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The third issue of the journal “Community Schooling” is now online, published by the UCLA Center for Community Schooling (CCS). 

“As journalists across the country cover community schools as ‘a growing phenomenon in the educational landscape,’ the spotlight is often on wraparound services as a COVID recovery strategy,” write the editorial board, led by Karen Hunter Quartz, director, UCLA Center for Community Schooling, and Marisa Saunders, CCS associate director for research. “Yet, in the low-income communities of color hit hardest by the pandemic, the story is as much about power as it is provisions. Our third issue shares how educators, families and students in Durham, North Carolina embraced their collective agency to take back local public schools in the wake of a state takeover plan. 

“Their work to develop community schools involved both reflection and action, praxis, or what we call public scholarship. A living example of democratic education, the Durham team created space to collectively grapple with big ideas and theories in the context of daily school practice.” 

The issue includes a school case on Lakewood Elementary School, an historic and diverse public school in Durham, which focuses on a probing conversation between Lakewood’s former principal and community school coordinator.  A discussion guide follows the case to inspire other schools to think and talk about their history, core beliefs and opportunities to strengthen their community-based vision for teaching and learning. 

A teacher scholarship feature includes a short video of Durham educators sharing their insights on empowering leadership. In connection to this, the UCLA Center for Community Schooling will be re-releasing with a new forward our 2021 research brief, “Collaborative Leadership as the Cornerstone of Community Schools: Policy, Structures, and Practice.” This brief includes a set of teacher-developed tools and activities for creating teams, making decisions, and taking action. A feature on Policy ABCs (Actions, Briefs, and Commentaries) looks at  “Durham Policy Implementation: Organizing for Community Schools” with an interactive infographic that shares the team’s actions from 2015 to the present, with links to resources and supporting organizations. 

Students from North Carolina Central University and Duke University share their research in an engaging podcast titled, “Ecosystems of Change: University-Assisted Community Schools Research in Durham, North Carolina,” discussing how they investigated ways to better prepare university students for engagement in local public schools and reflect on their own growth and development through these research experiences. Tackling important ideas such as deficit perspectives, institutionalized racism, and empathy, the students share their own learning and pose a challenge for their peers across the country.

Visit this link to read the Fall 2022 issue of "Community Schooling." 

For previous issues, visit the UCLA Center for Community Schooling website.

UCLA Center for Community Schooling: Strategies for Recovery From the Pandemic’s Learning Shortfalls

Researchers at UCLA and UC Riverside today released a nationally representative survey of 682 high school principals, making clear that political conflicts impacting schools are pervasive and growing, with more than two-thirds of principals surveyed reporting substantial political conflict over hot- button issues. Almost half (45%) of principals said the amount of community level conflict during the 2021-2022 school year was “more” or “much more,” than prior to the pandemic. Only 3 percent said it was less.

The report, “Educating for a Diverse Democracy: The Chilling Role of Political Conflict in Blue, Purple, and Red Communities,” finds that political conflicts have had a chilling effect that has limited opportunities for students to engage in learning and respectful dialogue on controversial topics and made it harder to address rampant misinformation. The highly charged environment has also led to marked declines in support for teaching about race, racism, and racial and ethnic diversity. In addition, there has been sizable growth in harassment of LGBTQ youth. 

“Public schools increasingly are targets of conservative political groups focusing on what they term ‘Critical Race Theory,’ as well as issues of sexuality and gender identity, and are impacted by political conflict reflecting growingpartisan divides in our society,” said John Rogers, a professor of education at UCLA and the director of the UCLA Institute for Education, Democracy and Access. “These attacks are undermining the role public schools play in educating for our democracy.” 

Principals at schools in politically divided (Purple) communities were far more likely than those in Blue and Red communities to report acute levels of community conflict. The increasing political conflicts often result from intentional and organized efforts that have targeted Purple communities in particular.  

John Rogers, UCLA --     Joseph Kahne, UC Riverside

“These groups are using anti-democratic practices, spreading misinformation and employing threatening, denigrating, and violent rhetoric,” said Joseph Kahne, a professor of education and co-director of the Civic Engagement Research Group at UC Riverside.  “These constant and often personal attacks on educators are having a costly chilling effect, leading educators at schools in Purple and Red communities to avoid giving students opportunities to learn about controversial issues or about our nation’s full history.  And these schools are often doing less to ensure that all students are treated respectfully when some are targeted and harassed.”

Political conflict is pervasive and growing, particularly in Purple communities

Sixty-nine percent of principals surveyed reported substantial political conflict over hot-button issues. In many schools, parents or community members have sought to limit or challenge teaching about issues of race and racism (50%); policies and practices related to LGBTQ student rights (48%); student access to books in the school library (33%); or social-emotional learning (39%).  

Political conflict undermines the practice of respectful dialogue

Political conflict between students has created significant challenges for public schools. Almost seven in ten (69%) of principals report that students made derogatory remarks to those expressing liberal or conservative views.     This problem was much more likely to occur on multiple occasions in Purple communities. Despite these challenges, schools in Blue communities (49%) were much more likely to provide professional development on how to support controversial issue discussions than were schools in Purple communities (33%) or Red communities (27%). 

Political conflict is making it harder to address misinformation

Almost two-thirds (64%) of principals report that parents or community members have challenged the information or media sources used by teachers in their school.  This problem is most acute in Purple communities where more than a third (35%) of principals reported it occurred three or more times. 

Political conflict leads to declines in support for teaching about race, racism, and racial and ethnic diversity

Nearly half (48%) of all principals and about two-thirds (63%) of principals in Purple communities reported that during the 2021-2022 school year, parents or other members of their school communities “sought to limit or challenge … teaching and learning about issues of race and racism.”  And almost a quarter (23%) of principals in Purple communities report their school board or district leaders acted to limit teaching and learning about race and racism – more so than in Red communities (17%), and almost three times as often as in Blue communities (8%). Consistent with these patterns, schools in Blue communities (64%) were far more likely to provide teachers with professional development on ways to help students learn about the literature and history of people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds than were schools in Purple (44%) or Red (33%) communities.  

There is substantial political conflict aiming to limit LGBTQ protections, and sizable growth in harassment of LGBTQ youth, particularly in Purple communities

Nearly half (48%) of principals surveyed report that parents or community members sought to challenge or limit LGBTQ rights in the 2021-2022 school year. In Purple communities, principals were nearly twice as likely (24% to 13%) as those in Red or Blue communities to say such attacks occurred multiple times. Principals in all schools also reported multiple incidents of students making hostile or demeaning remarks toward LGBTQ classmates in 2022. And the problem is increasing.  In 2018, in Purple communities, 10% of principals reported multiple instances of students making hostile or demeaning remarks toward LGBTQ classmates.  By 2022, that percentage had increased to 32 percent. 

