At the turn of the 20th century, profound social shifts—industrialization, urbanization, and immigration—pushed aside many traditional forms of public life while simultaneously creating ever-greater needs in America's cities. Many social reformers argued that to make the cities at once more hospitable and democratic, the newly urbanized population needed to overcome divisions of language, nationality, race, and class to create a "life in which all citizens share." They reasoned that public schools offered ideal sites for bringing citizens together around common interests.

A century later Los Angeles faces similar economic and social challenges. However, we've lost confidence that the public schools can bridge the divisions that reflect and threaten the city's public life. In response, IDEA aims to forge new research connections among the university, communities, and schools to promote educational access and help citizens, scholars, and community leaders bring new vitality to democratic life in Los Angeles. Democracy, education, and access are tightly bound up with one another, with developing a strong and coherent community, and with the ideal of an urban public research university.

Why IDEA? Most efforts to engage research universities in educational reform focus narrowly on life in schools. However, the challenges that urban schools face tightly connect to lack of access to quality jobs, public space, and public safety. Few of these access issues facing Los Angeles fall within the realm of a single academic discipline or professional school. Rather, most reside at the intersection of multiple intellectual traditions. Moreover, few of the city's problems can be addressed adequately by scholars sequestered within the university. By involving academics from diverse fields and different institutions along with non-academics from Los Angeles schools and communities, IDEA will study theories, structures, and relationships that promote and sustain educational access and a vigorous public life in greater Los Angeles. Taken together, the Institute's activities will be a locus for learning, research, professional development, and public engagement.

Scope of Work: IDEA‰s program of multidisciplinary scholarship and activities will address the relationship among educational access, broader political economy, and civic life. UCLA faculty, postdoctoral scholars, and graduate students will join with educators and community members in research and action that address the challenge of assuring that children from across the city receive high quality public education and college access. It will investigate the role of public education in promoting and sustaining a productive dialog in a vital and diverse community. IDEA envisions an array of products in multiple formats that include, and go beyond, traditional research reports and other print publications:

• New knowledge to inform both scholarship and public policy about schooling and access in the context of the political economy of racially and linguistically diverse urban communities.
• Tested and transportable school and community practices that create and support rigorous, contextually relevant, college preparation for students in educationally disadvantaged schools and neighborhoods.
• Alternative strategies for engaging students in educationally disadvantaged schools in college-level work and for displaying their mastery of this work and their college "readiness" in the context of increasingly competitive university admissions.
• New forms of public engagement, including formats for seminars and public meetings in which participants who reflect the incredible diversity of greater Los Angeles—across lines of class, race, and geography—identify, make sense of, and respond to critical issues in communities across Los Angeles.
• Recommendations for state and local policies that promote and support high quality school and community practices that prepare students in educationally disadvantaged settings for university eligibility and success.
• An expanded and shared public understanding of who constitutes the Los Angeles' public and what is the meaning of education for the common good in the diverse communities of the Los Angeles basin.