this had been 20 years ago, when average incomes were rising throughout the economy, you could have had growing disparity, but still everyone would have been getting better off,” Levy said. “The rich would be getting richer faster, but at least the poor would be getting richer, too.”

While most economists are reserving judgment on just how wide the gap has become between rich and poor, with many waiting until the 1990 U.S. Census figures are available, Levy said there has been “some decline for those who have low earnings, and some explosion in earnings at the top.”

“Your gut sense is that while that explosion may not be very big in term of national numbers, it is concentrated in coastal cities like Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco,” he said. “You wouldn’t see the same kind of disparity in Kansas City.”

Because incomes are flat or declining for all but those at the top, the potential for a growing division between the classes, with fewer workers left to supply the boom in white collar and technical mid-level jobs, has the experts concerned.

Forming Into Two Tiers

Allen Scott, a UCLA professor of economics and urban geography, and author of “Metropolis,” a book on the Southern California economy, said the labor force here “is clearly bifurcating into two tiers. We are increasingly competing with the Third World, so a Third World economy and Third World conditions are being created here, and that is a policy disaster.”

Goetz Wolff, chief economic analyst for the Los Angeles Economic Roundtable, warned that if the region attempts to compete against low-wage workers worldwide, “we will lose that battle, because they will always be able to pay less elsewhere.”

While such complex issues may portend deep troubles for the region’s economic well-being, city, state and federal policy makers are only now beginning to become aware of such possibilities, several economists and educational researchers said.

“Certainly the educational community is aware and the business community is very vocal about the need for educated students, but we are just at the stage of recognizing the problems and seeking solutions,” said Gordon Palmer, principal economist for the Southern California Assn. of Governments.

Palmer said Southern California’s labor force will soon be minority-driven, “and these people are going to have to be assimilated for business to survive. Business has no choice but to have a greater integration of minorities into all job types and all wage levels.”

Loss of Jobs Seen

And if the Los Angeles region does not begin producing these better-educated workers, he said, “the fact is the jobs will go somewhere else.”

Despite these red flags, few changes are afoot in schools in the Los Angeles region, educational experts said. They said undereducated minority and poor students are moving from school into the same cycle of poverty as their parents.

“How ironic it is, that just when our economy is producing a surplus of jobs that would pay people enough money to lift them out of poverty, the school system is not producing students who can handle those jobs,” said Kati Haycock, director of the Achievement Council, a private group that trains California schools to raise achievement levels among minority and poor children.

Especially alarming to such experts are the vast numbers of immigrant children entering the labor force--a group that, in the America of past decades, received an education markedly superior to that of their parents, landed better jobs than their parents, and moved into the stable middle class.

The Achievement Council, which has studied the causes of low learning and poor grades among minority and poor children, lays much of the blame upon outdated and uninspired inner-city teaching practices, the watered-down curriculum foisted upon such children and the assigning of inexperienced teachers to troubled urban schools.

Chronic Underteaching

In Los Angeles’ minority-dominated schools, Haycock said, most teachers chronically underteach math, science, literature, history, reading and writing, and rely upon “boring rote training” long-ago dispensed with at high-achieving suburban schools.

Moreover, compared to nearby suburban schools, urban Los Angeles schools have a sharply disproportionate share of inexperienced teachers who cannot cope with the inner-city environment, plus a disproportionate share of very old teachers who do not keep up with teaching techniques or modern curricula, she said.

Gary Orfield, professor of political science at the University of Chicago who has studied Los Angeles schools, said: “I don’t think people in this country ever voted to take away the opportunities of poor people, but that is what has happened.”

Orfield said deepening racial isolation in neighborhoods and schools, decreases in college financial aid, cuts in minority recruitment efforts and the funneling of minorities into “dead-end community colleges” have combined to “assure that only a handful of Los Angeles’ minority high school kids will ever graduate from college.”

The Achievement Council’s Haycock said that pressure is being applied, both on state officials and the private sector, to infuse large amounts of money into education. While the arguments for tackling inferior urban education in the 1960s and 1970s were “essentially moral ones,” Haycock and others said, the arguments now are economic.

“Anybody in suburbia who thinks their own kids are doing fine better realize that 20 years from now their kids’ lives will be very much intertwined with these (minority and poor) kids,” Haycock said. “If the minority and poor kids are allowed to fail, this is not going to be a nice place to live.”