Many principals energetically advocated educating for a diverse democracy and the   researchers identified two factors that were strongly associated with doing so. Those principals who themselves were civically engaged were far more likely to advance the practices associated with education for a diverse democracy than those who were not.School district leadership also mattered. High schools in school districts where district leadership explicitly emphasized the importance of civic education were far more likely to support education for a diverse democracy.

“Public schools have long been viewed as institutions critical to our democracy. Yet as this survey makes clear, today they are under political attack,” Rogers said.  “If we are to further our democracy, educators must come together with students, parents and community members in pursuit of  it. The problem with our current moment is not too much democracy, but too little.”

“We face an existential moment for public schools and for our diverse democracy,” concludes Kahne. “What is needed is for a broad cross-section of the public to stand up for a diverse democracy.”

“Educating for a Diverse Democracy: The Chilling Role of Political Conflict in Blue, Purple, and Red Communities,” was conducted by the Institute for Democracy, Education and Access at UCLA and by the Civic Engagement Research Group at UC Riverside. The study is based on a nationally representative survey of 682 public high school principals and 32 follow up interviews during the summer of 2022.   

The full survey report and executive summary can be found online at (https://idea.gseis.ucla.edu/publications/educating-for-a-diverse-democracy/

New national survey by researchers at UCLA and UC Riverside details impact of pervasive and growing political conflicts

Political Conflicts are Having a Chilling Effect on Public Schools

Johanna Drucker’s work deftly combines her two worlds as a top-flight academic researcher on the history and art of the book, and a creator of her own artistic tomes. In addition to these arcane realms of knowledge, the UCLA Distinguished Professor of Information Studies is very much rooted in the digital arena and has recently created her own free Substack blog, using the platform to share her reviews of books and art. 

Most notable are Drucker’s essays, ranging from a poignant account of dealing with her late father’s wardrobe to a wry observation of her own painstaking “Post-it Accounting” system, accompanied by her watercolors of objects that, according to Drucker, have their own “material life.”

Professor Drucker’s most recent book, “Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters From Antiquity to the Present,” unpacks the oft-misunderstood history of the world’s alphabets. Likewise, her Substack essays showcase her gift for revealing humanity in both the rarified academic study of the printed word and the mundane routines of personal record.

Drucker, who is also the Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies in the UCLA Department of Information Studies, shares her experiences as a writer and creator of her own art books, her journey to sharing her knowledge on a purely digital platform, and how today’s screen-obsessed generation can lose themselves in the time-honored craft of printing. 

Johanna Drucker: It is basically a platform for blogging and newsletters. A colleague had recommended it to me about a year ago, but I thought it was all subscription based and charged a fee, and I didn't want to charge people a fee for anything I was doing. I wanted a readership, but I’m a State (public) employee, so I feel like I should not be generating a revenue off my activities in that regard. 

Anyway, a friend recommended it, and then our former colleague, Jean-François Blanchette, got in touch with me this summer, and said: “You know, you really need to work on your media profile. You have so much content, and you could be putting things out in ways that you're not.” Substack allows me to write in a voice that connects with a variety of audiences. When I launched my site, I posted a personal essay, a book review, and a review of an exhibition with the idea of building a broad constituency. I will continue in this way, attending to visual art and literary work along with personal pieces.  

But with Jean-François’s assistance, I put together a program for me to start building up various platforms. His encouragement really prompted me. Now I’m working on getting some YouTube video pieces started as well. In August, I had an event at the bookstore of Hauser & Wirth, a prestigious gallery downtown. It went super well and focused on the alphabet book. 

I thought I could put together a series of very short YouTube videos that would share some of the information in that book in a very accessible kind of conversational way, and use some of the primary materials that I have that are antiquarian books or facsimiles of them. I want to  model my presentations on some of the things I benefited from during the pandemic, because I listened to all kinds of lectures and lecture series by people who were just fantastic. 

For instance, Lee Berger is a professor at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. He did a fantastic set of very modestly filmed lectures in the vault at the university, where they have 75 percent of the hominid fossilized remains. He’s a paleoanthropologist who helped to discover some of these distinct species. He would simply sit there with a camera on him, and then he had a little cam that looked at the velvet box in which he had these two million, five hundred thousand year old fossils. It was super effective, and I came to appreciate the generosity of people who shared their knowledge in a conversational way.

One thing that is so fascinating about your work is that you are very firmly planted with one foot in academia and one foot in the art world, beyond information studies and archives. You write about Post-it Notes, the voter’s packet that comes in the mail before an election – what is the significance of these ordinary objects?

Drucker: I’m interested in writing for a very different audience, not an academic audience. The piece [on Substack] about my father's shirts–there was so much response to that. The writing is easy for me. When I'm running in the morning I get the ideas articulated. 

I’m having so much fun doing those paintings. I was out in the studio this afternoon because I had a little break, and I'm painting a picture now of the very first novel I ever wrote [when] I was twelve years old, [in] this little yellow notebook … to put on to Substack in a few weeks. 

It's sort of like, the material life of things. You know how things in our lives just have this incredible resonance across all kinds of memories or activities. Something will come in the mail, and it triggers something, from years back. So, I'm just having really a lot of fun with that.

You led the Horn Press on campus for years – how did that provide an experience with that material life of things, for your students?

Drucker: Some of the equipment was mine—the press and type. But some of the type belongs to the UCLA Department of Information Studies, along with other accessory materials. Rob Montoya got a grant from Mellon and he’s going to build a new teaching lab, which will be great. I have a whole lot of materials I’ll bequeath to him, because I’ve built up a teaching collection over the years that shows things like stone lithography, engraving and etching, silkscreens, and offset [printing]. This way students can learn about production techniques. He’ll be building that studio out at some point in the future. It’s super that Rob is continuing this. 

The Horn Press was actually established by Andrew Horn, who was the first professor of our [department] when it was a [separate] school. When the library school was founded, Andrew Horn decided he wanted students to have a hands-on experience of printing as part of their education, and so, he built the press, and acquired a lot of equipment. And then Sid Berger and others helped build it out. 

But when I got here, all that equipment had been moved to the gate house out at the Clark Library because when the [Library] School got turned into a department, it was moved over to what is now the GSEIS Building, and the building couldn't handle the weight of the presses. They were beautiful cast-iron hand presses, and the type is very heavy as well, so that stuff just went into storage. 

When I arrived, I was told about it, so I went out and brought a whole bunch of the type back from the Clark, into the room I had in the Broad (Art Center) building, because I had been given a room there as my own studio when I came. So, I had my personal press, my type, and a bunch of other material. I printed books of my own, but I used the space for teaching as well. When I set that studio up and started using it with the students, [they] said, “Let's call it the Horn Press in honor of Andy Horn.”

