UCLA Ed&IS Magazine, Spring 2023

UCLA Ed&IS

Tyrone C. Howard

AERA

President

on the Power of Research and the Attacks on Public Education

MEDIA PRESERVATION LAB PARTNERS WITH COMMUNITY ARCHIVES ACROSS LOS

ANGELES

A state-of-the-art lab for MLIS students provides professional training in preserving obsolete media formats, while saving and sharing the untold histories of marginalized communities in L.A.

PAGE 16

We’re focused on preserving community-held media collections that document the cultural and historical diversity of the SoCal region.

UCLA ED&IS STUDENT AND ALUMNI RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS FROM AERA 2023

Student researchers from across UCLA Education presented their research on a variety of topics, showcasing the School’s focus on inclusion and social justice in education.

Kayla Teng, a UCLA undergraduate at the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST) at UCLA, made the case for the education community to study computational thinking and problemsolving with her poster presentation on, “Development and Validation of GameBased Indicators of Computational Thinking in a Block-Based Programming Game.” Photo by John McDonald

Ed& IS

MAGAZINE OF THE UCLA SCHOOL OF EDUCATION AND INFORMATION STUDIES

Embodying the principles of individual responsibility and social justice, an ethic of caring, and commitment to the communities we serve.

2 Message from the Dean

4 Tyrone C. Howard: The Power of Research and the Attacks on Public Education 2023–2024 AERA President draws from personal experience and professional expertise to lead the international and interdisciplinary research organization, advancing knowledge while addressing the links between education and social justice.

10 Anti-Blackness at School: Creating Affirming Educational Spaces for African American Students

Urban Schooling alumnae Joi Spencer and Kerri Ullucci use their unflinching perspectives as former classroom teachers—and Spencer’s lived experience as a Black student— to write a book that prepares educators to address racism in schools.

16 Media Preservation Lab Partners with Community Archives Across Los Angeles

The MLIS program in the UCLA Department of Information Studies is enhanced by a stateof-the-art lab, where students gain professional skills while recovering and preserving some of L.A.’s untold histories.

22

The Potential of California’s Community College Baccalaureate for Closing Racial Equity Gaps

Researchers from the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles at UCLA examine CCB pilot programs and the world of academic and career possibilities that they open for racially marginalized students.

26 Our Children Can’t Wait: The Urgency of Reinventing Education Policy in America

Book edited by Joseph P. Bishop, executive director of the UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools, makes the case that a national education agenda must be centered on community conditions and address structural racism to improve learning opportunities, academic outcomes and the health and wellbeing of all students.

32 UCLA Ed&IS Student and Alumni Research: Highlights from AERA 2023

At the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), students and alumni of the UCLA Department of Education highlighted research that showcases the School’s commitment to new ideas, knowledge and practices that are rooted in equity, diversity, inclusion and justice.

MESSAGE FROM UCLA WASSERMAN DEAN TINA CHRISTIE

Ed&IS

MAGAZINE OF THE UCLA SCHOOL OF EDUCATION AND INFORMATION STUDIES

SPRING 2023

Christina Christie, Ph.D. UCLA Wasserman Dean & Professor of Education, UCLA School of Education and Information Studies

Laura Lindberg Executive Director External Relations, UCLA School of Education and Information Studies

EDITOR

Leigh Leveen Senior Director of Marketing and Communications UCLA School of Education and Information Studies lleveen@support.ucla.edu

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Joanie Harmon Director of Communications UCLA School of Education and Information Studies harmon@gseis.ucla.edu

John McDonald Director, Sudikoff Family Institute jmcdonald@gseis.ucla.edu

DESIGN

Robin Weisz Design

© 2023, by The Regents of the University of California seis.ucla.edu

 The research outlined in this issue of the magazine showcases how we are hard at work developing the next generation of scholars and professionals who are our future.

In any given year, the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) hosts as many as 15,000 attendees. It is the world’s largest gathering of educational researchers and the forum for more than 2,500 sessions describing the latest scholarship on important topics from pre-K curriculum to college access. This year’s meeting was held in April in Chicago. It was an enormous gathering with global importance—and in many ways it felt like coming home.

This feeling comes from the Ed&IS footprint within AERA, which is vast and deep. Professors Teresa McCarty and Danny Solórzano are members of the AERA Council. Professor Sylvia Hurtado serves as co-editor of the organization’s journal Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. At this year’s annual meeting, two Ed&IS alumnae—Dolores Delgado Bernal and Jenny J. Lee—joined numerous other members of the UCLA community as AERA Fellows, an acknowledgment of their exceptional contributions to educational research.

Perhaps the most exciting part of the Chicago conference was seeing Professor Tyrone Howard, whom we highlight in this issue, assume the AERA presidency. (Notably, he follows in the footsteps of alumna Na’ilah Suad Nasir, who served as president from 2021 to 2022; in 2024, he will be succeeded by Janelle Scott, who also graduated from Ed&IS.) Our cover story focuses on Professor Howard’s new role as AERA president and how his scholarship will influence his agenda and leadership.

Before joining UCLA as an assistant professor in 2001, Professor Howard began his academic career at the University of Washington, where he studied with Professor James Banks. Now, as the Pritzker Family Endowed Chair in Education to Strengthen Families at UCLA, he explores issues of race, culture, equity, and opportunity, with a particular focus on the experiences of Black students.

Professor Howard leads some of the most consequential Ed&IS initiatives. He is the director of the UCLA Pritzker Center for Strengthening Children and Families, the faculty director of the UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools, and the founder and executive director of the Black Male Institute. He is a steadfast mentor to our students, as reflected in his receipt of the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award. And he is consistently recognized as a valued member of the broader academic community—he is a member of the National Academy of Education, and several years ago Education Week listed him as one of the most influential scholars of educational policy, practice, and reform.

These are some of Professor Howard’s most public accomplishments; I encourage you to read the Q&A with him in this issue to learn more about his ideas and his work. I also hope you will read the many other articles in the pages that follow. Throughout this issue you will learn about the important ways that members of our Ed&IS family are contributing to our understanding of issues that are central to community, equity, and justice, as well as how many of them took part in this year’s AERA annual conference.

We include an excerpt of Our Children Can’t Wait: The Urgency of Reinventing Education Policy in America, a new book edited by Joe Bishop, executive director of the Center for the Transformation of Schools. The chapters collectively argue for looking beyond standards-based ideas about education to include initiatives designed for equity that are led by youth and their communities.

We take a look at the IS Media Preservation Lab, led by Professor Shawn VanCour. This state-of-the-art facility is focused on preserving media collections related to Southern California, including those held in community collections.

