Transcript
Also Available:
Welcome and Introduction
Remarks by Marshall Smith
Remarks by The Honorable Chaka Fattah (D-PA)
Panel on GEARUP
Panel on LAAP and Distance Learning
Luncheon
Panel on Title II Teacher Quality
Wrap Up Session
H. Aaron: I'm Henry Aaron. I'm a senior fellow here at the Brookings Institution and was formerly director of economic studies at the time the Brown Center was created. This morning Lois mentioned that with the passage of years, she finds that she's bumping into people she has known for a very long time. And she mentioned somebody whom she had known, Mike Smith, for, I think, twenty-five years.
The first time I met Ray Orbach was forty-eight years ago. I was a high school sophomore. He was a high school senior. We went to the same high school. And he had a great distinction. He drove a car and was driving to a debate, which was my first, and I was privileged to be a passenger. We've bumped into each other and been acquainted on many occasions since, not least because he had the good sense to marry one of the more attractive members of my class in high school. And also because during my period in graduate school when he was an assistant professor of physics at Harvard, he and his wife were very gracious host and hostesses to a hungry graduate student, who would agree to drive out, pick up lobsters, which they would then prepare for dinner. I can't resist telling one story about his children, who are now — the eldest is now forty years old. At that time, they were, of course, much younger. I arrived early one afternoon, deposited the lobsters, which had to be left some place until dinner time and Ray, I think, it was decided they should go in the shower stall, just off the kitchen, which sounds like an innocent choice except by dinner time the lobsters and his children had bonded, making dinner a traumatic occasion.
Well, that may have been the high point but Ray went on and has done a few other things. He became a professor of physics at the University of California at Los Angeles [UCLA]. He then combined his teaching and research with administrative duties and became provost at UCLA. In recognition of his accomplishments there, he was asked to become chancellor at the campus of the University of California at Riverside [UC-Riverside]. And has, I think, compiled a record of extreme distinction in an area about which he's going to talk this afternoon. And that is the way in which a university can become a force throughout the educational system — not only at the higher educational level but influencing schools that train the students, whom the universities will then have to educate.
Some of you may know he was the subject of a marvelously adulatory article in The New York Times Magazine that recognized what he has accomplished in precisely those areas. And for that reason and for personal reasons, it's a real pleasure to have the chance to introduce Ray Orbach.
R. Orbach: Thank you, Henry, for that very kind introduction. I warned you that if you didn't introduce yourself, I would. Henry is a distinguished economist, has headed the economics department here at Brookings, is internationally known for his work, and a very good friend. And it's just great to be back and see you, again, and be reminded of those wonderful lobster dinners, though my children could not watch the dismembering of the animal after they got to be friends with it.
It's my very great privilege to be here and I want to thank Lois Rice for inviting me to the day. It has been a most informative day and I've learned a great deal. And the nice thing about being the luncheon speaker but having the lunch somewhere else is that the luncheon speaker actually got to eat lunch, which I had given up any hopes of under a previous understanding. So thank you for the lunch. I guess I should thank the Ford Foundation. We were told — oh, no, okay.
It's a fascinating issue that we are discussing today. It's the issue of excellence, which has been implied when we speak of higher education, and access, which is a commitment that this nation leads all others in achieving. I'll be talking about the melding of the two. Many times one will read that diversity is a requisite for excellence in higher education. I truly believe that. I would like to talk with you about a partnership that we have had with our two counties but really the entire state of California and, then, how that plays out. It plays out not only in the numbers game — how many underrepresented minority students do you have on the campus, but also how that changes the nature of the campus; how the campus develops and profits from the richness that diversity brings. Some of the materials outside on the table may look strange to you. There was a collection of material from a conference titled, "Diversity and Aesthetics: Difference and Aesthetics." This is an attempt to take the richness of ethnic studies, gender studies, this remarkable student population, and bring that into coincidence with our sense of values. The quality of the institution, quality of the fields, that's what's going on right now at UC-Riverside. And so for us diversity on our campus is not a luxury or a numbers game, it's an essential element in our curricula program. And so when we have done what we have with a community and we are blessed with a wonderful community around us, there's a great deal of self-interest in it, not only for access but also for quality. And it's those two elements that I want to bring together in my presentation.
