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Data for Democracy: A UCLA Centennial Initiative
A project for K–12 students to analyze and gather data on critical issues such as access to parks, jobs, and housing in Los Angeles
BY JOHN MCDONALD
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UCLA Data for Democracy in Los Angeles was launched last fall as one of four UCLA Centennial Initiatives designed to expand public access to UCLA’s scholarly resources and build upon the University’s longstanding commitment of service to the community.
“The project aims to develop the interest and capacity of young people to deliberate with data about important social issues affecting their communities,” said John Rogers, a professor of education at UCLA and co-leader of the project. “We aim to tap into the interests and concerns of a broad body of Los Angeles students.”
Developed by researchers at UCLA Center X and the UCLA Institute for Democracy, Education and Access (UCLA IDEA) with research colleagues across campus, the plan for the Data for Democracy initiative was to gather research from schools and departments across the university and share it with K–12 students and teachers in schools across Los Angeles. Examining issues like access to parks, immigration, and housing inequality, the idea is to engage students, teachers and schools in research exploring issues impacting equality, opportunity and social change.
26 UCLA Ed&IS SPRING 2020
“The project provides authentic data around issues that are relevant to students’ lives and invites students to explore important mathematical topics using real-world data,” said UCLA Education Professor Megan Franke, who is also a co-leader of the project. “We hope it will increase opportunities for mathematical thinking and quantitative reasoning.”
But in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Data for Democracy has been playing a bigger role—providing a source of content for teachers and students who find themselves challenged by the closure of schools.
“Amid the crisis of the coronavirus pandemic, Data for Democracy offers a critical source of content for teachers and students as their classrooms transition to distance learning,” said Rogers. “Given the impact of the pandemic on schools, the project could not be more timely.”
Available free online, the Data for Democracy briefs offer K–12 students in the Los Angeles area the opportunity to engage in research, accessing charts, graphs, tables, maps, and interviews about issues that impact the lives of students and their families. Teachers and students can also share their ideas and work using an online tool called Padlet.
At the UCLA Lab School, teacher Julie Kern Schwerdtfeger is using the briefs with her sixth-grade class.
“The briefs are beautifully constructed and drawn. That made it easy to put them on a screen in front of children. And there are also multiple places to interact with the content,” Kern said. “After reading the first brief, our students posted questions about the distribution of LA’s parks on Padlet. Students need practice at using data and need a safe place to just try out some conversations. Looking at graphics related to Los Angeles Parks was an elegant and relevant place to start.”
“After reading the second brief, which focused on immigration, many of my students looked up their own zip codes to find the percentage of households with an immigrant parent in their neighborhoods.”
In late April, Kern was using the newest brief, Housing Inequality in Los Angeles, in a Zoom session math lesson with her class. The students, their images showing on the now all too familiar Zoom screen, were using the charts from the brief to examine data on the homeless.
“What do you notice?” Kern asked as she engaged them in a conversation about the data. The students talked about the data, and where it came from. Looking at tables that showed the population of Los Angeles County, and the total number and percentage of homeless over time, they shared ideas on what might affect the numbers, suggesting ideas such as health issues, housing policies or service and maybe fires or natural disasters.
Sample image from research brief.
Linking into video on her phone, Kern used one of the discussion questions about the Homeless data comparing Norway and Los Angeles County to work through math problems that helped the students to visualize what the numbers and percentages of homeless might really look like.
When asked, the students excitedly said they really liked working with the charts and graphs, and that the briefs were really interesting to read. One student said, “My mom keeps grabbing it, looking at it whenever I open it up.” They all said that even when schools get back to normal, they want to keep using the briefs.
“The Data for Democracy briefs proved a perfect resource for accessible data that was relevant to our Los Angeles children’s lives,” Kern said. “And to be honest, studying social justice issues related to LA Parks, learning about immigration patterns to California, and analyzing information around housing inequality allowed us to step outside the COVID-19 situation.”
“We want our young people to know that they can use data to think about and act on the world they live in. This project brings civics and mathematics together and allows students to see themselves as actors in both realms,” she concluded.
LA in 1979: courtesy of John Humble
Source: U.S. Census Bureau
THREE RESEARCH BRIEFS
1 Parks
Data for Democracy in Los Angeles partnered with the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies in the Luskin School to explore parks in the Los Angeles region.
Parks offer places to relax, play and exercise. They help people be healthy. But an examination of parks in Los Angeles also raises important questions of fairness, equity and opportunity. Who has access to parks? Do some people have more access than others? Where are parks and why are they where they are? How much park space does Los Angeles have? Should there be more? Where should they be, what should they be like, and what kind of services should they offer?
“Parks are spaces of our everyday life. They are important for everyone, and quite critical for people with no other access to open space,” said Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, professor of urban planning at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. “Parks fulfill some basic human needs.”
There are more than 600 parks in Los Angeles, but about four in ten people lack access to a park in walking distance from where they live. There is an interactive map showing where parks
are, and charts and maps detailing what areas have more park space and what neighborhoods have less. The brief examines park access by median income and explores the kinds of services found in parks in Los Angeles, including charts showing the percentages of specific types of facilities and activities such as baseball fields, playgrounds or pools.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS: Compare
1. How close is your school to the nearest park? How close is your home?2. How close should the nearest park be to your home? How long a walk?
3. How much more park space does Santa Monica have per person than East LA (unincorporated)?
2 Immigration
WELCOMING NEWCOMERS TO LA
Who are the immigrants in our communities and where do they come from? What assets do they bring, what are the challenges they face and how do we as a community welcome and support them?