There was still some equipment at the the gatehouse, [which was] deemed seismically unfit. A couple of years after my arrival, I was suddenly told I had two weeks notice [to move it out]. For some reason, they thought it was my responsibility to deal with these beautiful old hand presses and some of the other stuff there. So with a couple of other volunteers, I went out there and we cleaned up the presses. We got them moved and installed one in Powell [Library], and one in the [the Charles E. Young Research Library] as exhibits. I ran a class where [MLIS students] developed interpretive exhibits around the presses. Working with the library staff, the class did the whole creative, intellectual, logistical side of building exhibits for those antique presses. 

The presses are not disabled, but they are hand presses, and hand presses are dangerous and fragile. They're made of cast iron and held together with pressure from a pin at the top, and when you pull the lever, that apparatus compresses, and it's got a spring and springs back. But if you let go too fast, the whole thing can spring apart and that giant platen can fall off, and break someone's foot. They are also very hard to print on. The little press that I had is easy to print on and it's basically the press of choice, for most current printers, a Vandercook flatbed proofing press. 

The students absolutely loved letterpress. But as I was beginning to make my plans for retirement, and talking to various people in the department and to my chair in Design Media Arts, no one was willing to take time to think about planning for the future of the press. I just felt like I needed to make sure that my equipment went to a good home. 

A letterpress fits in nicely with the California Rare Book School, and will make a great enhancement for that program.

Drucker: I used to do demos for them. Susan Allen (retired CalRBS director), who's also a letterpress printer, would come over and use the Horn Press equipment, and show people things. Again, students loved it. They go in there and start hand-setting type, and they get lost. I think it's hard for people who've grown up with all of this kind of social media and electronic media to find that place of absorption. 

Kids love it, though you can't really use lead type with children because it's so toxic. But my friend Joseph Beery, who was here for APHA (American Print History Association), was one of the people with whom I developed the Virginia Arts of the Book Center. He’s now built these little wooden tabletop presses. He does digitally 3-D printed wood type, and then gives this to kids, and they go bonkers with it, they just love it. It’s not toxic, and they can set type, and have fun and print little broadsides. You can teach kids to carve linoleum blocks if you do it carefully enough. 

As you said, young people that grew up in this generation with nothing but social media, are entranced when given something to do with their hands that is creative – when was that moment for you?

Drucker: I learned letterpress the year I was 19 and I was at the California College of Arts and Crafts. A woman there named Betsy Davids, who was the creative writing English professor in the art school, decided to buy a press and teach a creative writing and printmaking class, and I thought I died and gone to heaven. She's still my friend. I printed my first book the year after that. 

I did some painting as a kid. We had an aquarium and I painted the fishes, added their Latin names, that kind of stuff. But mainly, I was always a writer. I wrote and wrote and wrote, and so to me the idea of printing a book was really significant. I felt writing wasn't legitimate unless it was in a book. In the 1970s, if you wanted something printed, you had to have a lot of money, get published, or learn to print. And so, I learned to print.

For a excerpt from “Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters From Antiquity to the Present,” read UCLA Ed&IS Magazine on Issu.

Visit YouTube for an interview with Professor Drucker on “Inventing the Alphabet,” for the podcast, “Scientific Sense” by Gill Eapen.

Scholar of bibliography and author of “Inventing the Alphabet” showcases her talents as an essayist and painter on Substack. 

Johanna Drucker: The Memory Life of Material Things

Adrian H. Huerta of USC’s Pullias Center, along with UCLA SEIS’s Cecilia Rios-Aguilar and UC Davis’ Marcela Cuellar, have been awarded a $275,000 grant from the College Futures Foundation. The grant will fund research to create a racial equity framework for select California community college baccalaureate degree programs with a focus on racial equity in academic and labor market outcomes.

 Huerta will collaborate with colleagues at UCLA and UC Davis on the study, which builds on recent research focused on narrowing the racial equity gaps in CCBPs.

This grant comes one year after California passed a law expanding a pilot program that created bachelor’s degrees at community colleges. The new law allows the community college system to add up to 30 baccalaureate programs each year. Currently, baccalaureate programs are offered in 17 community colleges throughout the state, with three more awaiting accreditation. 

The College Futures Foundation Baccalaureate Program study will develop new racial equity assessment tools, determine which areas need capacity-building support to enhance race-conscious and equity-minded policies and practices, and how research-to-practice learning communities improve CCBP practitioners’ expertise and implementation of processes and practices.

 Huerta, a former CCC college student and current faculty member at USC’s Rossier School of Education, stated, “I'm excited to engage with colleagues at UCLA and UC-Davis to embed racial equity elements into CCB programs. It's an incredible feeling to invest into a system that provided me my first access to higher education." 

"CCB programs are a promising step to increase access to higher education for more California students, we are excited to collaborate with colleagues across CCs to embed racial equity into these new efforts," continued Dr. Huerta.

“I am excited to partner with two leading scholars in higher education whose expertise is on racial equity,” said UCLA’s Dr. Rios-Aguilar. “This grant will give us an opportunity to partner with all California’s CCB programs and document their successful processes and practices and to develop strategies to better serve low-income students of color who are pursuing their baccalaureate degrees.”

UC Davis’ Marcela Cuellar said, “I am excited to collaborate with my colleagues at USC, UCLA, and across California’s CCB programs. Our collective efforts will help inform how these vital programs can advance baccalaureate degree attainment and racial equity.”

The College Futures Foundation works to ensure that more students who reflect California’s diversity complete a B.A. and access the opportunity for a better life.

USC’s Pullias Center, UCLA School of Education and Information Studies, UC Davis School of Education are recipients of grant aimed to support the development of a racial equity framework for Community College Baccalaureate Programs (CCBP) in California. 

College Futures Foundation Awards Grant to Create Racial Equity Framework for California Community College Baccalaureate Program

Highlighting the strategies and efforts of schools and community organizations fostering the success of Black students in Los Angeles, researchers from UCLA’s Center for the Transformation of Schools (CTS)  today released, Bright Spots: Schools and Organizations Cultivating Excellence in Los Angeles Black Youth, a new report examining the benefits of providing targeted support for Black students.

“Amid pandemic and strife, these ‘bright spots,’ are shining a light on the success of Black students and showing us how we can help them to learn and achieve,” said Tyrone C. Howard, a professor of education at UCLA and co-faculty director of CTS. ”In doing so, they are illuminating the path for others to follow in support of meaningful efforts to further student success.”  

Building upon a 2021 study, Beyond the Schoolhouse: Digging Deeper | COVID-19 & Reopening Schools for Black Students in Los Angeles, the new report provides an analysis of three Los Angeles K-12 public schools and two community-based organizations that have a history of facilitating academic success for the Black students they serve: Baldwin Hills Elementary, 99th Street Elementary, King Drew Magnet High School, Community Coalition (CoCo), and Social Justice Learning Institute (SJLI).