We include a summary of a report co-authored by Professor Cecilia Rios Aguilar for the Civil Rights Project. The Potential of California’s Community College Baccalaureate for Closing Racial Equity Gaps focuses on the important role of these postsecondary programs in increasing educational and racial equity in the state.

We also share an excerpt from Anti-Blackness at School: Creating Affirming Educational Spaces for African American Students, written by Joi A. Spencer and Kerri Ullucci, both Department of Education alumnae. The authors draw on their perspectives as a Black woman from Los Angeles and a White woman from Rhode Island, respectively, to offer concrete strategies for creating Black-affirming spaces in schools.

Finally, we return to our AERA focus. Research presentations are truly the heart and soul of the annual gatherings; in line with this, we provide a glimpse of the work that Ed&IS students shared in Chicago through symposiums, paper presentations, roundtable discussions, and poster sessions.

From our undergraduate and graduate students to our most senior professors, members of the Ed&IS community are contributing to conversations that continue to expand our understanding of education, information, and equity. I hope this issue of the Ed&IS magazine gives you a taste of this essential work and that, like me, you read these articles and feel inspired and optimistic for our future.

In unity—Tina

Howard takes the reins of AERA during a time when public education, from K–12 to higher ed, is under attack from those that seek to deny the full exploration of history, restrict discussion about race and racism, and limit the rights of LGBTQ students and educators, among other efforts.

Tyrone C. Howard

AERA President on the Power of Research and the Attacks on Public Education

BY JOHN MCDONALD

UCLA Professor of Education Tyrone C. Howard currently serves as president of the American Education Research Association (AERA) for 2023–2024. Howard, who is the Pritzker Family Endowed Chair of Education in the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies, the co-faculty director of the UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools, and the founder and executive director of the Black Male Institute, will help to lead the international, interdisciplinary research association of 25,000-plus members, devoted to the scientific study of education and learning and working to advance knowledge about education.

Howard takes the reins of AERA during a time when public education, from K–12 to higher ed, is under attack from those that seek to deny the full exploration of history, restrict discussion about race and racism, and limit the rights of LGBTQ students and educators, among other efforts. These attacks have critical implications for research and learning, threatening the longstanding role schools and education have played in the furtherance of civic life and democracy.

&A

UCLA Ed&IS Magazine sat down with Professor Howard to learn about his role as AERA president and his priorities for the coming year.

UCLA Ed&IS: As you start your tenure as AERA president, what are some of the issues that will be a priority for you?

TYRONE HOWARD: I’m going to have to temper myself, because I’ve only got a year as president of AERA, but a couple of buckets of priorities come to mind. One is a focus around dismantling racial injustice. In this moment right now, there is so much happening in this country in terms of racial inequities where education is at the center. I want us to have a larger nationwide and maybe even global discussion, asking questions tied to racial injustice in education, from preschool all the way to higher education. As researchers, we should be thinking about racial justice when it comes to our methods or theories, we should be thinking about it when it comes to the kinds of communities that we work in, the questions we ask, and the policies we advocate for, because our nation is becoming increasingly diverse with each passing day, yet the persistence of racism remains strong.

A second bucket I want to talk about is the political moment we are living in. This political moment is making a lot of people uncomfortable. And that discomfort manifests itself in lots of ways. For example, the banning of books, the anti-CRT misinformation that’s been happening, the anti-LGBTQ+ legislation happening across the country … in some ways all those acts are forms of resistance to change, with education at its center point.

I see this manifesting as attacks on public education. It’s not labeled or stated that way, but when people start to say, “we don’t want certain parts of American history taught, we don’t want certain issues to be discussed,” it’s really about changing the purpose and function of public education. We need to have a conversation about public education and lift up how and what we do to ensure that we defend and we fight to protect public education, and how teachers teach and what students are learning. Public education is supposed to be a core staple in a democratic society. And once you begin to let attacks on public education take place, you’re almost inviting public attacks on your democracy to follow.

One other thing is that there are minority serving institutions that I want to do a better job of engaging in the work of AERA. For years, I’ve talked to folks from historically Black colleges and universities who ask, “Why aren’t we more present in this organization?” or folks from Hispanic Serving Institutions saying, “How can we get on the program?” or those from Native American serving institutions who say, “You know, you don’t think about us.” That needs to change. We’re trying to put our heads together around how we can have greater engagement from those faculty and students who are at minority serving institutions, to give them a place where they see AERA as an organizational and intellectual home.



One is a focus around dismantling racial injustice. In this moment right now, there is so much happening in this country in terms of racial inequities where education is at the center. I want us to have a larger nationwide and maybe even global discussion, asking questions tied to racial injustice in education, from preschool all the way to higher education.

Ed&IS: One of the things you’ve said is that if research isn’t going to have an impact, why do it? What do you mean by that, and what are the implications for AERA?

HOWARD: In this past year’s AERA presidential address, Rich Milner, who is a very important voice in education, spoke about the importance of consequential research. What I take from that is that we should be asking ourselves, are we having an impact in a real way?

The kind of research I’m thinking about for example, is the work of John Hattie, a professor at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, who among other things, studies small class sizes. Hattie’s work is impactful because he says, let’s not just look at this on the surface level by saying small class size makes a difference with student learning. Let’s also ask what are the features that need to be in place. Hattie found that it’s not just small class size, but that teachers have modified their teaching approaches to be clear about the objectives and goals that they’re going to teach, they have ongoing support, and have specialized interventions in place. Hattie’s laid out four core aspects that need to come along with smaller class sizes.

That’s impactful research, because teachers can take that and apply that, and they can begin to see how educational outcomes can improve for students. We need to make an impact on helping to reduce the number of students living in poverty, focus on supporting young people in foster care, and looking at why so many young people are unhoused. And, consider that in each of these categories, they are disproportionately made up of students of color. Race, once again, is key to these realities. Impact work cannot avoid the effects of structural racism.

Ed&IS: What is its importance and how do you build on its capacity to address the critical issues public education faces right now?

HOWARD: AERA is important for a number of reasons. First, public education is critically important. And we need organizations and bodies that are going to continue to fight for it and uphold all the promises that public education is supposed to deliver.

Secondly, AERA serves as an intellectual home for 25,000 people who study education, research, policy, and practice. That intellectual home is important for a variety of reasons. Let me give you a couple. I have the good fortune of working at a place like UCLA where I have colleagues who are supportive. I’ve had colleagues who have served as mentors for me, and I’ve always felt in my 22, 23 years here that there are people who value, support, and respect my work. But the more I talk to folks at other places, that’s not always the case. There are folks who say, “My workplace is hostile, I don’t have supportive colleagues, I’ve struggled to get tenure because people don’t really respect my work.” And AERA in some ways, becomes that place where folks can come together and

Public education is supposed to be a core staple in a democratic society. And once you begin to let attacks on public education take place, you’re almost inviting public attacks on your democracy to follow.



