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Center X Mission Statement
This sad reality takes on added significance given the changing population in California. The California Department of Education projects skyrocketing school enrollments during the decade of the 90s, with the number of K-12 students increasing by more than 36 percent by the end of the decade, and by more than 50 percent by the year 2005. These increases coincide with the graying of the educational workforce, bringing unprecedented numbers of retirements. Thus, even without providing relief for the most crowded classrooms in the nation, the state will need over 11,000 new school administrators (including over 6,000 superintendents and principals) and 111,000 new teachers to accommodate this surge in student enrollment. Moreover, the 7.6 million K-12 student population projected by the year 2004-2005 will be much more ethnically, racially, and linguistically diverse than that population is today. In 1991-1992, K-12 "minority" students (including African Americans, American Indians, Asians, Filipinos, and Chicano/Latinos) constituted about 55.5 percent of enrollments; by 2004-2005 they will likely be over 69 percent of the K-12 student population. The diverse Chicano/Latino student population alone will probably reach 49 percent. Growing numbers of children enter California's schools with limited English proficiency or speaking languages other than English--many arrive with little formal education. Demographic shifts have also brought staggering increases in the numbers of children in poverty--children deprived of basic necessities, as well as the school-related advantages and experiences that children from middle-class homes routinely acquire. Many face multiple barriers to their educational development--barriers that arise from their growing up in the physically, medically, and emotionally hazardous conditions that increasingly prevail in our inner cities. To meet this demand, the state will require not only more K-12 educators, but more broadly trained ones as well. Projected demographic shifts call for a tremendous multicultural shift--a shift in the ethnicity of school administrators, teachers, and staff, in the kinds of understanding they must have about multilingual education, cultural diversity, ethnic and racial differences, and in the ways they work with students. They will need to understand the problematic conditions of urban life and the special needs of limited English proficient as well as low-income urban students. In short, California's educators increasingly will need cross-disciplinary training, knowledge, and expertise. They will also need the support of research to develop creative approaches to education policymaking and to build an education ecology that provides a broad range of social and clinical, as well as educational, supports. Society's heightened expectations for schools exacerbate these imposing challenges. Increasingly technological work, international markets, geopolitical tensions, and rapidly changing social conditions press our nation toward greater complexity. The accelerating pace of change in the workplace blurs past distinctions between "working with one's hands" and "working with one's head." Today, education serves a central role in helping society adapt to change, and policymakers and the public increasingly look to the schools and universities to address these fundamental social shifts. One major consequence is the demand that K-12 schools and community colleges move away from an emphasis on low-level skills and instead equip all children with analytical and problem solving abilities seen as essential for productive lives and work in our more complex world. Related to this demand is the current movement toward national curriculum standards and assessment strategies (accompanied by new standards for the teaching profession) that will press teachers to teach complex ideas and skills to all children, including low-income, minority children, as well as children from diverse cultural and language backgrounds. California's education policymakers have been at the forefront of the much needed national education reform movement. The state's K-12 curriculum frameworks in the major subject areas and its efforts to develop an innovative and appropriate state testing program has made California a leader among the states. In addition, the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing (CTC) responded to the needs of limited English speaking students by adopting a new design for the preparation and licencing of teachers who serve LEP students (CLAD/BCLAD). Many schools are struggling to be better--to provide a quality education, with equal access to the core curriculum, to all of their children and to enhance the life chances for culturally and linguistically diverse children, or low-income, children of color. Wherever school improvement initiatives surface, schools eagerly sign on. Improving urban schools and teaching is not easy. Lack of resources often undermine well-intentioned, thoughtful efforts on the part of caring teachers and administrators. They have little access to (or time to consume) new knowledge about effective curriculum and teaching. Structures in our schools do not allow for many children's needs or abilities, and often limit children's creativity and initiative. As a result children are "lost" before they have a chance to develop their own learning. Children from non-mainstream ethnic groups and low-income families are most often the ones harmed by these circumstances, but even children from white, middle-class families are expected to fit into a uniform, regulated structure that might not be best for them. Educational scholarship all too frequently fails to have an impact on these features of day-to-day life in schools. Dismissed (often appropriately) as naively idealistic, irrelevant, or impractical, insights and recommendations from research are seen as dangerously radical ideas or as whims of an academic community that lacks a genuine commitment to language & culturally diverse, or low-income, minority children and to the teachers and schools serving them. Changes within the cultures of all our educational institutions are required. Any effort to transform teacher education and reform urban schools must also transform the relationship between the university and the schools and make fundamental changes in the culture of the university itself.