Despite the pronounced structural and educational disadvantages affecting Black students - many of which have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic - these schools and community organizations continue to foster the success of Black students. 

“These ‘bright spots’ have an established history of furthering academic success for the Black students they serve,” said Angela James, research director at the UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools. “Their strategies are illuminative for both practitioners and scholars working to create broader equity within educational systems.” 

In the new study, CTS researchers present a focused analysis expounding the practices, approaches, techniques, and collaborations used by these organizations that have sustained their effectiveness in supporting Black students. Student focus groups and individual interviews conducted for the study with students and staff reveal four major themes among the “Bright Spots”: 

The “Bright Spots'' practice holistic support approaches where academic needs are paired with practices to support the overall well-being of students, including students’ mental health and socio-emotional needs. This creates a comprehensive network of support. Interviews with staff and students reveal that educators play a big part in supporting their students through academic preparation and resourcing, addressing non-academic needs, and providing socio-emotional supports

Culturally relevant teaching and engagement strategies

Teachers, staff, and facilitators identified using culturally relevant and social justice-oriented curriculum to create engaging lessons that are tailored to Black students for the purpose of increasing student engagement and promoting positive academic outcomes, identity affirmation, and self-representation within their learning experience. Researchers found that lesson plans on Black history and African American culture allowed students to better connect with the curriculum. 

Researchers observed a theme of learning opportunities doubling as empowerment spaces, giving Black students the opportunity to become active learners and civil participants. Social Justice Learning Institute’s YPAR (Youth Participatory Action Research) program offers students the opportunity to apply research skills learned at the institute to investigate social inequities within their communities, providing learning spaces where students can develop confidence to discuss their opinions and collaborate with peers. 

Co-construction of learning spaces and opportunities

A project-based learning approach allows students the opportunity to work with teachers and staff to develop solutions, teaching students to develop problem-solving and critical thinking skills at an early stage. Interviews revealed particular examples in which students engaged with structural conditions impacting their communities or personal challenges affecting them as Black youth. At both school sites and community organizations, faculty and staff were able to identify and describe the immediate benefit students experience when able to actively participate in the personalized design and execution of their learning spaces and lessons.

New UCLA CTS Research Highlights “Bright Spots” That Prioritize 
Black Youth Success in Los Angeles

In his new book, “The Walls Around Opportunity,” UCLA Professor Gary Orfield, co-director of the UCLA Civil Rights Project, argues that while families of color share the dream of higher education, racial inequality hinders that dream for many from an early age, and that colorblind policies have made college inaccessible for far too many students. 

The book paints a troubling picture of an education system that advantages the privileged, where students of color are walled off from opportunity by deeply ingrained racial inequalities, and schools fail to provide the preparation they need to access and succeed in college. It is a portrait of a system of higher education, marked by a tradition of exclusion, where cost is a barrier and colorblind policies have done little to open the doors.

Orfield renews the call for race conscious policies that can open the doors to educational opportunity for all, and sets forth ideas for deep changes that result in meaningful gains for our systems of education and all of the people they need to serve.

Gary Orfield: The book is about the concern that higher education is serving to stratify the country rather than to equalize it. Higher education institutions almost all have equity as a basic premise and basic goal. But as an aggregate, they act in ways that privilege the privileged and deny reasonable access to those who are less advantaged, especially to people of color. It’s a system that operates as if everybody has a fair chance.

The exception is the use of affirmative action policies, which are now under attack by the Supreme Court of the United States. The book is written with the realization that we may be coming to the end of affirmative action policies, and that we have not reached the goal of racial equity. And it states that one of the things that academics should do is not to worry too much about what seems feasible right now, but to think about what actually needs to be done.

Ed&IS: What does the book say about affirmative action?

Orfield: The Supreme Court will hear two major cases concerning race-based affirmative action from Harvard and the University of North Carolina in October 2022. They are going to hear cases about whether we should dismantle the last remaining educational remnant of the civil rights evolution. Affirmative action policy is all we have left in the battle for racial integration and equity in higher education and it’s been under assault steadily for the last 20 years.

Affirmative action is important because, until we had it, we had almost no significant integration of our elite higher education institutions. Affirmative action did that. It didn’t do it thoroughly, but it made a big difference. It created a critical mass of students of color at elite schools. Without affirmative action, we’re likely to lose a good part of that. That is what has happened in the states that have abolished the policy, including California. Harvard told the courts that they will lose 45% of their students of color if they are forced to not consider race in any way in admissions.

Affirmative action is very important, but it’s mostly important for the elite schools in the country. But it is also inadequate there—because so many other aspects of our society, in addition to admissions to college, bear on whether or not people have a fair chance to go to and to survive college.

Ed&IS: What are the walls around opportunity?

Orfield: We have multiple race-related walls around access to higher education. And we’ve been more or less blinded to that by several decades of policy in higher education that has proceeded as if race really wasn’t a fundamental problem.

The book starts out with the description of the conflict between the aspirations of higher education and the realities of it, and looks at the continuing failure to adequately serve people of color, who are already the majority of public high school students in the United States. It argues that we have been blind to the reality that we’re facing in terms of higher education barriers. We have to think about strategies that are more far reaching.

The book documents the systematic racial inequalities we have in every aspect of life and says you can’t be colorblind in a society where everything is related to color. You can’t really think about higher education policy as if we are a colorblind society, as if the civil rights movement solved all of our issues, and we can just proceed as if we don’t have to think about race in every aspect of life. The pandemic has underlined these realities, as the differential racial impacts have seriously widened gaps in preparation because of the different resources of schools and families of different races.

Ed&IS: How does the civil rights movement shape what has happened?

Orfield: The book describes the history of our country’s treatment of the issues of racial inequality and says that from the beginning of the United States, up until the civil rights movement, the dominant policy in selective institutions of higher education was exclusion. We had almost no significant  representation of people of color in leading colleges. That only changed because the institutions and the government decided to change it. That decision was made in the 1960s at the peak of the civil rights movement, a movement that lasted from the middle sixties into the early seventies when we expanded opportunity and acted against discrimination. That was when we created all of the affirmative action plans that still exist today. But even then, they were limited.

After the civil rights movement, that ended with the killing of Dr. King and the election of Richard Nixon and his quick appointment of four Supreme Court justices, the United States didn’t do much. In the 1980s, we slid into a period of denial. We basically said we need to raise standards, we need to be more competitive, schools and colleges shouldn’t worry about racial equity. Students should not have their way paid for college, they should have to make it on their own. We should shift the burden of college costs from the state to the individual.