We need to make an impact on helping to reduce the number of students living in poverty, focus on supporting young people in foster care, and looking at why so many young people are unhoused. And, consider that in each of these categories, they are disproportionately made up of students of color.

feel supported, and understand that there are people who want them to be successful.

And then third, AERA is an important place to learn about the work that’s happening across the world. When it comes to education, sometimes we’re in our own little bubbles in our respective cities or institutions. AERA is a learning community. A learning community where you can learn and understand a lot of the things that are going on in other parts of the world. And there are some things that are happening that are impactful. Things that we should be looking at and asking, can we replicate this? How do we lift this up and amplify this work so that people know about it? Because it’s making an impact.

Ed&IS: It seems there are critical education issues playing out in our politics and policy discussions now. Does AERA need to have a stronger voice on those issues?

HOWARD: That’s a great question. I don’t want our work as researchers to just be theoretical and abstract and disconnected from day-to-day practice. We need to have an impact.

I think we can be a bigger, better voice. But it’s a challenge. I’m going to try to use this pulpit, for whatever it’s worth, to bring issues that I care about to the forefront and try to create an inclusive tent and show that these are things we should all be concerned about. For example, when I think about the attacks on public education, on what’s happening with attacks on schools, books, and curriculum, I think that’s something we should all be concerned about and doing something about. I don’t think that AERA can be soft or off to the side on this. I want it to be talked about on Capitol Hill and in state houses and school districts, and I want them to say, “Well, the president or the executive director for the American Education Research Association has said this, they’ve taken this stance.” I think neutrality has no place if we’re going to be viable in this work.

It’s not even so much the specific things we might speak to, but that we have this giant group of researchers doing important work, and that work needs to inform the debate. And in some instances, we should be leading the debate, because we’ve got some incredibly smart people who have done critical research on these topics.

AERA is a learning community. A learning community where you can learn and understand a lot of the things that are going on in other parts of the world. And there are some things that are happening that are impactful. Things that we should be looking at and asking, can we replicate this? How do we lift this up and amplify this work so that people know about it? Because it’s making an impact.

Doctoral student researchers Gene McAdoo (at left) and Keara Williams are among Professor Tyrone Howard’s students who presented their research at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), earlier this year in Chicago.

Photo by Ecaterina Slamnoiu

Ed&IS: As you think about the year ahead, is there a research issue or project that you want to shine a light on as AERA president?

HOWARD: There are so many, but here are a couple. This past year in Chicago, we had these youth student groups who came to present student research. They were phenomenal. I want to expand on that, I want to hear from student voices, hear more youth perspectives. I feel like sometimes we talk about young people, but we don’t listen to young people. I’d like to see us create really high-profile sessions where young people who are experiencing schools firsthand, talk to us about what they think we should be asking about and the work we should be doing. I also want to continue to hear from K–12 teachers, and to have more teachers at the AERA annual meeting.

Those two things are tied to this larger focus on having a conversation about race. That’s the main thing I want to discuss, how we talk about race in this country when it comes to educational opportunities, because it has always been there, and it is not going away. And as we are becoming more diverse, it requires our real, honest, and thoughtful time and attention.

Ed&IS: You received the AERA Social Justice Award this year and, in your acceptance speech, you talked about the pursuit of justice. What’s the role of AERA and its members in that pursuit?

HOWARD: We need to be bold about it, to be unapologetic about it, to talk about it, and when there are issues of justice that come about in the educational landscape, we need to weigh in on them.

We have to ask ourselves how we can position AERA and its members to be much more visible and viable in ways that makes people say, “Wow, when they say something, we’ve got to listen.” We may not lean in with dollars, but we can and should lean in with our research and our voice to say, “This is what we know, and this what we think.” And if we’re being honest, we need to think about and change the way we share our work. Academics get rewarded for publishing our work in journals. That’s important, but the public and policymakers do not read education research journals. We need to do a better job of sharing our research and ideas with the news media and through social media.

Ed&IS: This is clearly a fraught time for education. Are you the right guy at the right time to lead AERA?

HOWARD: I think so and let me tell you why. When you get a little older, you get to a point in life where some of our filters fall by the wayside and our willingness to be risk takers becomes a little greater. I think about the kind of schools and the kind of world I want my kids and my grandkids to live in one day, and if I can make any small contribution to making this world a little bit better, then I think that makes it all worthwhile.

I’m a product of public schools in working class communities. I’m living proof of what can happen when it is done right. But unfortunately, I’m the exception, not the norm, and I want my story to be the norm. So, I’m willing to weigh in, and I’m going to say some things that folks don’t want to hear and that sometimes make folks uncomfortable. That’s why I think I’m the right person, because we’re in a very perilous time in lots of ways when it comes to education. And you’ve got to have folks who are a little bit more courageous to say some things and maybe bring issues of justice that I care about to the fore.

I’d like to see us create really highprofile sessions where young people who are experiencing schools firsthand, talk to us about what they think we should be asking about and the work we should be doing. I also want to continue to hear from K–12 teachers, and to have more teachers at the AERA annual meeting.

Anti-Blackness

at School:

Creating Affirming Educational Spaces for African American Students

BY JOANIE HARMON

The title of “Anti-Blackness at School: Creating Affirming Educational Spaces for African American Students,” leaves nothing to the imagination, and indeed, co-authors Joi Spencer (’06, Ph.D.) and Kerri Ullucci (’05, Ph.D.) intended it that way. The interracial perspectives of the book—by Spencer, who is Black and from Los Angeles, and Ullucci, who is White and hails from Rhode Island—are girded by the co-authors’ experiences as classroom teachers, and by Spencer’s own personal history as a Black student in L.A. schools. The co-authors were moved to write the book after nearly 20 years of on-going conversations, as well as their experience in the UCLA division of Urban Schooling and its impact on their research and practice.

UCLA Ed&IS Urban Schooling alumnae Joi Spencer and Kerri Ullucci open difficult conversations with their classroom teacher expertise and Spencer’s lived experiences as a Black student.

Ed&IS: How has your experience in the classroom informed the writing of “Anti-Blackness at School”?

JOI SPENCER: It is both: my experience being a student in the classroom [and] my experience being a teacher in the K–12 classroom. There are a lot of personal examples in the book where I’m able to reflect on my own experience. A lot of the ideas I talk about in the book are experiences that I had in schools that seemed like they were egalitarian, seemed like they were equitable. But when you scratch the surface, you could see clearly who was getting honors classes, who was not; who was getting tested for gifted and who was not; how they spoke to students.