Certainly UCLA has the capacity to make a difference. UCLA scholars have made impressive contributions to education scholarship; and its GSE&IS houses well funded, national research centers, as well as many other schooling research and policy analysis programs. UCLA claims among its graduates some of the most highly regarded education scholars. As in medicine and law, however, UCLA's education program is a professional school as well as an academic department; therefore, its research, teaching, and public service also find fruition in the education of educators and the improvement of educational practice. Each year school systems throughout the state vigorously recruit novice teachers trained in UCLA's CLAD/BCLAD Emphasis Teacher Education Program--nobody doubts that these graduates are among the "best of the crop" of new teachers in the state each year. And, in school systems throughout the area, teachers wear their UCLA Center for Academic Interinstitutional Programs (CAIP) affiliation proudly. CAIP as the home of California Subject Matter Projects in History/Geography, Literature, Mathematics, Science, and Writing has been a premier provider of high quality professional development in the state. However, what distinguishes UCLA's highly regarded programs in education from those of most other training institutions is the potential for a creative synergy of research, teaching, and the improvement of education policy and practice that UCLA's position as a top-ranked research university makes possible. Moreover, the central mission of UCLA, as a public land-grant institution, is serving the public good. Research, professional preparation, policy analysis, and service directed at the improvement of K-12 education (an enterprise that has no other expression than public service) may be the area in which UCLA can most fully enact its central mission, particularly at this critical time in our social and economic history. However, business as usual will not suffice. Without doubt, it's time for UCLA to act in bold new ways. Our privileged status as an institution and the protection that tenure brings to faculty carry with them the responsibility to tackle problems that others can not or will not. Strong action in the field of education provides an unparalleled opportunity for UCLA to renew its commitment to the public good, and to show clearly what its contribution is and could be. This commitment drives our creation of Center X.
Embody a social justice agenda -- Use the racial, cultural, and linguistic diversity of our Los Angeles community as an asset as we construct extraordinarily high quality education for all children in Los Angeles and particularly for limited English proficient, and low-income, children of color in urban schools. A social justice agenda expresses itself both in and outside the classroom. As one expression of this agenda, we encourage teachers to approach curriculum, teaching, and learning from socio-cultural and constructivist perspectives, since we believe they can make content knowledge accessible to students from all cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Further, it means that teachers utilize appropriate bilingual and primary language instructional strategies when needed. It also means that schools assist children to obtain the social supports that they need to learn and achieve. Treat professional education "cradle-to-grave" -- Education is a seamless process that connects efforts to attract young people into teaching, with learning experiences for teacher candidates, with learning experiences for novice teachers, and with learning experiences for seasoned professionals--including those studying for doctorates in curriculum, teaching, and education leadership. Further, it is a process that is focused on serving students--of all ages--and their families and communities. Collaborate across institutions and communities -- Collaborative efforts provide the best means to address the entire ecology of settings and institutions that contribute to children's education. Center X is committed to develop and sustain long-term, positive, interdependent connections equal status, partnerships among K-12 schools and community colleges, UCLA, and the diverse communities of Los Angeles (including business, state and local health and other social agencies, and local community organizations). Center X must that provide settings for school improvement efforts, professional development, graduate students' training, and faculty research. Center X must also must forge new alliances between the Graduate School of Education and Information and other UCLA departments and professional schools. Additionally, Center X must connect with broader education reform efforts in the state and nation, and maintain a global view of our efforts. Focus simultaneously on professional education, school reform, and reinventing the university's role in K-12 schooling and community colleges -- Center X must help new and experienced educators acquire the knowledge and skills necessary for social justice and educational quality in urban schools. At the same time, the Center's work must press schools to develop cultures that encourage and support putting new knowledge and skills into practice. Moreover, UCLA will also change as it crafts new roles and responsibilities for the university in these collaborative theory/practice efforts. Education practitioners come to the university, not just to learn, but also to teach. Their expertise, gathered over years of experience, is a valued Center X resource. Engagement with practitioners in the Center's work will enable