At the same time, we were abandoning the effort to make access to our best high schools and public schools available to students of color. We pursued integration efforts from the middle sixties until the middle eighties, but since then, under radical limits from conservative Supreme Court decisions, we’ve systematically re-segregated our school systems. When we look at the walls around opportunity, we haven’t made much progress at all. In fact, we’ve  gone backwards.

Orfield: The second wall the book discusses is preparation. Preparation has become much more unequal for college; even as selective colleges have become much more competitive. There is higher competition, more applications, and you have more unequal preparation. In California, a Black or Latino student is about one twentieth as likely as a white or Asian student to be in a top performing high school. If you’re not in a top performing high school and you haven’t been in good public schools, your chances of being fairly prepared for competitive college admissions and success in a competitive college, go way down.

Orfield: The third major wall is cost. In the civil rights era, and in the 1970s, we made colleges much more accessible. We expanded the number of colleges, increased financial aid and held costs stable. Cost was actually a declining share of family income. Beginning in the eighties, we decided to cut back. We went through a tax cutting phase that took place initially here in California with Proposition 13, but spread across the country, and cut state and federal taxes. As a result, we had to sharply cut state and federal support for higher education in important ways. We kept the colleges going by shifting the cost to the students and their families, through far higher tuition and costs, often paid through loans.

Our financial aid system did not keep up with the cost of college and a huge gap emerged between what college costs and what many families could afford. At the same time, family incomes were becoming much more unequal in society. In the 1980s, we became, and today we still are, the most unequal advanced society in the world in terms of income distribution. This particularly hit families of color that are not only way below in average income levels, but drastically below in wealth, which is also very important for higher education access.

Orfield: It is likely that the Supreme Court is going to rule against affirmative action; we’re going to lose that as a tool. Researchers need to help identify what else can be done now but also think hard about what actually needs to be done if higher education is to be more equitable.

Affirmative action is important for elite schools but they will have to search for the most equitable practices such as cutting the requirement for admissions testing, as most have done during the pandemic, and doing vigorous recruitment and comprehensive review of applications.

For most schools, what is important now are targeted resources for students and support making up for the fact that they’ve been so unfairly prepared for college. And we have to address retention problems, and those relate directly to whether you’ve been prepared and whether you’ve got enough money to stay. Financial aid offices need to use their discretion to consider the actual situation of students from families of color.

What we proved in the civil rights revolution is that if you really want to change the outcomes in terms of racial equity, you have to have specific goals, a specific plan. There have to be sanctions and resources attached to it. People need to be held accountable. It doesn’t change by itself. Segregation and inequality are powerful self-perpetuating sets of institutions and beliefs. And they will continue unless they are disrupted.

We need race conscious policies that are designed with clear racial goals and mechanisms. And we need race sensitive policies that are designed with an awareness of the reality of race in the society, so that even though schools can’t consider race explicitly, they can consider the range of realities that students face.

American society is well along in a great transition, nearing the end of its white European majority, but it is failing to educate its future majority. If our society is to succeed, the country and its institutions, including its colleges, must find ways to offer real opportunities to groups they have historically subordinated and discriminated against. There is no real alternative, given the birth and migration patterns that have been changing our communities for a half century. White birthrates have been below the replacement level for four decades, and immigration is the reason we have not aged out as drastically as many peer nations. Our colleges need to reflect a changing nation. The great wave of immigration from the 1970s until the Great Recession was overwhelmingly nonwhite, something we’ve never experienced before, though it was restricted at least for a time under Donald Trump. College enrollment has declined since 2010. We have campuses that were designed to serve the white middle-class society of the past and are now challenged to adapt. If we are to have the educated workers and leaders an advanced economy demands, we have to reach groups that have long been neglected. If we want to bring together our polarized communities, sharing higher education can be a powerful tool. We have never achieved higher education equity for Black Americans or for our native peoples. The children of a vast immigration from Latin America have become our largest minority and have not received equal opportunity. Since 2000, three-fifths of the nation’s most selective public universities have had a decline in Black enrollment and Latino students’ access has declined relative to their growing population. How can the higher education system respond? Do we understand the roots of the crisis? Is there any plan? 

Americans see college as decisive in the lives of students. You can see the clear pattern in Gallup polls across the decades. In 1978 more than a third of the public thought college was very important, which rose to 58 percent in the early 1980s and 70 percent by 2013. College education came under attack by sectors of the rising conservative populist movement in the Trump administration, and the number saying it was very important dropped somewhat, but only 11 percent, one person in nine, said it was not important. Blacks and Latinos were most likely to say it was very important. 

The social and economic impacts of higher education are dramatic, and the inequality of opportunity for students of color and those from poor families is systemic. Typically, college completion makes a major difference in terms of employment, earnings, wealth, and even the probability of marriage and good health. It is strongly related to voting and public involvement, thus to power in the political system and to the health of democracy. In 2016, in a period of unusually low unemployment, among people aged twenty-five to sixty-four, 84 percent of college graduates were working, compared with 68 percent of high school grads and 55 percent of dropouts. Among Blacks the numbers were even more dramatic: 85 percent of college grads had jobs, but only 61 percent of high school grads and a dismal 39 percent of dropouts did. Latino college grads had about the same level of employment as their white and Black counterparts, 84 percent, and their employment shares with less education were the highest—72 percent for high school graduates and 65 percent for dropouts—but the quality of the jobs and incomes were low. The problem for Latinos is the low level of degree attainment. The situation is particularly threatening for males of color. College-age Black males are about one-seventh of the nation’s male population but they receive one-twelfth of the college degrees (8.5 percent). Latino males are more than a fourth of the nation’s college-age males but they receive one-ninth of the degrees (11.2 percent). The huge gap in college attainment for men of color is a basic cause of poor employment and income, low levels of marriage, involvement in the criminal economy, and many other problems that affect not only the men themselves but also their families and their communities.

There are gaps at every stage. People of color are less likely to graduate from high school, less likely to immediately enroll in college, less likely to go to a four-year college, substantially less likely to graduate from college within six years, far less likely to get increasingly important postgraduate degrees, and less likely to be employed or get equal wages afterward. If colleges are to help heal the wounds of separation and inequality in U.S. society, better policies are needed at many levels. 

College education is critical in America’s twenty-first-century society. It is the key to opportunity and the pathway to a middle-class life. It has become, for most, the boundary between a life of possibilities and resources and a life of struggle and immobility. In our recessions, college graduates are largely protected while others suffer; in times of prosperity, they get a greatly disproportionate share of the gains. There are, of course, nongraduates in fields like the skilled trades, small business, or good union jobs who do well, but the overall pattern is clear, and college is the high road to success. If the huge gap in college completion continues between whites and Asians and other students of color, wide racial differences will be perpetuated into the rising generation. Since college is so critical to their families, the advantage will pass into children’s lives. 