Most of the kids I grew up with didn’t speak a lot of standard English. Their parents were from the South. My mother is from the Midwest, so I didn’t have a Southern accent. I think a lot of teachers saw me as maybe a little bit more intelligent than the kids who may have been African American and Southern, who were seen as maybe not as intelligent. So, there were these little subtle things that if you paid attention … they kind of bubbled up to the top.

AKERRI ULLUCCI: Both Joi and I were classroom teachers before we became professors. I used to teach fourth grade in an urban location. And now, we both prepare teachers to teach, and the issues around race are always critical.

We both went to UCLA because of the focus on Urban Schooling, and that’s a rarity—a program that’s so anchored in the importance of equity lenses and of paying attention to who is in front of you. My interest in this work unquestionably started from my experience with UCLA.

Ed&IS: How do you seek to make educators—both non-Black and Black—more aware of anti-Blackness?

SPENCER: Most Black children are going to be taught by non-Black teachers. Sometimes we’ll have White teachers say, “You know, I’m just not able to do that.” They’re uncomfortable. And we tell them that we rely on non-Black teachers to help students of color be successful. I don’t get a chance to say, “Well, I’m not White, so when I have a White student in my class, I can’t help them.”

In the book, we raise awareness by helping people acquire the language for the idea that race and racism are real things. We say that a student can get special services if they have a special need or if they speak in a language other than English. But there are no special services for a kid if they are Black, because race is not something that is called out.

ULLUCCI: About 85 percent of my students are White. Being able to have these conversations with them is more important, or at least as important as talking to any other group, because it’s the behavior that needs to change.

A lot of my personal mentors as teachers—like the person that I worked under as a student teacher, and then my doctoral advisor—are Black people. And so, a lot of my understanding about how you teach was through a Black lens. I know that that’s rare, and that has helped me to this day.

I remember sitting in Tyrone’s (Howard, UCLA professor of education) classes. I was his TA, working with the master’s students and I can remember things that he said, and the way that he would approach different topics that I knew were different from the way that I would. Part of that is gender, and part of that is race. I can say things that he can’t say, and he says things that I can’t say. Being able to see that when I was developing as an instructor was really important.

Ed&IS: How did your experiences at UCLA in Urban Schooling shape your research and your practice as teachers, and now, as teacher educators?

SPENCER: UCLA was an incredible training ground for Kerri and I. Dr. Mike Rose, who since passed away, was an incredible mentor of ours and helped teach us how to write in a way that is accessible to teachers and accessible to the public. We actually dedicate the book to him because of his impact on our writing and helping us to see that when you write as a scholar, it’s not about the big words but relaying ideas in a way that makes people comfortable and is accessible.

Dr. Megan Franke (UCLA professor of education) had a very big influence on my work. She has taught thousands and thousands of teachers how to teach mathematics better and she believes in the day-to-day, on-the-ground work of improving teaching. As my advisor and mentor, she has helped me to weave together my ideas about educational equity/racial justice with my commitments to designing and delivering mathematics instruction of impact. I see these as inseparable.

ULLUCCI: Joi and I have literally been writing for 20 years. She and I became colleagues, and then very good friends from our being in the cohort together. I always look back with such gratitude that I’ve been able to maintain these relationships so long after.

It’s the same thing with Tyrone. I was his very first doctoral student when he came to UCLA and it’s such a blessing that literally, 21 years from when I started, he is still such a central figure and mentor in my life, and has meant so much to the trajectory that I’m on. I would not be in this field if it wasn’t for his mentorship when I was his student.

Ed&IS: What is the most important thing you hope people will take away from the book?

ULLUCCI: It’s like a walk-through of the professional lives of people who are trying to think hard about these things. We’ve been collecting experiences for a long time and trying to put it together in a way that we thought would serve teachers. We were very much thinking about practitioners, and about the way that we translate what we’re seeing for mass audiences, versus talking to very niche populations. The tone of it, and the suggestions in it are written to address that audience, so hopefully, that will make it usable by most people.

 A lot of the ideas I talk about in the book are experiences that I had in schools that seemed like they were egalitarian, seemed like they were equitable. But when you scratch the surface, you could see clearly who was getting honors classes, who was not; who was getting tested for gifted and who was not; how they spoke to students.

JOI SPENCER

Joi Spencer, Ph.D.

Courtesy of UC Riverside

SPENCER: I hope they read the personal stories that are in there—those matter a lot. But I also hope that teachers don’t shy away from some of the tougher work. A lot of the book’s goal is to raise comfort with talking about race as a factor that shapes what goes on in the classroom and the schoolyard, getting rid of the fear of it.

I think teachers are sort of trained to be race-less and to be color blind—“We judge people ‘not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.’” This is used to sort of erase [race], and not speak about race at all, as if it doesn’t actually have impact. But, that was not what Martin Luther King intended by his words. You can’t ignore something—that does not honor it. That is not a solution.

Ullucci is an associate professor of Diversity and Equity in Education at Roger Williams University in Providence. She achieved her B.A. in history and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, her M.A.T. at the University of Pittsburgh, and her Ph.D. at UCLA. Spencer is the dean of the School of Education at UC Riverside. She achieved her B.A. in African and African American studies with honors in education, as well as her master’s degree in education at Stanford University, and her Ph.D. at UCLA.

 A lot of my personal mentors as teachers—like the person that I worked under as a student teacher, and then my doctoral advisor— are Black people. And so, a lot of my understanding about how you teach was through a Black lens. I know that that’s rare, and that has helped me to this day.

KERRI ULLUCCI

Kerri Ullucci, Ph.D. Courtesy of Kerri Ullucci

By Joi A. Spencer and Kerri Ullucci

Foreword by Tyrone C. Howard

EXCERPTS FROM THE BOOK

As we write this chapter, examples of the dishonesty of whitewashing and omission abound. In a case of actual omission, a public school in Utah allowed students not to participate in a Black History Month curriculum. Parents were allowed to sign an opt-out form to remove their students from these lessons (Asmelash, 2021). The school ended up reversing the decision after public protest, but the message that Black history is marginal remains. In what other context would students be allowed to opt out of history lessons?

In a new twist, Black books are under particular fire, as they increasingly find themselves on banned book lists. In the context of the conservative social movement to ban critical race theory from schools, Black stories are believed to be inherently critical race theory stories (Bellamy Walker, 2022) and are getting swept up in that storm. The American Library Association cites rising challenges against books written by Black authors (Will, 2021). The Katy, Texas, school department removed two of Jerry Craft’s (award-winning) books from their libraries, seemingly because they show Black boys experiencing racism. All Black stories, and stories mentioning the Black experiences, begin to look (to some people) like a criticism of White people and their histories, and opponents target Black books as promoting critical race theory despite the fact that the books never actually discuss critical race theory at all.