At UC-Riverside, we have a long tradition of reaching out to help k through 12 schools and underrepresented students. Our efforts are now paying great dividends for us. Next fall, this coming fall, we will enroll a freshman class that will numerically be the most diverse in the University of California. We will have twenty-seven percent of our freshmen who are underrepresented minority students — African American, Native American, Chicano and Latino students. And everyone of them is eligible to enter the University of California — that is they have graduated in the top one — eighth of their high school graduating class. They have chosen our campus. It is a campus of quality. We have about 11,000 students at UC-Riverside. There was a recent study by the Association of American Universities [AAU] that showed that our graduates rank number twentieth in the United States among all public and private research universities in receiving the doctorate. Out of the top sixty institutions in the AAU, we rank twentieth and we're not even a member of the AAU. But it gives you an idea of opportunities that our students have and our commitment to quality. We're not finished. Our students are coming close to mirroring the population of California. But we are by no means at that point. Hence, the term underrepresented. It's something that we would like to eliminate at UC-Riverside and that is what we are working towards. We're fortunate to be generously supported by the Department of Education, the State of California, and the University of California among others.
Let me describe our region a little bit to you. It has the somewhat pretentious name of inland empire. It is composed of two counties, Riverside and San Bernardino County. It has a population of three million. We are the only California campus in those two counties. And within ten to fifteen years, it will have a population of five million. It is the most rapidly growing area in the state of California. Our current student body, as I said, is about 11,000 students. Our average family income is the lowest in the University of California system. It's half of the family income average for the highest family income in the UC system. Our student population is budgeted to double by the year 2010 so we will be a campus of 21,000 students in a little over ten years. That increase is somewhat frightening but it also is an opportunity as we move into the new century to develop a curriculum, which reflects the richness of our community. It is a heavily Hispanic and black community. The Caucasian population is certainly not the majority in our two counties and ceases now to be a majority in the State of California and soon in the United States. We want our student body to look like the face of California and we believe it will be the future of California.
Our work with the schools started in the early nineties. In 1990, our region had a six percent eligibility rate for the University of California. That is half of the state average. In 1996, another study was taken and our community, our two counties, had an eligibility rate of 8.1 percent, still not 12.5 percent but that's a thirty-five percent increase in six years. This was caused by the partnership between the University of California, Riverside and the k through 12 schools and the parents in our region. This year the number of African-American students will increase by fifty-six percent since 1997. The number of Chicano, Latino students will be up by over seventy percent. All of these students are fully eligible for the University of California. They are among the highest achieving students in their communities. It is a fantastic group of students. And any university in the nation would be thrilled to attract and we are privileged to have them.
Our success in enrolling this diverse student body is a direct consequence of an array of outreach efforts to help all students, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, to become eligible for college admission. It is also a testament to the efforts of our region's schools, their students, and their parents. Our coordinated efforts are anchored by early academic outreach, which this coming fall will reach more than 10,000 students in a 150 schools. Our program counselors work closely with the students, their parents, and school counselors. They provide information on college preparation, a workshop on college entrance exams, tours of our campus, and seminars on the admissions' process and financial aid. Each summer we bring ninth, tenth, and eleventh graders to campus for residential programs that give these students a taste of college life and, hopefully, inspire them to excel in their high school studies. UCR students, faculty work with them providing role models for academic life. For high school seniors who graduated in 1998, more than fifty-seven percent of those who participated in our early outreach program were University of California eligible — the top one-eighth of the high school graduating class in the State of California.