Students of color have the desire and make the attempt, but they often do not have the preparation and means for success. Students from all groups have been starting college at higher levels than in the past, but the gaps in completion are actually widening. Starting college somewhere is good, but where you start matters. After enrolling, students must succeed and have the financial means to continue if they are to reap the gains that come from completion. Admitting a student with severely defective preparation or who cannot pay the coming bills often leads to an academic tragedy. A big loan debt without a degree can be crippling. Weak preparation in clearly inferior schools where almost no one is well prepared is a huge barrier. Very capable students find they simply haven’t been given the academic skills other students have received. Starting without the means or extended family support to pay college bills, even with student loans, may make success impossible. These are the second and third walls that must be crossed if we are to move toward equity and real development of students’ capacity.

THE FIRST WALL: ADMISSIONS AND THE AFFIRMATIVE ACTION STRUGGLE

America’s selective colleges, both the private ones and the strong public flagship universities, were overwhelmingly white institutions throughout their history until the civil rights movement. Almost nothing serious had been done to integrate U.S. colleges before the movement, which reached its peak in the mid-1960s. In 1965, the year of the Selma march, the Voting Rights Act, and the first large urban riot, the selective schools of New England, for example, professed their readiness to welcome Black students but had only 1 percent Black enrollment. Students, faculty, and local community organizations identified with the great movement for racial justice developing in the South and put pressure on their institutions to take action. Affirmative action became a central tool when selective colleges recognized that their normal processes had never produced significantly integrated campuses and classes and that it would not happen without making it a clear goal and changing policies and practices as needed to make it happen.

The reality was that admissions on the basis of a traditional formula for “merit” and the special treatment of children of alumni and other groups who had special skills, often fostered by special opportunities, guaranteed that there would be little representation of students of color who were being ill-prepared in highly unequal segregated schools and whose parents were not alumni and had limited resources. Test scores were relied on, but scores are very strongly linked to family income and parent education. Privileged children gained from family and school educational resources and experiences. In a society where housing is strongly related to the quality of school opportunity and families of color lack the income and savings or housing equity of whites and Asians and often face housing discrimination, unequal local schooling is built into the racial structure of communities. We have had a strong, deeply rooted, long-established web of inequality, and it did not change itself. Waiting for more traditional students who simply had a different skin color wasn’t a workable model. To overcome those and other realities, colleges had to try to assess factors such as teacher recommendations, commitment, and desire to learn, and actively recruit unprecedented numbers of students of color to their campuses. In our extremely unequal society, colleges found that they must consider the circumstances of students of color to fairly assess them and also institute a variety of support efforts on campus.

Colleges had to face the hard realities of race if they were to become diverse. Most Black, Latino, and Native students were from families and schools with more limited resources and did not have the preparation needed to score well on the standardized tests. Many lacked normal prerequisites because of their school’s limited curriculum or weak counseling. Their families, on average, had much lower incomes and vastly lower wealth, as well as different needs from those of traditional students. That meant that the normal financial aid policies and assumptions often wouldn’t work. They had to convince

the students of color to come to campuses where they would be isolated in an overwhelmingly white population with white student organizations and, often, some racial hostility. They had to plan academic support. This was the situation in the Ivy League, the competitive public flagships, and strong private colleges and universities. The response to the demands of the civil rights era was voluntary race-conscious action, and it soon began to make a significant difference, moving colleges from virtually all white to a modest level of diversity. In the South, the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Higher Education Act meant that there were more federal funds and that universities segregated by law could put their federal dollars at risk if they did not take positive action, though that received little attention until the 1970s when a court ordered the Nixon administration to take action to enforce the 1964 law. 

It was obvious at the outset that all kinds of adjustments had to be made if the campuses were to integrate and students were to succeed. The hope was that the enforcement of civil rights changes and the many social reforms of the Great Society would help solve the underlying problems of inequality over time, but the country took a long, sharp turn in a conservative direction. Many of the domestic programs were drastically cut back and progress on various fronts stalled or even reversed. The Supreme Court, changed by conservative appointments, became far less supportive of broad race- conscious remedies after President Richard Nixon was able to appoint four justices. By the 1980s, under President Ronald Reagan, the country faced a sharp reversal in both civil rights and social programs. It has yet to recover.

Although the affirmative action policies became rooted in many campuses and the failure to close huge racial gaps made it apparent that the underlying problems were not solving themselves, affirmative action was repeatedly challenged. The ideas that civil rights policies were unnecessary and amounted to discrimination against whites produced continuous challenges. The battles surfaced in three crucial Supreme Court decisions from 1978 to 2016, in each of which affirmative action survived by a single vote in a deeply divided Court. Two of the cases were argued and decided during administrations working to end affirmative action. In the first great decision, the 1978 decision in University of California Board of Regents v. Bakke, the Court prohibited setting aside a specific number of seats for students of color, a quota, but held, by a single vote, that universities could consider racial diversity as a “plus factor” because of the educational value of diverse experiences to the university and all students.

As the courts became far more conservative in the 1990s, there was a major attack. A striking decision by a court of appeals, Hopwood v. Texas, ruled that affirmative action in Texas was unconstitutional. The same year, the voters of California passed a state constitutional amendment that outlawed affirmative action, which stimulated similar action in nine other states. Two lawsuits against the University of Michigan brought the issues back to the Supreme Court in 2003. The Court held, by a single vote, that it was illegal to simply add points for race in a mechanical admissions formula but that an individualized comprehensive admissions policy considering race as one of several factors was legal. The Court ruled that there was convincing evidence that racial diversity was an educational benefit and a compelling interest that justified this limited consideration. There was a major mobilization of higher education in defense of the university. (After winning the case, however, Michigan opponents succeeded in enacting a state referendum barring  affirmative action, and the referendum was upheld by the Supreme Court.) 

The issue came back to the Court twice in two decisions in the case of Fisher v. University of Texas. The university was widely believed to have the strongest existing alternative to race-conscious admissions, the 10 percent plan, in spite of analyses showing its shortcomings. The 2003 Grutter decision had recognized and relied on all the research concluding that campus diversity was a “compelling interest” in enriching the educational process, and the Supreme Court agreed in the Fisher cases. Now the question was whether there was a workable alternative that would produce diversity without considering race. In the first decision, the Court accepted the idea that there was a legitimate compelling educational interest in campus diversity but concluded that the lower courts had not demanded sufficient proof from the university that there was no colorblind way to achieve the needed diversity. After serious documentation by the university, the Supreme Court ruled that there was sufficient evidence of the absence of a workable alternative and upheld the university’s affirmative plan by a single vote in a 2016 decision written by Justice Anthony Kennedy. 