In a related mess, Texas State Representative Matt Krause (see Lopez, B., 2021) sent a letter in October 2021 to superintendents asking if their schools possessed books from a list of 850 titles believed to make students feel “discomfort” or “guilt.” Superintendents were asked to reply with (a) which books they had, (b) how many copies they had, (c) where they were located, and (d) how much they spent on them. Titles included: Amnesty International’s We Are All Born Free: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Pictures, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander, All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely, and This is Your Time by Ruby Bridges.

Just who are these books making uncomfortable or guilty? Who is being protected here and who has gone missing from the equation? Do Black boys who live in Texas not know that racism exists, and the Katy school department is trying to protect them by removing these titles? Or do they not want to let White children read about racism? Our professor used to tell us if you throw a rock into a pack of dogs, you know which one you hit because it is barking. North Carolina has just passed rules that threaten discipline or dismissal of educators who “teach that American historical figures were not heroes, undermine the U.S. constitution in lessons or say that racism is a permanent part of American life” (Associated Press, 2021, para. 2). Rather, it states in this new policy that “all people who contributed to American society will be recognized and presented as reformists, innovators and heroes to our culture” (emphasis added) (para. 4).

Let’s think this through. Teachers are being told that people who contributed to society must be painted in a positive light. So any contribution has to be seen as heroic? How do we teach Jefferson? Andrew Jackson? We will tell Black children (and all children) that Jefferson was a model Founding Father? Of course, he contributed to the country in indelible and important ways. But how do we overlook his participation with slavery? His plantation? His relationship with Sally Hemings and their enslaved children? When we omit these facts, the goal is not the truth, but a whitewashing of it.

Here we see yet another example of how storytelling has led us astray. Schools have been telling stories about the past, fictionalized stories about the greatness of White leaders who walk through history unblemished and pristine. But they—like the stories we tell about race—are inaccurate. They miss the full picture. They leave out key information. Students would have so much richer an experience if we told them the truth. If we told them that Washington was a

Schools have been telling stories about the past, fictionalized stories about the greatness of White leaders who walk through history unblemished and pristine. But they— like the stories we tell about race—are inaccurate. They miss the full picture. They leave out key information. Students would have so much richer an experience if we told them the truth.

pivotal leader and a plantation owner. That Jefferson penned much of the Declaration of Independence and held more than 600 slaves. That most people are not 100% good or 100% evil but instead a mind-numbing array of in-between and that people can do great things and horrific things and history, like life, is filled with this contradiction. We can teach them that the United States is a beautiful, messy, imperfect country that aspires to something we have not yet reached but we still keep trying. We can tell the truth.

When you were in grade school, you remember reading stories by African American authors such as Faith Ringgold or Walter Dean Myers, right? In history, you learned of the immense diversity in Africa, studying various people groups and some of the 2,000 African languages, and can point out South Africa or Kenya on a map. Throughout social studies, you consistently learned about Black people who were creating, resisting, and moving society forward, beyond Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. You have taken field trips to local Black history museums.

In middle school you learned about the complex global trading systems and architectural feats that were present in ancient Africa. You learned that Africa is a continent, not a country, home to arguably the richest man in world history (Mansa Musa), and some of the earliest universities (University of al-Qarawiyyin, Morocco) and libraries (in Egypt and Timbuktu).

You are knowledgeable about Black intellectuals, those authors, artists, poets, and scientists who helped build the United States. You learned about the kingdoms of Nubia and Egypt. In high school, you learned about race and racism, and how racist policies (redlining, gerrymandering) create economic and social obstacles for African Americans. You studied the Harlem Renaissance. You learned about Black women leaders, from Mary McLeod Bethune to Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

You know about people and places in Africa.

You can point out African influences in American culture, from the banjo to jeans/denim to the cultivation of rice.

Your high school had Black students in AP courses, and in calculus and physics.

You know about Black scholars and thinkers, those born in the United States and those born abroad.

You have read Walker and Baldwin and Du Bois and Angelou. You have seen Jacob Lawrence’s work.

You know more than a partial view of slavery told largely from a White perspective both without context and without any connection to the present, filled with well-meaning White people who fought to free enslaved Africans.

You know more than ancient Egypt, or bits and pieces of colonialism that you were taught over and over and still don’t have a firm grasp of.

Or you don’t. Or you didn’t.

We imagine that for many readers, you did not have an opportunity to learn the above. The standards did not “allow for it” or

 Just who are these books making uncomfortable or guilty? Who is being protected here and who has gone missing from the equation? Do Black boys who live in Texas not know that racism exists, and the Katy school department is trying to protect them by removing these titles? Or do they not want to let White children read about racism? Our professor used to tell us if you throw a rock into a pack of dogs, you know which one you hit because it is barking.

the curriculum did not “cover it.” If these omissions are more in line with your experience, you would be a typical student in the United States.

For many years, we have asked our college students what they remember learning about Black and African-descent people in schools. The responses are always the same: about slavery, the Civil War, perhaps the civil rights period, and they are done. Literature is just as sparse. It is a story of omission (not being included; being invisible) and whitewashing (the telling of half-truths about history in order to be less culpable). Both omission and whitewashing have similar consequences. They enable incomplete stories to dominate our understanding, skewing our collective memory. They suppress the contributions of Black people while exalting the contributions of White people. They allow students to remain ignorant of the astounding precolonial African civilizations that were pioneering in so many ways. They sanitize history in a way that makes it more about nostalgia and patriotism and less about what actually happened in the past. In all these effects, omission and whitewashing help support the structures of White supremacy.

Reprinted by permission of the Publisher. Joi A. Spencer and Kerri Ullucci, Anti-Blackness at School: Creating Affirming Educational Spaces for African American Students, New York: Teachers College Press. Copyright © 2023 by Teachers College, Columbia University. All rights reserved.

PARTNERS WITH LA COMMUNITIES

UCLA IS Media Preservation Lab to Digitally Preserve Local Media Collections

The UCLA Department of Information Studies runs a state-of-theart lab, where students gain hands-on training and participate in projects to preserve community histories.

BY JOANIE HARMON

The UCLA Department of Information Studies has expanded preparation of students in its Master of Library and Information Science program for practical work in media archiving and preservation with its IS Media Preservation Lab, which formally opened in Winter 2022. Part of the department’s larger IS Library facilities, the lab is housed in the SEIS Building in North Campus. It was created through a $300,000 gift from a local foundation to support the  Center for Preservation of Audiovisual Heritage (CPAH), which now operates out of the lab.

