Felipe E. Agredano, M.T.S., President, Garvey Board of Education - "Higher standards. We need to elevate the expectations across the board. California’s working families need to have the college-going culture in mind and at reach always. The sooner we implement that college is for everyone is accessible to all, the sooner we make education the social equalizer of our democracy. It’s our duty to give working families the choice of attaining access to college, even if the decision includes not attending college at all. All should be prepared to choose between college and career."
State Senator Darrell Steinberg, 6th Senate District - "We have to face the fact that for lots of kids, the big, traditional high school just isn’t a model that works. We can’t legislate all of this, but from Sacramento we can help. One of my bills this session, SB 219, would improve the school accountability system to make sure middle and high schools pay closer heed to the thousands of students who are dropping out each year and push high schools to make better decisions about alternative education placements for struggling students."
Veronica Garcia, English Teacher, Wilson High School - "Schools need to do a better job of tapping into student voices and bringing those voices into the classroom. School has to feel relevant to young people because when it’s disconnected from their reality, they feel like they have no purpose. We have to find a way to make every day relevant to them, because that strengthens their desire to learn and increases their consciousness about what education can do for them. And it can’t be just schools, it has to be a community effort that includes parents and guardians and other community members as well.
Christopher Guzman
Graduating Senior, David Starr Jordan High School - "If schools taught students how to socialize with others, how to solve problems and think critically, it would help so that students could become more involved with school and with making decisions that would affect them. If schools offered courses such as Chicano Studies or African American studies, if there were more college recruiters instead of military recruiters, and if students were expected to more than just graduate - for example if students were given higher expectations such as going college and teaching them that there is more to college than studying - I believe that it would greatly increase the graduation rate of students."
Joel Jordan , Director of Special Projects, UTLA - "The current obsession with high states testing and its corollary, the narrowing and 'shallowing' of curriculum, only serves to intensify student alienation. Only when high schools widen, deepen, humanize, and make relevant their curriculum will students want to come to school and make up for any past deficiencies from previous grades. To accomplish this, the entire school culture will have to be transformed from the current command and control model to authentic collaboration."
East Los Angeles freshmen from Wilson High School share a day in their life.
By Christine O’Keefe
Staff Writer
UCLA Urban Schooling Professor Ernest Morrell, along with two graduate students, Rosa Jimenez and Mark Bautista, have partnered with first-year English teacher Veronica Garcia at Wilson High School to develop and implement a unique project called “A Day in the Life of…Critical Minds Project.” The project enables students to deepen their critical literacy skills through analysis of their own educational experiences. Using the genre of a written narrative, the students capture both the mundane and poignant aspects of their daily lives as they move from home to school and through the sequence of a typical high school day.
By Mohammad Tajsar
Staff Writer
Politicians and educators, take heed: California’s future students want top-level schools, and they expect to graduate from them en masse.
In a survey entitled “California Dreamers” commissioned by the University of California Office of the President and New America Media, California youth expressed a genuinely optimistic vision for their educational future, even in an environment where schooling is far from perfect and where living conditions are far from affordable.
Inglewood High seniors Miner and McClain will attend UCLA this fall.
It is ten miles from Inglewood High School to UCLA but for Devon Miner, Ebreon Farris and Marvin McClain, Inglewood High School seniors attending UCLA this fall, the road was much longer than that.
Traditionally Inglewood High School has been known to send very few seniors to UCLA. A few of the reasons are the lack of credentialed teachers and the lack of rigorous course, such as AP and Honors, offered to students. In addition, the freshmen class at UCLA last year was composed of 4,800 students, yet less than 100 of those students were African American. Miner admitted to being somewhat discouraged after learning the number of African American incoming freshmen last year, but pushed himself to apply anyway.
City Year corp. members work with youth in the communities across the United States.
“Where are you going to do your year of service?” Cesar Cervantes hopes someday young people will be asking each other this question as commonly as they ask, “Where are you going to college?”
