Photos courtesy of Martin Lipton Liz Vasques, a
high school student participating in a summer seminar at UCLA,
hands out a survey to students at Central High School as part of
her research on equity and access in public schools.
By Kelly Rayburn
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
Last week at the UCLA Faculty Center, the students were the
teachers.
High schoolers took center stage on July 27 to tell a group of
formally dressed professors and administrators about the current
state of public schools.
Students challenged them to think critically about the public
school system.
During her presentation, Daisy Moreno, who will be a senior at
John Marshall Fundamental Secondary School this year, stood in
front of a UCLA faculty panel and asked them and other attendees to
close their eyes and picture themselves in a different place and
time.
Moreno asked everyone to picture his or her second grade
classrooms and teacher.
“What is (the teacher’s) purpose?” Moreno
asked the audience. “What is her role? Is she an authority
figure? Is she your friend? Does she inspire you?”
Photos courtesy of Martin Lipton Daisy Moreno,
a senior from John Marshall Fundamental Secondary School, sets up a
laptop that students were given to use for the seminar.
Moreno was one of 21 high school students who, after a rigorous
application process, was invited to UCLA for a four-week seminar
combining social science research with legal advocacy regarding a
California Educational Bill of Rights.
John Rogers, a professor at the UCLA Law School, and Ernest
Morrell, a visiting professor from Michigan State University,
taught the seminar, which was co-sponsored by the Institute for
Democracy, Education and Access, the Los Angeles Basis Institute
and the Los Angeles Alliance.
Before the seminar began, members of IDEA, faculty from the law
school, legal advocates from the American Civil Liberties Union and
community leaders drafted an educational bill of rights, outlining
student rights regarding access, equity and resources they say all
students should have.
Members from IDEA and the ACLU are working with California
legislators to eventually pass an educational bill of rights,
Rogers said.
As a step toward an eventual bill of rights, students who
participated in the seminar extensively researched access and
equity ““ or lack thereof ““ in L.A. urban schools.
Rogers said their research would provide some factual backing
for the proposed bill.
“The broad goal ““ which has some loose backing
““ needs some specific support in the form of concrete
ideas,” he said.
Photos courtesy of Martin Lipton Los Angeles high schoolers
(l-r) Jarret Moore, Chau Nguyen,
Jasmine Arenivar and Adrianna
Simental listen to American Civil Liberties Union attorney
Rosio Cardoba.
Last week the students divided into five groups, and each
addressed a different issue and presented their findings.
Moreno and classmates Sochin Lee and Cynthia Cassillas presented
their final project on what it means to be a good teacher and
whether children have access to quality teachers.
Many schools have teachers who are not fully qualified,
educational bill of rights supporters point out.
But Moreno, Lee and Cassillas said teachers need to have more
than just a credential. After much research, which included
surveying and interviewing students and L.A.-area high schools, the
three found that students are just as interested in how influential
teachers are in students’ everyday lives as in formal
qualifications.
Too few students have access to teachers who have such important
qualities as courage, tolerance, coherence and openness, the group
said.
And presenters from all five groups expressed a desire for
teachers to provide a more personal and open education.
“It means a lot for me to be here because I feel I can
speak freely about things,” said Denicia Cormier, who attends
school in Oakland and was the only Northern Californian to take
part in the seminar.
“Here, it’s much more open and it’s pertaining
to topics I actually relate to … in school I feel obligated to be
in the mind-set they’re interested in,” Cormier
said.
Cormier later read a poem she wrote about her high school
““ a place she said is troubled by racial separation and an
enclosing jail-like fence.
“What a horrendous sight to see / How can this possibly be
meant for me?” she read.
Though the students largely enjoyed their time at UCLA, the
summer seminar was academically strenuous.
The seminar met each day, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Students wrote
daily journal entries, took notes on lectures and participated in
school mapping projects.
They also studied the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Brown v.
the Board of Education and read excerpts from Cornell West’s
“Race Matters,” Jay MacLeod’s “Ain’t
no Makin’ It” and other educational and social
writings.
To conclude their seminar, the students completed written and
oral final research projects.
“It is essential to listen to the voices of the
students,” said Rogers, just before the students gave their
presentations. “I’m very excited to hear what the
students have to say. They have been up all hours.”
The students researched five different areas, including access
to fair and authentic assessment, technology, primary language
instruction, a safe and supportive school environment and quality
teachers.
All groups studied two area high schools: Central High and
Pacific High.
Generally, the seminar’s participants found that students
from Central High, which is almost entirely African American and
Latino, had less access to a quality education than students from
Pacific High, which has higher numbers of whites and Asian
Americans.
The group which spoke about access to fair and authentic
assessment, for example, found that Central High had many students
whose first language was not English. Those students, the group
found, often perform poorly on standardized tests such as the
Stanford 9 test, which are only given in English. Pacific High, in
comparison, has few non-English speakers.
When it comes time for the state to allocate funds based on how
well a school is performing, schools like Central High are
disadvantaged because they do not have access to fair and authentic
evaluation, the group said.
Students presenting on access to primary language instruction
found other problems regarding non-English speakers.
“We were talking to bilingual students who said they were
ashamed to speak in Spanish,” said Chau Nguyen, who attends
Pomona High School in Los Angeles, after one day of class.
Besides the 21 students in the seminar, five who took a similar
seminar last year returned this year as research assistants.
Alejandro Nuno, one of the returners who will be starting
college at the University of San Francisco next year, said:
“The most important thing I got out of the seminar is good
friends.”
With reports from Michaele Turnage, Daily Bruin Senior
Staff.