In 2022, the lab successfully supported an initial round of CPAH projects aimed at digitally preserving media materials in community-held collections.

“We’re focused on preserving community-held media collections that document the cultural and historical diversity of the SoCal region,” says Shawn VanCour, associate professor of information studies, who supervised the lab’s construction and directed the first round of preservation projects using the new space.

Students in the department’s MLIS program preserved materials in collections of several community-based archives and other local arts and cultural organizations, gaining hands-on skills using the lab’s equipment and helping local organizations to make content originally housed on vulnerable, obsolete audiovisual formats accessible to their intended publics.

“We’re pursuing a curriculum-based model for media preservation [for] students who are training in the Media Archival Studies area of our MLIS program,” VanCour explained. “Once they hit an appropriate point in their training, they are cleared to work with community-held collections in the context of their courses [and] for faculty-supervised independent studies and practicum exercises. Our department also houses chapters of two of the country’s main professional societies for AV archivists, the Association of Moving Image Archivists and the Association for Recorded Sound Collections. These groups have been using the lab to train their own members and pursue a number of additional community-oriented preservation projects throughout this past year.”

Formerly a smaller suite in the main room of the IS Library, the Media Preservation Lab moved to a larger, adjacent room, renovated through a gift from the late Professor Robert M. Hayes, who from 1974 to 1989 served as dean of the then UCLA Graduate School of Library and Information Science. This expanded space has provided room for the lab’s new equipment purchases, as well as several recent donations, including a vintage open-reel videotape machine received from Corday Productions, that was used in the production of NBC’s long-running soap opera, “Days of our Lives.” The new equipment includes several high-end items, such as a Prism audio converter, a Timestep preamp for deriving material from vinyl records and other grooved media, and a custom-built Kinetta archival film scanner that enables work with a variety of delicate and damaged film formats.

“Preservation spaces like this include a mix of hard-to-find obsolete playback technologies and state-of-theart digital technologies used to transfer and restore media content to something approximating its original state,” says Professor VanCour. “There are very few places that have this kind of equipment. Students walk out of our program saying,

‘I was trained on a Prism,’ or ‘I know how to use a Kinetta.’ Those are not skills that most people have straight out of grad school, and it gives our MLIS students a competitive edge.”

A number of IS classes have used the new lab space since its opening in February. Students in a digital preservation course taught by Professor Anne Gilliland used some of the specialized digital forensics software on the lab’s computers, and students in classes taught by VanCour and Professor Michelle Caswell participated in CPAH pilot projects, preserving materials from community-held collections.

Chloe Reyes, an MLIS student and technical coordinator for the Center of Preservation of Audiovisual Heritage at UCLA, works on equipment used to derive video from a variety of formats for restoration and preservation.

Caswell, a co-founder of the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA), recruited the organization to participate in her spring course on community-based archives. Her students processed a SAADA collection that included materials from ArtWallah, a South Asian American arts festival in the early 2000s in Los Angeles, that included poetry, musical performances, painting, and sculpture.

Thuy Vo Dang, who joined the faculty of the UCLA Department of Information Studies in the fall, taught an oral history methods course in the 2023 Winter quarter. Her students were able to use the Lab for their coursework, as well as gain skills they need to enter the archival field.

“My students greatly benefited from the loan of portable field recorders for their interview recordings, and some also made use of the video and audio editing equipment and support from the Media Preservation Lab,” says Professor Vo Dang, a scholar of oral history and community archives.

“The grad students who staff the Lab introduced everyone to the myriad resources available there to support our learning journey. It’s an important hub for cultivating technical expertise around the use and preservation of various audio-visual media.”

VanCour’s course in audio archiving was designed as a primary pilot course, based on training students in the new lab space with the goal of digitizing materials in community-held collections for final projects.

“The first part of the class was exposing students to the different formats that they would be working with over the course of the quarter, so they got practice handling and assessing those media, then they did some practice transfer exercises, using our lab equipment so they would know how to operate all of the machines [and] properly digitize these materials,” says Professor VanCour. “Once they finished that training and demonstrated their competence in these areas, they received clearance to work with the community-provided collections.”

The class partnered with three local organizations that selected priority content from their collections for

students to digitize. The June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives provided oral histories and musical performances from the 1960s through the 1980s on cassette tapes and reel-to-reel tapes, as well as a rare vinyl record from their collections. The Skid Row History Museum & Archive provided recordings from the early 2000s of activist theater performances by the LA Poverty Department on Digital Audio Tape, and LAist Radio selected several episodes of its local news and public affairs program, “Air Talk with Larry Mantle,” with original airdates from 2002–2005, housed on DATs, MiniDiscs, and CDs. Over 40 hours of content were successfully preserved by students, which will be used by the participating organizations in current projects and made available to users of their collections now that they are in an accessible, digital form.

In addition to the pilot projects in VanCour’s and Caswell’s classes, the Lab also assisted producers of the independently produced “This Way Out,” a self-described “international LGBTQ radio magazine” distributed to community radio stations across the U.S. and abroad. More than a hundred episodes were archived on Jaz disks, a shortlived format that was a descendant of Iomega’s Zip drive and cannot be read by modern computers. Students accessed the contents of a dozen provided disks using the Lab’s specialized forensics software, and the producers are

The grad students who staff the Lab introduced everyone to the myriad resources available there to support our learning journey. It’s an important hub for cultivating technical expertise around the use and preservation of various audiovisual media.



Students in the Media Preservation Lab adjust audio levels for video that has been digitally preserved from obsolete formats. Photo by Janet Ceja

now working with federal government institutions on plans to make this content accessible through a national collecting repository.

“Some of these media don’t hold up well over time,” says VanCour, noting that many of the digital formats can deteriorate even faster than their analog predecessors. “It’s a good thing we got to these now, while they were still playable.”

Chloe Reyes, a MLIS student who works as the department’s lab assistant and serves as technical coordinator for CPAH projects, says that with the IS Media Preservation Lab, “… the possibilities are so endless.” Reyes, who earned a prior degree in film production at CalArts, has been teaching film classes at the Echo Park Film Center for 10 years and also worked as a projectionist, coming to the MLIS program with a depth of prior professional skills already in hand. She assisted VanCour with the initial construction of the lab and, as he puts it, “put a lot of this stuff together with her own two hands.”