A critical dimension of our outreach initiative is the involvement of parents in the early stages of their children's education. It is important to empower the parents, many of whom have not gone to college and for whom their child will be the first one in their family to receive a college education. Beyond good grades and test scores, we inform them that inspiring to enter the University of California means that their children must complete a prescribed high school curriculum — a curriculum that should begin in terms of preparation in the fourth grade of elementary school.
To address the specifics we created a booklet called, "Keys to Your Future," which is located on the desk outside. We have printed over 90,000 copies of these booklets and they are both in English and in Spanish. The booklet tells parents what they should do. And if you go through the booklet, and we bring these booklets to the schools, there is a page of instructions for the parents. And then the booklet goes through year by year from the fourth grade through the twelfth what their children should be achieving in their curricular work; and finally at the end has a table of what is required to become eligible at the University of California. It is delivery, which we make personally. We visit schools, school boards, and community groups. Our traveling team utilizes simultaneous translation through infrared earphones to those who prefer Spanish to English. I personally attend those presentations, many to communities with high proportions of disadvantaged students, and speak frankly about what is required to obtain preparation for a UC education. Many times the principal is sitting in the office and I will ask the students, depending on their grade, how their progress compares with our recommendations. And if their hands don't go up, I then inform their parents, who are sitting there that they need to go to the principal's office the next morning and ask why their child is being robbed of a college preparatory program. This booklet and our counselors give the parents the knowledge they need to make sure that their children aren't being tracked. It is an opportunity for the schools to measure their performance against a set of litmus tests. And, most of all, it's an opportunity for the schools and the parents and the university to work together to make sure the children have opportunities to come to the university.
One of the most important features, as has been discussed this morning, is the issue of financial aid. We are talking to families, many of whom are below the poverty line. And when I talk about the university and the importance of coming to the university, there's an awful lot of "Oh, yeah but I can't possibly afford it." And so a university education is not credible to the families. We have structured our financial aid, and this chart is also outside on the table, so that any student, independent of family income, can come to the University of California, Riverside, graduate in four years, and if everybody contributes, not incur debt. We expect every student to work fifteen hours a week during the school year and then during the summer. That provides roughly $5,000 towards their college education. That's the blue bar. And then a year at UC-Riverside is $12,500, covering everything books, room and board, tuition, travel, other expenses. And we create this chart so that for family whose income is between 0 and $15,000, we provide the remainder of the $12,500 in grant aid. Then we follow the federal guidelines for family income in terms of what parents need to contribute and the amount of our grant aid or scholarship aid, not loan, diminishes in proportion as the family income increases and their contribution increases.
This is also turning out to be valuable for families who have young children. For example, if someone has an income of $32,000 a year, federal guidelines say they should contribute $1,000 a year to their children's education. Their child is ten years old, that means they need to save $4,000 over eight years or $500 a year. That's a very different thing than telling a parent they have to save $50,000 for four years. And it enables families to plan. Study after study has shown that the poorer the family, the more in absolute terms they believe that college costs. And what this is is an attempt to show that everyone can come; and that the financial side, everyone has to contribute, is feasible and that their children can graduate on time and, if everyone contributes, without debt.
We've established an office of parent outreach. A six session course entitled, "Education: A Family Affair," is offered to parents who want to learn more about higher education and financial aid. There are sessions that explore ways in which parents can help inspire their children to greater academic achievement and identify potential troubles early so they can get their children back on track.
We also coordinate the three Riverside County schools' The Upward Bound Programs. One of the most visible and successful national enrichment activities. It is highly successful with those who are traditionally the least successful academically — at-risk students, particularly those from low-income families. Like many Upward Bound Programs, we offer a four-week summer residency in campus residence halls for high school freshmen, sophomores, and juniors. Of this spring's Upward Bound high school seniors, eighty percent have been accepted to a four-year institution. Our own students contribute significantly to this program. They're vital to our success. These ambassadors return to their high schools, and remember they look like their high schools to share their college experiences and inspire their student colleagues to pursue higher education. As role models, these are perhaps our most effective ambassadors. Their diversity encourages others.