Affirmative action was, in practice, an important but modest policy. It never came anywhere close to producing proportionate representation of students of color in selective universities. Stanford professor Sean Reardon and associates concluded that in spite of affirmative action, whites were five times as likely as Blacks to attend selective campuses. As student demand for the most selective campuses soared, students of color were more squeezed out. A 2015 report of a national survey of admissions offices showed that the large majority of selective campuses, except for public institutions in states

where it was illegal, found it was crucial to continue affirmative action. Affirmative action for low-income students was not seen as a substitute. In fact campuses practicing affirmative action for race were also practicing it simultaneously for students from low-income families. Extensive research analyzing admissions variables, considering many alternatives and combinations of variables, found no feasible alternatives that would produce anything like the results of affirmative action at a cost that universities could manage. Although it affects a small share of students, it has a substantial impact on the institutions that train most American leaders and the students of color who would have been excluded but show that they can meet the requirements and become important leaders in many institutions.

This article is featured in the Fall 2022 Issue of UCLA Ed&IS Magazine. 

An excerpt from the book and Q&A with author Professor Gary Orfield about his perspective on social and economic barriers to higher education.

The Walls Around Opportunity: The Failure of Colorblind Policy for Higher Education

Lorena Guillén is an assistant professor of education at the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies. A native of Los Angeles, she splits her time between teaching in the UCLA Teacher Education Program and working with colleagues and students in the Urban Education Program.  Her research and teaching interests are focused on partnerships between teacher education programs and the students, families and communities they serve. 

Guillén is working to model more democratic, less hierarchical teacher education programs with the potential to further transformative, culturally relevant, responsive and sustaining pedagogies in K-12 classrooms and teacher education programs. She also plays the violin and is passionate about a particular type of music popular here in Los Angeles, in Latin America and across the globe. We talk with her here. 

Okay. Let’s start here. Rumor has it that you are a mariachi musician. Can you tell us about that? How does being a mariachi shape who you are and what you do? 

I'd love to, being a mariachi musician makes me very happy. It’s definitely been a very big part of my personal life.  I think a lot of my community-oriented way of thinking about schools and education comes from that.  

I started playing mariachi when I was in college. There weren't many college mariachi groups when I first joined Stanford's group in 1997. Before that, I was playing more classical music. I picked up the violin when I was 10. But it wasn't until I started playing mariachi that I made this connection with musicians and the way, at least in the mariachi world, they have a very particular role. 

I think the role of the musician is different, but as a mariachi, I was performing at weddings and at funerals and at birthday parties and serenading mothers on Mother's Day. Those kinds of experiences really helped me in the classroom. They got me honestly outside of centering myself in the classroom to instead, center community. So yeah, mariachi is very much a part of who I am and how I understand the role of each member of a community.

I haven't had the time yet, but I've always wanted to join the mariachi group here at UCLA, Mariachi UCLAtlan  in The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. They are one of the oldest college based mariachi groups in the country. I would love for UCLAtlan to play at an event at UCLASEIS. I could teach a whole class about mariachi.

Beyond mariachi, can you tell us a little bit about what your research and teaching is focused on this year? 

Guillén: Sure. I am currently involved with a collective group looking at “lands and waters” pedagogies in the UCLA Teacher Education Program. That's the main project right now. It is an indigenous-based approach to thinking about teaching and learning in education and schools on Tongva lands that we - the lands and waters collective consists of Tongva and teacher education communities, faculty and students - are piloting within our ethnic studies cohort in the Teacher Education Program.  

The idea is to base it on thinking about the natural world around us, and using that when you first start to plan your curriculum, when you think about learning outcomes, when you think about how you understand the way that we human beings exist in this world. This work also begins in reflecting upon what it means to be teaching specifically on Tongva lands. It's been a cool challenge to think about what that means in different disciplines, besides what most people think about it in terms of science or biology or something. I’m teaching the lands and waters class in the TEP program this quarter. The course is EDUC 406b Social Foundations and Cultural Diversity in American Education: Ethnic Studies Emphasis. The lands and waters approach is being taught in both my 406B class and Ananda Marin's 407 Psychological Foundations of Education.

That’s interesting. What is the ethnic studies cohort and what's your involvement with It?

Guillén: The cohort is part of a larger project deeply exploring ethnic studies. Darlene Lee, who is one of the advisors in the UCLA Teacher Education Program and the advisor and co-creator of the Ethnic Studies pathway in our Teacher Ed program, and Emma Hipolito, now the director of the Teacher Education Program, started it together with a group of students about a year or so before I started at UCLA. 

The first group of students really were demanding to have some sort of preparation for teaching ethnic studies. That demand was driven by the push in schools in Los Angeles and across California and the nation by students wanting ethnic studies offered as part of their K-12 schooling. The students in our pre-service program, they wanted to rise to that occasion, so they were pushing the program to prepare teachers to teach ethnic studies.

Let’s talk a little more about teaching.  Now that most instruction is back on campus, can you tell us a little bit about what it's like to be teaching in front of a live class again and what you're doing this quarter? 

Guillén: Oh, goodness, especially with this new focus on lands and waters, it's just such a difference from being online. In our last class, we were outside and the students were doing an activity -- based on an idea I got from my colleague Ananda Marin -- where they were looking for and finding plant relatives. They were able to go out onto campus and locate a plant that they are going to be developing a relationship with this quarter and hopefully beyond. 

It was just super exciting to see them come back with pictures of their plant relative. And they had done preliminary research looking into the name of that plant and what kinds of leaves it has, what kind of water it needs, and how it's able to survive in this climate, that kind of thing. It’s the kind of thing we could talk about when we were online but we couldn't really go do it together and then come back together. It’s such an important piece of the way we are thinking about ourselves in the natural world, and in particular, the way we think about our role as teachers on Tongva land. 

Do you teach outside of the Teacher Education Program at UCLA or just within the program?

Guillén: Yes, the other half of me is assigned to the Urban Schooling Division. Right now, I have a Research Apprenticeship Course (RAC). Next quarter I’ll be  teaching the second half of our Introduction to Urban Schooling Core series. 

What is a RAC exactly? Can you tell me a little bit about yours and what you do in it? I hear different things about them from different people.

Guillén: I think it's because different people run them in different ways. For this one, I decided to gear it towards those who are practitioners going into their doctoral studies. In  particular, we are focusing on looking at ethnic studies: what that is, how that's rolling out, and how we think about that in the K-12 school setting.

It's a small group of doctoral students, but actually, I just opened it up to folks who are not in our doctoral program. Darlene has joined the space. And I'm hoping to have other teacher practitioners, alumni and others join.  A lot of that idea came from Danny Solórzano. He has a lot of that kind of bigger community involved in his research space. The other piece I've added is we meet at different places around the city. I think that helps a lot of our students who are not from Los Angeles ground themselves and kind of get a feel or an understanding for what K-12 schooling is here, what the community is here.  Sometimes we just can't get that when we're on campus on the Westside.