“I really, really have enjoyed my time in the MLIS program,” says Reyes, who worked as a project assistant when the lab was being built. “The Community Archive Lab that Michelle Caswell started got me interested in the program,

and this media lab was opening up just in time. Once the installation [work] was done, I stayed on, and I’ve been building documentation and organizing technical workshops for students to learn the different stations, as well as coordinating technology needs for project work with community archives.”

Reyes has also been assisting IS lecturer Janet Ceja, Ph.D., with preparing a fall course in film preservation that is making active use of lab facilities. As the next installment in CPAH’s projects, this course was designed by Ceja following the same curriculum-based model pursued for the department’s spring classes, with students digitizing materials for final projects from community-held collections. For this course, Ceja has partnered with Deserted Films in Palm Springs, which has a number of Southern California-themed home movies that students will transfer on the Kinetta. These films will be publicly screened by the organization once the transfers are completed.

Last fall, Ceja taught a fall course in film preservation, partnering with Deserted Films in Palm Springs, a regional archive of films mainly produced in Palms Springs and other surrounding desert regions. Her students gained professional archiving skills including

Some of these media don’t hold up well over time. Many of the digital formats can deteriorate even faster than their analog predecessors. It’s a good thing we got to these now, while they were still playable.

Chloe Reyes, who organizes technical workshops for students in the UCLA Media Preservation Lab, assists Blair Black, an ethnomusicology student from the Herb Alpert School of Music at UCLA, in learning how to organize information from a vinyl disc.

transferring film using the Kinetta, and inventorying, assessing, and digitizing a collection from the film archive. Their efforts can now be viewed on the organization’s website. (desertedfilms.org)

“Knowing that I had access to the Media Preservation Lab, I designed a course using Project Based Learning, a learner-centered approach that encourages engagement in real world activities through ‘learning-by-doing,’” says Ceja, who connected with Deserted Films co-founders Melissa Dollman—a UCLA IS alumna—and Devin Oregon through the Lab. “In the Lab, learners gained and practiced the skills necessary to process the Deserted Films collection as they would in a professional setting, because we were using a state-of-the art facility and we were working with a community organization’s treasured film collection. Additionally, the amazing Lab staff and student workers helped me tremendously by facilitating some workshops on film handling and digitization.

“By engaging in a real world, handson project, we were able to clearly connect with the theoretical questions from class readings and discussions. In this sense, we achieved a most satisfying praxis.”

Dino Everett, a lecturer in the UCLA Department of Information Studies and the archivist of the HMH Foundation Moving Image Archive at USC (formerly the Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive), teaches a course in moving image technology.

“I have often said that properly teaching students to enter the archiving field, whether this be traditional paper-based materials or audio-visual materials, really sits somewhat uncomfortably in between traditional academic studies and that of a trade school,” he says. “Programs shouldn’t rely solely on students gaining ‘skills’ from internships. Instead, they should provide methods for them to acquire some of these skills as part of the overall curriculum.”

“For instance, in the past it was quite challenging to get students to think critically about the concepts and challenges of digitizing and restoring old media when they had no concept of the tasks involved to perform such actions. From an academic perspective, this would be like trying to get them to understand the complexities of a certain formalized theory from one of the popular humanities without being able to tell them the framework of the theory first.”

Knowing that I had access to the Media Preservation Lab, I designed a course using Project Based Learning, a learnercentered approach that encourages engagement in real world activities through ‘learning-by-doing.’

In Everett’s course at UCLA, students have the opportunity to work directly with one of the collections of the HMH Foundation Moving Image Archive, and have access to internships at the archive.

“The existence of the Media Preservation Lab not only allows students the ability to acquire and develop the various necessary skills students will need to enter the field of audiovisual archiving [and] allows the faculty to expand upon the ideas and concepts that they can help students theorize and think critically about.”

Professor VanCour says that UCLA has the only ALA-accredited MLIS program with a specialization dedicated to media archival studies and is one of the only universities in the country with a fully equipped media preservation lab for instructional use.

“There are very few collections these days that do not have media in them, but there are very few iSchools that are actually teaching students how to work with these formats in any indepth manner,” he says. “It’s a real point of distinction for our program that we are able to offer this, and in a way that directly benefits our community as well.”

There are very few collections these days that do not have media in them, but there are very few iSchools that are actually teaching students how to work with these formats in any in-depth manner. It’s a real point of distinction for our program that we are able to offer this, and in a way that directly benefits our community as well.

Associate Professor of Information Studies Shawn VanCour and MLIS student Chloe Reyes inspect the label of an oversized commercial radio transcription disc from the 1950s, a format that cannot be played back on modern equipment. The lab’s specialized turntable setup enables correct playback and digital capture of these unusual formats.

The Potential of California’s Community College Baccalaureate for Closing Racial Equity Gaps

BY JOHN MCDONALD

“The Potential of California’s Community College Baccalaureate for Closing Racial Equity Gaps,” examines the status of existing Community College Baccalaureate (CCB) pilot programs to analyze enrollment patterns in CCB programs and describe program outcomes, including student persistence, graduation, and employment success after graduation. Those outcomes are largely positive. The report’s authors contend now is a pivotal moment to improve the effectiveness, efficiency, and quality of CCBs in California and in so doing, increase the number of students that complete a baccalaureate degree in the state. They urge policy makers, practitioners, and other education leaders to expand CCB programs, and offer specific recommendations for doing so.

“Our community colleges are filled with bright, talented students, but many face economic and structural challenges in the education system that hinder their ability to transfer to four-year colleges and complete their degree,” said Cecilia RiosAguilar, chair of the Department of Education at the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies and report co-author. “The expansion of the Community College Baccalaureate degree programs offers the potential to do better by these students. We can further educational and racial equity by increasing access to opportunities for degree completion at local community colleges and help to meet our state’s educational and economic needs by increasing degree production.”

The researchers note, however, that data systems in California can and need to be better integrated and comprehensive to document students’ academic and labor market participation and outcomes in community college baccalaureate programs. Effective program evaluation tools and resources will be necessary for program growth, and the state must create a cohesive data and research infrastructure that is inclusive of CCB programs.

RESEARCH BY CECILIA RIOS-AGUILAR MARCELA G. CUELLAR NIDIA BAÑUELOS AUSTIN LYKE AND DAVIS VO

The report’s authors contend that the current version of the California Master Plan for Higher Education is obsolete and poses structural impediments for bachelor’s degree-aspirants in California. The system intentionally stratifies postsecondary education access by primarily designating CSU and UC with baccalaureate conferment, and the CCB approval process currently involves getting CSU/UC support. There is also an unnecessary focus on program duplication with CSU/UC programs since CCB programs attract a different student population (e.g., older students who may be more place-bound).