university faculty to develop professionally and improve their programs of teaching and research. UCLA faculty, students, and field-based practitioners all bring a wealth of knowledge about these issues to the Center; and all have much to learn. Blend theory and practice -- Center X will combine opportunities to acquire new knowledge and skills, with research aimed at creating new knowledge, and the practical application of that knowledge in schools. UCLA scholars must formulate and conduct their research and teaching in ways that reflect the realities of children, educators, schools, and their community contexts. The value of this work must be evident to all of the constituents the university serves. School professionals, in turn, must guide their practice by a process of critical inquiry, reflection, and social responsibility. Bring together educators' and students' needs for depth of content knowledge, powerful pedagogies, and school cultures that enable serious and sustained engagement in teaching and learning -- Center X avoids a false separation of content, pedagogy, and contexts for learning. To better understand their complex relationship and promote reforms that enhance it, Center X places a high value on having education professionals engage in the disciplines they teach, as well as learn about teaching. Writing teachers write, history teachers conduct original inquiries into historical topics, science teachers do scientific investigations. Doing so, they learn how their disciplines create knowledge and better understand the school and classroom contexts that permit teachers and learners to engage in creating discipline-based knowledge. Remain self-renewing -- View change and problems as "normal" conditions that require a flexible, responsive, non-static, learning organization. Center X must resist efforts to shape its activities into a traditional control-oriented, bureaucratic organization. Rather it must remain a commitment-driven entity whose structures organize people around important problems, interests, and goals. Mirror in the Center's organization, staffing, and daily activities the diverse, caring, socially responsible learning community that we seek to create in schools -- In order to reform schools' expectations for themselves and their students, we strive to model a constructivist approach to teaching and learning and a curriculum that reflects the diversity of our society in all its aspects: gender; ethnicity; cultural, linguistic and ethnic identification; multiple intelligences; socio-economic status; family structure, and others. Center X is itself a diverse community in which all members lead and contribute to our quest for socially just and intellectually rich schools for all children.
Our initial planning and pilot efforts have led already to a number of new programs and activities, and a renewed commitment to others, and we are conducting considerable formative inquiry and revision of these new directions. For example, we have initiated the Center X Math/Science Collaborative (funded by an Eisenhower grant) that brings together six K-12 school complexes, UCLA science and mathematics faculty, and GSE&IS to increase the achievement and participation of low-income, minority students in math and science. We've launched the "Students-in-the-Center" Professional Development Collaborative (funded by DeWitt Wallace-Readers Digest) that engages UCLA, other local professional development groups (Galef, LAEP, and The Achievement Council), and Los Angeles area educators and community members in new forms of professional development and school reform. The preservice teacher education program has been transformed into a 2-year program that includes a one-year, paid teaching residency in an urban school. We are now entering the third year of our CLAD/BCLAD Emphasis Credential Program. Students are now more professionally prepared for meeting the needs of children who speak no or limited English and who come from culturally diverse backgrounds. We have strengthened our already strong ties with Santa Monica-Malibu School District, and with schools in LAUSD and Lennox. Discussions are underway with UCLA's new school of Public Policy, and faculty in medicine, public health, social welfare, and psychology about ways to develop programs that deal more comprehensively with the range of issues facing low-income, urban children, and schools. We are also making connections with community colleges, the CSU system, and community groups such as the Boyle Heights Elementary Institute. There is much, much more ahead. It is not merely in its activities with K-12 schools and community colleges, however, that Center X has attempted to transform UCLA's work toward improving professional practice. In developing the structure and culture of Center X, the faculty, staff, and school partners have themselves sought to embody the Center's guiding principles. With John Dewey, Center X takes the position that the value of connecting educational research and practice goes far beyond improving professional education and the university's contribution to public service. Rather, research also stands to benefit as a consequence of contact between the worlds of practice and research. In sum, then, we believe that not only the urgency of public problems, but also the nature of scholarly inquiry in education support a renewal of an integrated mission for the University of California's schools and programs in education. We are eager to have others who are committed to these ideals join us in this ambitious effort. |
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