Cervantes, 25, is serving a second year with City Year, a national service organization that provides young people between the ages of 17 and 24 with a demanding year of community service and leadership development. The corps members of City Year work with youth in communities across the United States, acting as mentors and tutors, running after-school programs, and leading community service days. Cervantes is part of the effort to bring this program to Los Angeles, which will be the program’s 18th site in as many years.
In our first issue of Learning Power News, we featured profiles of five seniors who attend various high schools throughout Los Angeles. Within the next month, these students are all graduating from high school, and in the fall will be going on to college. With the exception of Lily, the other four students are the first in their families to attend college.
You can view the original article here.
Student: Brittany Green High School: Magnet program within large LAUSD high school
College Attending: UCLA
Proposed Major: Undecided, possibly theater or physical therapy
Brittany chalks up her success to her involvement in YouTHink and the theater arts program at her school. YouTHink is an education program sponsored by the Zimmer Children’s Museum that all five of these students are involved in. Her experience with YouTHink taught her to be a better listener, speaker, and team builder, and to see that social issues are truly important. “YouTHink helped mold me into being a better citizen,” she commented. The theater program affiliated with her school gives students the means to actually produce their own works, and Brittany has been involved with several productions. She said her involvement in theater “has helped me learn how to develop friendships and communication skills and has taught me that I’m an artist and a social butterfly, and that diversity is beautiful. Everything I do I throw myself into, and I know it will be the same way in college.”
Student: Esthefany Garcia
High School: Large LAUSD high school
College Attending: El Camino Community College
Proposed Major: Cosmetology
Esthefany credits her family for being encouraging and supportive as she made her way through high school, and said the only time she feared not graduating from high school was when she didn’t pass the English section of the California High School Exit Exam the first time she took it. She did pass in November of 2006, but she had to take the exam three times until she passed. During her second attempt at the exam, all of the test booklets of the group she took the test with were lost. Esthefany received very little college counseling during high school. “I never had a counseling appointment that was just me and the counselor, all we had were college fairs.” She will attend her first one-on-one counseling appointment at El Camino next month.
Student: Lily Roh
High School: All girls’ private high school
College Attending: Cornell University
Proposed Major: Policy Analysis and Management
Lily attributes her success largely to the academic focus of her high school. “My teachers are very thorough, both in the way they teach the material and in the way they stay on top of the students. If a student’s grade falls below a B-minus, the teacher sends a progress report home with a note about what the student should do to improve the grade. We also did a lot of academic planning in the seventh and eighth grades, talking about the classes we needed to take and starting to think about college.”
Student: Luis Herrera
High School: Small self-contained magnet school
College Attending: California State University, Long Beach
Proposed Major: Architecture or Graphic Design
Luis attributes his success to his mom, his school, and the staff at YouTHink. Luis said, “My mom went to the Foshay Learning Academy every day for a week and talked to the principal so I could get in. Otherwise I would have gone to Manual Arts High School, which is a much bigger high school. At Foshay, you get more attention, and the counselor knows everyone. The school and my counselor really helped me know what I needed to do to get into college, and so did the people who work at YouTHink. I wasn’t sure about applying to colleges but they encouraged me to do it and helped me with the essays.” Luis notes his brother was the first in his family to graduate from high school, and Luis will be the first in his family to attend college. “I’ve heard people say that one out of every two Hispanics don’t graduate from high school, so it’s a big accomplishment that I’m going to college and taking that step towards success.”
Student: Roberto Orellana
High School: Small self-contained magnet school
College Attending: UC, Santa Barbara
Proposed Major: Electrical Engineering
Roberto said he believes his mother and uncle were critical in encouraging him to work hard and apply to college. The activities he was able to participate in at the Foshay Learning Academy also furthered his interest in studying engineering. He participated in the robotics team at Foshay, an activity offered by only a few schools in the area. The team was one of the first inner-city schools to make it to the Los Angeles regional FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) robotics competition, as well as to a national competition. “I helped build the chassis of the robot. I didn’t participate much in the wiring of the robot, but I watched and I became interested in how that worked. When the team made it to the regional and national competitions, I had the feeling that this was something I had helped with, so I felt proud,” said Roberto.
-Christine O'Keefe, Staff Writer