These and other issues are the topic of the UCLA Data for Democracy brief “Immigration in LA.” The brief examines patterns of migration to California and Los Angeles, highlighting the percentage of foreign-born residents and where they come from, and offers historical perspective on migration to the state. Data representations include an interactive map detailing how many immigrant families are in Los Angeles and where they live. There are also suggestions for student exploration such as comparing migration in different years or charting the proportion of immigrants in the neighborhoods where they live. The brief also includes resources to help students to examine the patterns of migration to California and Los Angeles and the legal issues related to immigration. Students are also invited to narrate their own stories of migration and share insights about the people, places, and practices that can make Los Angeles schools and neighborhoods welcoming for all.
This map displays the percentage of children living in different neighborhoods across LosAngeles County who have at least one parent who is an immigrant. In the areas of the map with the lightest shading, fewer than 25% of children have at least one immigrant parent. In the areas that are dark orange, more than 75% of children have at least one immigrant parent. This map reflects the fact that many children in our region live in immigrant families. Indeed, more than half (57.7%) of all children in Los Angeles County live with an immigrant parent.
Photo: Defend DACA March in LA 9/5/17
Photo by Molly Adams
“Immigration in LA” offers historical data that allows teachers to have conversations about the trends in the data over time,” said project co-director Megan Franke. “Those trends can be discussed in relation to periods in history and the geography, policies and practices that influenced them.”
The brief also includes interviews about immigration with Wasserman Dean Marcelo Suárez-Orozco and UCLA Professor of Education Carola Suárez- Orozco, who, together with Professor Robert Teranishi, serve as codirectors of the Institute for Immigration,
How many immigrant families are in Los Angeles?
Globalization and Education at UCLA. “Migration is our history. It’s a story of how Los Angeles came to be in its present form,” said Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, Wasserman Dean of the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. “We need to normalize immigration, and we need to acknowledge the enormous resources that immigrants bring to our society.”
There is an important conversation with Nina Rabin, the director of the
Studying immigration in L.A.amilies from all around the world move to Los Angeles. This is nothing new. “Migration is as old as Homo Sapiens, it is an ancient and shared condition of our humanity,” says UCLA Dean Marcelo Suárez- Orozco. Los Angeles attracts immigrants for many reasons—it is the home of relatives, the site of job opportunities, and a beautiful place with lovely weather. But many also come to Los Angeles due to circumstances beyond their control—economic collapse, war, climate change.
Families that arrive in Los Angeles do their best to make this new city home. Sometimes they experience a warm welcome, and other times the conditions are more challenging. The national political environment in the last few years has created new strains for immigrant families.
Yet immigration has made Los Angeles the global city it is today, and immigration—and our response to it—will shape our collective future.
There are several important questions to ask about immigration:
• How are young people born in other parts of the world welcomed in LA?
• Has this changed over time? Does it differ across communities?
• What actions can be taken to ensure that immigrant youth and families experience this city as their home?
Immigrant Family Legal Clinic at UCLA Law School, exploring legal issues related to immigration and providing information on topics such as DACA, Sanctuary Cities and Asylum. Exploring the fear and uncertainty over immigration felt by many students, the brief highlights national research by UCLA Professor of Education John Rogers, examining the impact of national political rhetoric and immigration policy on students and schools.
3 Housing Inequality
The Housing Inequality in Los Angeles brief examines the issues that affect housing insecurity and housing justice in the Los Angeles region.
Produced in collaboration with the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, in partnership with the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, the brief explores data about who owns and who rents homes in Los Angeles, the cost of housing, eviction, homelessness, and movements to address housing justice.
Home prices are out of reach for many Los Angeles residents and the median monthly cost of rent is more than one third higher than the rest of the United States ($1,390 compared to $1,023). The majority of renters in Los Angeles County are considered rent burdened—meaning they spend more than 30% of their income on rent, leaving less money to spend on other basic needs like food, transportation, and healthcare. Nearly three in ten renter households in Los Angeles County spend more than half of their income on rent and are severely rent-burdened.
Fifty-five percent of residents of Los Angeles County are renters, a much higher rate than the 30 percent of renters in communities across the nation. The share of renters has increased over time, and Black and Latino households are more likely to be renters than other racial-ethnic groups.
Source: LAHSA, “Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count, 2019 Results”
Professor Ananya Roy, UCLA Professor of Urban Planning, Social Welfare, and Geography, explains how the legacies of discrimination in the housing market, redlining, subprime lending, and subsequent foreclosures, have made it hard for these communities to achieve and retain home ownership. Less than half of African American and Latino families in Los Angeles County live in homes that they own. More than 60 percent of these families are renters.
Evictions are also on the rise and the brief examines the impact of the Ellis Act, a California State Law intended to limit evictions in rental properties. Research in the brief by the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project shows that in many cases, after tenants were evicted, the landlords redeveloped their buildings or converted them into condominiums, making huge profits.
Homelessness, or as the brief focuses on, “Houselessness,” is an urgent and growing challenge. The research looks at the number of homeless residents in Los Angeles, the changes that have occurred over time, and an analysis of how homelessness differs by race and ethnicity. Nearly 59,000 people were homeless in LA County in 2019. The document also examines responses to homelessness, including strategies such as providing shelter, permanent housing and policing.
The Data for Democracy brief on housing inequality also offers a broader set of ideas about how to promote greater housing security, including tenant protections and public and subsidized housing. It includes an interview by co-director John Rogers with Professor Roy, exploring the ideas and sharing examples from the housing justice movement, and inviting students to envision a different housing future in Los Angeles.
“Immigration in LA” was created in partnership with The Institute for Immigration, Globalization and Education at UCLA; The David J. Epstein Program in Public Interest Law and Policy at UCLA; UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access; UCLA’s Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles; and the UCLA Alan Leve Center for Jewish Studies.