Student volunteers direct service to at-risk youth through our University East Side Community Collaborative and our Americorp team. These two programs have reached more than 2,000 youth with after-school tutoring and enrichment activities. Through Americorp, alone, students from UCR and the surrounding campuses have completed more than 70,000 hours of community service and received $148,000 in scholarships to invest in their own education. This summer we, again, will have more than 200 low-income students on our campus for a program combining sports activities and an awareness of higher education and career opportunities. In order to carry on these functions with a full commitment from our campus, we have created an organizational structure on our campus which we call the Alpha Center — The Academy of Learning through Partnership for Higher Education. The Center is a hub of outreach that contains several spokes. We have a school/university partnership program in which six school districts have engaged. Each partnership is fashioned to meet the particular needs of a school district. One high school has created a thirty-day intersession program between semesters, focusing on the high need areas of mathematics and language arts. Teachers from two local school districts are teaching in our own teacher credential program, teacher preparation program, exposing our students to the real world challenges they face in the classroom. In other districts parents are involved with the schools and UC-Riverside in creating the activities that will best address the needs of their children. This is an integrated program, which feeds off the entire fabric of the campus. It is a program in which our faculty, our students, and staff are fully engaged. We have built in an evaluation component through our School of Education so that each of our efforts is monitored and evaluated with regard to effectiveness. We have created an organization, which we believe has been successful for outreach.
However, the wonderful increase in the underrepresented student enrollment at UC-Riverside is more than just a numbers game. When these students assume the mantle of leadership that we expect in the community, state, and nation, they will need to have participated in the finest education experience offered anywhere. If these students find the campus cold, unfriendly, their curriculur experiences foreign to their own interests, cultural backgrounds; if they are alienated, they do not feel a part of the learning process, we will have failed them. And this is a group of students for whom we cannot fail. We have structured support services for these students through specific programs identified with their ethnicity and gender. We have also created an atmosphere on campus that is welcoming and warm and we believe this is one of the major reasons these students have voted with their feet in order to come to UC-Riverside.
Fortunately in terms of curriculum, the arts, humanities, and social sciences are addressing a structural question. A confluence, a theoretical revolution within the academic disciplines, especially effecting those areas, has transformed the subject matter and methods of study of all forms of cultural expression. Assumptions upon which critical evaluations of cultural forms had been based previously have been called into question and in many cases discredited. Within the context of this theoretical reformulation, the growing awareness of cultural diversity of the United States, both in the present and throughout its history, has generated a remarkable expansion in the lists of texts and artifacts counted as worthy of study. Many scholars have recognized that most cultural productions by women and members of ethnic minority groups were suppressed and excluded from main stream culture previously because the established aesthetic criteria had been formulated in ways that privileged the works of white male artists and writers.
The challenges of developing a curriculum that expresses the richness of ethnic and gender studies are enormous. They involve nothing short of a construction of an entirely new set of principles for evaluating productions of art within a context of the fullest possible grasp of the aesthetic principles of the cultures, which contribute to these works. They involve, as well, the creation of new terminologies and explanations for how and why elements of creative production affect us as they do.
To do this, we need not only study the history of the arts in various parts of the world but also we need to examine our own contemporary cultures and perceive how our minds are currently being formed and reformed by the technology, knowledge, human interactions around the globe that are instance openings to new channels of communication, responses, and understandings of these processes. That is a tall order and this last fall we had a conference on difference and aesthetics, which began to probe this intellectual sphere. This coming year we'll be offering courses to this diverse student body, which will then turn into a set of seminars at the freshman and sophomore levels to engage this diverse group of students in the academic program to enrich the program with their own experiences and their own contributions that they can make.