What are you trying to make happen with your RAC? How are you trying to help students? 

Guillén: I think, as you pointed out, people, faculty and groups have used RACs differently. Some folks use it as a lab space to do particular research and students help with that research. And I think there are benefits to that model. But I think what I've been hearing from students since I've been at UCLA is that they really are hoping and looking for a place where they can also develop some of the professional skills, or just a space to talk about what does it mean to be working in academia and what does that look like. Just practical stuff. 

I think sometimes we miss that in our coursework.  How do you write a CV?  Or how do you navigate the big AERA educational conference? It’s just a space to informally learn from those who are elders in the program or from an advisor or a faculty mentor. It's informal, but it's also sort of structured in that you're meeting on a regular basis.

I've really tried to make this invisible or hidden curriculum of what it is to be working in academia part of our space. And particularly for a lot of our students who like me, identify as some sort of Black, Indigenous person of color, what does it mean for us to be in these spaces. For a lot of us, we really think about ourselves as academic scholars but also as community activists. So, there's a place for community scholarship or public scholarship in our RAC, and I'm trying to help our group think that through.  

 After the disruption of COVID, how are feeling about being back on campus and in the classroom? 

Guillén: Like many others, I am not completely comfortable teaching in person. I still mask in the classroom and I still provide the option for students to use a Zoom link to join class or to record a lecture. That said, in terms of the teaching, there's just nothing like being on campus and having a back and forth with students. 

 Lots of times I tell students that the online place is just another tool in our toolbox.  In the end, what matters is  what you're doing and how you're using these tools. So sometimes, I just have the students turn the computer off. The other day we did a mapping activity. We just had handouts. It was a map, and they were color coding with their pens, the river and where villages or settlers have decided to build a school. That kind of activity, it helps students really focus, it helps them ask questions or take the time to think things through. I am doing my best to figure out which tool fits the learning goal. 

Being outside to create a mini-ecosystem, being physically together to discuss a reading, assigning asynchronous community-based activities, these are all tools in our teaching toolkit. This  is something for us all to consider when we think about teaching. When are outdoor spaces good for our learning as well as our mental and physical wellbeing? There are also good pedagogical reasons to be in a classroom, sometimes for direct instruction or to puzzle through a projected image.  

You work with people who are trying to become teachers. As we move to hopefully a brighter side of the COVID pandemic and students are returning to campus, what's your sense of how your students are doing?

Guillén: They are grappling. They are struggling with the job [of teaching] itself. And I think, honestly, and people have said this before, the pandemic just highlighted a lot of the problems with the profession. And it, the job itself has been a problem. It demands a lot of hours, it requires a lot of thinking time. We need a lot more teachers, more people to spread the work around, more educators, I should say, school-based educators. I feel like these are problems that people just kind of put up with before. 

Things were so rough during the pandemic. And taking care of young people while taking care of your family or yourself is really, really taxing. That has to change. The job itself has to change. It's never been sustainable. 

As an English teacher, you have maybe 150 students. You do the numbers. You can't plan and teach five classes with only one prep period to plan cool projects,  grade all of their papers, provide feedback to students and communicate with  parents. Let alone collaborate with colleagues, complete paperwork – there is so much paperwork – and keep up your own professional reading and learning  It's just not sustainable. So, all that to say is yeah, the teachers are struggling. Pre-service teachers have a lot of excitement, and I think they would be able to stay in the profession longer if we really re-thought the way that we structure time for young people, but also for teachers.

So, the teacher as superhero model is not sustainable?

Faculty Interview: Lorena Guillén

UCLA education professor Federica Raia’s research explores how people care for one another - not just about how people say they care, but what they do.

“I want to know what it means to care for another human being,” Raia says. 

In her work, she examines how people care for one another in medical and educational situations, engaging students, teachers, patients, and doctors at the crossroads of learning, science, technology and relationships.

On a Saturday in early November, Raia, together with colleagues from the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine could be found putting research into practice at the Mann UCLA Community School in South Los Angeles, providing healthy heart screenings to about 50 student athletes at the school. The event is part of WeCREATE (Wellness Collaborative for Research & Education Activities to Transform and Empower) an initiative of UCLA School of Education and Information Studies and the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine . The screening was developed  in collaboration with Mann UCLA Community School and  the Saving Hearts Foundation, UCLA chapter, who provided Electro Cardio Gram (EKG) Screening to Student Athletes at the school and some of their parents.

UCLA Advanced Heart Failure cardiologists Mario Deng, and Jeff Hsu from the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, met and spoke with students about heart health and healthy heart practices, interviewed students about their health background and any symptoms or concerns, and provided students with an EKG exam.  For many of the students, if not all, it was the first time they had received an EKG as part of their health care.

Dr. Mario Deng with Mann UCLA Student and Parent

“The goal is to educate young members of the community to empower them to take control of their heart health,” said Dr. Hsu. “This is a great young community, and we have the opportunity to impact their trajectory, their health trajectories for the rest of their lives.

“We're seeing high school students and talking with and educating them about their heart health. We're asking about any concerning symptoms they may have had, whether it's during exercise or during their day to day activities, and any family history of any heart disease, heart conditions like diabetes and hypertension, and educating them on what these conditions are. We’re measuring their blood pressure and explaining what their blood pressure means. We're doing 12 lead electrocardiograms and talking about what we can see on a 12 lead ECG.  After making an assessment, then we give them this information, and let them know what this information means.”

The event at Mann UCLA was held in partnership with The Saving Hearts Foundation, which is focused on preventing Sudden Cardiac Arrest (SCA), a top cause of death among student athletes, killing more than 5,000 annually. Sudden Cardiac Arrest, can occur without any visible warning signs or symptoms. The first symptom can be death. Occurrences are more prevalent among students of color, and those from low-income communities. 

“Sudden cardiac arrest is a really dangerous thing,” said Andy Shea, a UCLA graduate and now a medical student at UC Irvine, who serves as director of the Foundation. “It's basically due to abnormalities with the electrical system of the heart that can cause a heart to beat abnormally and can cause an arrest. The only way to really identify warning signs of sudden cardiac arrest, because it's largely an asymptomatic type of condition, is to do a heart screening including an EKG.” 

 Many students though lack access to effective heart screenings. By providing students with access to electro cardio exams, the Foundation is helping to identify potential abnormalities that can lead to SCA. If any students are identified with potential problems, they receive an echocardiogram and are referred for any necessary follow-up care or preventive measures. To date, the foundation has provided more than 4,800 exams to student athletes.

The heart screening at Mann UCLA is just the one event in what the partners in WeCREATE envision as they work toward the development of a learning and wellness collaborative with the school.

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