The issues of diversity and excellence are intertwined. What we're trying to do at UC-Riverside is to show that one is a precondition of the other. To work with a school so that we have a diverse population. To work with our faculty and students to develop new concepts, new ideas, new sets of values that they can feel they have been a part in terms of their construction and which they can enjoy in their classroom experiences. This is, we believe, one of the most exciting periods in the development of the intellectual base of higher education that any of us has gone through. And we hope within the next ten years as we double our population, we will create the new structures that will bring these students into the aesthetic framework of disciplines to which they have contributed and which, we believe, will influence and benefit the entire academic community.
Thank you very much.
Lois has given me the opportunity to answer any questions, and I'll do my very best. Yes.
Participant: I have a question. I would just like a copy of your presentation today. I think it would be very valuable and I just commented to my colleague here, and I really think the model that you're developing not only changes the culture but you're creating a new tradition should be acknowledged. And I would like to see your program, your model replicated in other universities across the country as they grapple with the same change of demographics.
R. Orbach: Thank you.
Participant: So your presentation will be available.
R. Orbach: Yes, I will make it available to Lois. In the interest of time, it's a little shorter than what you will receive but there are outside copies of the text to which I was referring.
It's an uncomfortable process because we're challenging the value structure. And you've heard all the arguments about western civ and how can you move away from that and are you watering down the curriculum. We're trying to go beyond that and to use the diversity products of the wonderful programs in ethnic studies, black studies, Chicano studies, gender studies, the insights that these programs have given to bring them into the main stream. Someone referred to those programs as studying foreign language literature in translation. Unless you know the language, unless you are familiar with the background that it is based on, it's almost a foreign element is added on. We want to eliminate the adding characteristic and make it an integral part.
Yes.
Participant: How have you encouraged —
L. Rice: Identify yourself, please.
Participant: Oh, sorry, Sally Clausen, Southeastern University Louisiana. I'm interested in knowing how you — what incentives that you provided for faculty, particularly maybe traditionalists, who may have needed to spend more time cultivating this change in culture with their peers. Were there special incentives or did it just flow naturally from your leadership?
R. Orbach: Well, that's very kind to attribute it to my leadership. I'm afraid it's really due to the academic leadership of the campus. Emery Elliott, who's a distinguished professor of English and a figure in American studies around the world, has been the one who put the conference together. If it were just a service function, then I think you would be quite right. You would have to then provide some kind of incentives for people to move away from what they would really like to do and perform a service. But this is integral to the nature of the humanities and arts right now. There has been a period of twenty years of deconstruction. I'm using very general terms. And what this group of scholars is attempting to do, not just from UC- Riverside but from all over the country and indeed in the world, is to reconstruct the discipline. But to put it back together, not based on the same set of principles that went into fifty years ago, but rather in the context of the modern world and all that we've learned over the past decades as these programs have matured and developed.
So this is faculty driven. It is an effort that arises out of faculty commitment to discovery and taking the new theoretical models and actually addressing the fundamental issue. Is what I am doing important? Does this find itself at the center of my value structure and others? So it's almost a missionary zeal that the faculty is approaching this with.
The wonderful thing about our campus is that they're doing it in conjunction with the students. And we have the diversity that will fuel, I believe, this enterprise directly. But I'm just fortunate to have faculty around me who are committed to their discipline, but to opening it up.
Participant: Kenneth Cooper, Washington Post.
I'm wondering if you agree with conclusion of The New York Times Magazine writer in that your integrated outreach program is a replicable substitute for affirmative action.
R. Orbach: One of the things I have studiously tried to avoid is getting caught in the cross fire between those who are for and those who are against affirmative action. And, in fact, Jim Traub in that article does quote me correctly when I say that I am, in fact, in favor of affirmative action and, frankly, the loss of affirmative action in California has made my life more difficult. Issues of financial aid, for example, are ones that I believe I ought to be able to allocate on the basis of ethnicity and gender, but I can't.
I have tried to stay out of that debate because in some sense it's irrelevant. The issue for me is the fourth grade when students are starting using their reading to learn, and dealing with all students in all environments means I don't have to worry about it. What I'm committed to is to bring those students, that richness, that excellence that is out there into our university, into higher education. And so to be honest, I don't pay much attention, except I feel a little uncomfortable when I'm caught in the cross-fire. But it's not an issue.
The issue is really can we reach out to the children — low-income, disadvantaged — and give them the opportunity to develop themselves into the future leaders. If we don't, if these students don't become the leaders of our community, state, and nation, I don't think democracy can flourish. I think it is essential that we have participation of our entire community in a leadership position or we won't make it. So to me affirmative action is important. And it is a tool, which I wish I had to use. When it comes to outreach, the most important thing is the children and reaching them early and helping them to realize their own potential.
Participant: If I might follow up. In the case of your peers as university presidents whose institutions are in areas, counties that are less demographically diverse than yours, do you think they could do what you have done and have the same effect on diversity, campus diversity?
R. Orbach: The answer is they are doing it and yes they can be very effective. California is a very diverse state, and I have to also say that we don't just focus on our two counties. We have taken our group to Los Angeles, to Orange County, to San Diego. We're going to the northern part of the state, which is a rural area. We've gone to the central part of the state, the valley. We are going all over to try to bring the very best students to our campus. And every one of my dear colleagues in the university is doing exactly the same thing. They are recruiting in our area to bring students to their campuses. That competition is proving a very valuable resource for students all over the state.
L. Rice: Lois Rice, Brookings.
I wonder if you could elaborate just a little bit more on your efforts to change the curriculum, such as vouchers, charter schools —
R. Orbach: Thank you. We, indeed, are focusing precisely on substance and on the quality of the programs. We work very closely with the schools. When we visit the schools we follow up with our own counselors going out and following the courses. We also during the days that they have available will bring the school teachers to our campus to discuss in their own areas of interests their curriculum and, with our faculty, our curriculum. And that brings a binding between the two that recognizes the content issues that they face.
I referred very briefly to my litmus test that I provide. And that is that I expect every school in the eighth grade to offer algebra one to all students. And when I ask that question of all the eighth graders, "how many of you are not taking algebra one," it is their parents that I go to and tell them to talk to the principal. Because if you don't take algebra one in the eighth grade, you can't take calculus in the twelfth grade. And that means your options are severely limited when you start thinking about college. It's even preferable to have algebra one in the seventh grade, but it doesn't mean that all children prosper taking algebra one in the eighth grade. And this is where the schools have been so inventive, where they've literally restructured the year. Indio High School, for example, insists that every ninth grader take algebra one because in that school district they haven't offered algebra one in the eighth grade in the middle school. And about half of the students fail. And then they structure the school year where they have about one month where they do nothing but algebra one for that one half. And for others there are enrichment programs. And then those students go back and complete the algebra sequence and about half of them make it.
So by the end of the first year, three quarters of this very diverse student body has succeeded in algebra one.
In Cochela High School, which is close by and even poorer than Indio High School — both of these high schools are about ninety to ninety-five percent Hispanic--many of the children are involved in farm work in the fields. And they choose their academic year to fit in with the harvest so that the children can come. Principals, I find, are the most important element besides the teachers in this quality process. And so these schools, which are in very disadvantaged areas and under very difficult conditions, are now competing with one another. We received a phone call from Cochela High School that they sent more students to the University of California this year than Indio High School did. I cannot explain how wonderful that is. What a change from six years ago when they were hardly sending anybody to the University of California. Now, they are in competition. Now, there is an expectation that the children of those two areas can go to the university. It's that kind of credibility that we want to instill in the schools for the parents and for the children.
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE AND END OF LUNCHEON.]
Also Available:
Welcome and Introduction
Remarks by Marshall Smith
Remarks by The Honorable Chaka Fattah (D-PA)
Panel on GEARUP
Panel on LAAP and Distance Learning
Luncheon
Panel on Title II Teacher Quality
Wrap Up Session