“In the 60 years since the establishment of the California Master Plan for Higher Education, the system has become increasingly stratified, with largely white, Asian, and more affluent students attending UC and CSU campuses, with two-year colleges mostly attended by lower income students of color, far too few of whom have the opportunity to go on to attain four-year degrees,” said Patricia Gándara, co-director of the UCLA Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles. “The expansion of the community college baccalaureate programs offers a powerful tool for increasing the number of underrepresented students who attain bachelor degrees, and importantly, furthering educational racial equity and economic and social advancement.”

“In the face of a growing need for baccalaureate degrees for job requirements and unmet social and economic mobility, California’s Master Plan for Higher Education is outdated and limited in its ability to equitably serve Californians,” said Davis Vo, a doctoral researcher at the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies and report co-author. “There is a need and promising potential for structural reform. California can do better.”

Our community colleges are filled with bright, talented students, but many face economic and structural challenges in the education system that hinder their ability to transfer to fouryear colleges and complete their degree.

well as data from other states

successes

FROM THE REPORT SUMMARY

The bachelor’s degree remains a fundamental path to economic opportunity in the United States. Critical for policymakers, then, is ensuring equitable access to such benefits–a task often constrained by long-standing structural barriers. One of the most obvious structural impediments for bachelor’s degree-aspirants in California (CA) is the current version of the CA Master Plan for Higher Education. With a robust public higher education system that is continually forced to adapt to demographic shifts and evolving labor markets, California is an especially important region for exploring the future of postsecondary education and economic growth. This report describes what we currently know about the California Community College Baccalaureate (CCB) program that was launched in 2017 and expanded in 2021. The program shows promising outcomes and that state education leaders can leverage existing components of the state’s education ecosystem to meet the economic and social demands of 40 million diverse Californians and to close existing racial equity gaps. We examine existing data to show that over 1,000 students have enrolled in CCB pilot programs across California since such programs were approved in 2015. We found variation in who enrolled in the CCB programs by gender, race/ethnicity, and age group. For example, colleges like West Los Angeles College have enrolled a plurality of Latina/o/x students, which is no doubt influenced by their local populations. In addition to analyzing enrollment patterns in CCB programs, we also describe program outcomes, including persistence and graduation in programs and employment success after graduation. Using administrative records from the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office (CCCCO), we found that across eight programs with available data, first-year persistence for CCB programs is generally high, with more than 80 percent of students continuing to the second term. Student institutional data from the first 15 CCB programs reveal that, on average, the year-two and year-three graduation rates for CCB programs (from when students can begin taking upper-division courses) were 67 percent and 78 percent, respectively in California across three student cohorts (Hoang, Vo, & Rios-Aguilar, 2022). Furthermore, CCB graduates have been relatively successful in gaining employment for each of the past three years with students reporting wage gains as a result of obtaining their baccalaureate degrees. Graduates of CCB programs also reported that their current job is in California, closely related to their coursework and field of study, and have positive wage gains. All told, employment outcomes for California CCB students are generally favorable and corroborate studies on the economic value of bachelor’s degrees.

From carefully examining available data for California’s CCB programs, as well as data from other states that have had successes in implementing CCBs, we argue that this is a pivotal moment to improve the effectiveness, efficiency, and quality of CCBs in California and to, by extension, increase the number of students that complete a baccalaureate degree in the state.

We urge legislators, administrators, practitioners, and other education leaders to consider addressing the following issues in the plans to expand CCB programs:

1. Center racial equity.

2. Evaluate and improve implementation, quality, and accountability.

3. Invest in community colleges and CCB programs.

4. Strategic expansion of CCBs.

5. Market the educational and economic benefits of CCBs.

6. Create a community of practice to learn together.

From carefully examining available data for California’s CCB programs, as

that have had

in implementing CCBs, we argue that this is a pivotal moment to improve the effectiveness, efficiency, and quality of CCBs in California and to, by extension, increase the number of students that complete a baccalaureate degree in the state.

According to the report, California enrolls approximately 2 million students in community colleges each year, with most intending to eventually earn a bachelor’s degree, however:

f Latina/o/x students remain significantly overrepresented in the California Community Colleges (CCC) (and in the California State University system), representing 46% of students attending CCCs.

f A higher proportion of students from economically minoritized backgrounds are also enrolled in the CCC with 42% of CCC students eligible for Pell Grants.

There are also substantial differences in who has access to and completes baccalaureate degrees in California:

f Fewer than a third of transfer-intending students transfer to a four-year college after six years and there are large racial equity gaps among those students who do.

f While Latina/o/x community college students represent more than half (51%) of all students who say they intend to transfer, they represent just 35% of those who successfully transfer within four years.

f African American or Black students represent a smaller share of the student body, representing 7% of all students who declared a degree/transfer goal, yet just 5% of those who transfer.

f The potential for better outcomes can be seen in the report’s review of educational outcomes of students participating in California Community College pilot programs:

f Student institutional data from all 15 CCB programs reveal that, on average, the year-two and yearthree graduation rates for CCB programs were 67% and 78% in California across three student cohorts (calculated from when students officially begin taking upper-division courses).

f CCB graduates have also been successful in gaining employment for each of the past three years, with students reporting wage gains as a result of obtaining their baccalaureate degrees.

f A review of community college baccalaureate programs in other states (Washington and Florida) finds promising practices and outcomes that also underscore the potential for expansion in California.

BY JOHN MCDONALD

OUR CHILDREN CAN’T WAIT: The Urgency of Reinventing Education Policy in America

A BOOK

EDITED BY

JOSEPH P. BISHOP

For too long, education policy has often ignored a growing body of evidence of how factors outside of school can impact learning and life chances for young people before they even get to the classroom.

“Our Children Can’t Wait: The Urgency of Reinventing Education Policy in America” makes the case that to address structural racism a national education agenda must center on community conditions like air quality, housing, public health, community safety, segregation and other issues as essential to improving learning opportunities, academic outcomes and the health and well-being of students. The book is edited by Joseph P. Bishop, executive director of the UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools, housed at UCLA School of Education and Information Studies.

The book presents a new equity-focused road map for a comprehensive effort to enhance opportunities to learn and a redemptive path forward for reckoning with race in America.

UCLA Ed&IS: What’s this book about?

JOSEPH P. BISHOP: This book makes a strong argument of why the narrow, standards-based conceptions of education policy that have dominated Congress, state houses and school boards have mostly overlooked what matters for student health and development. More importantly, it lays out a plan of action at the local, state and federal level for moving towards more youth and community led policy change that centers on equity and justice in school and outside of school.

“Our Children Can’t Wait” was written based on my experience training elected officials and working with civil rights groups, youth organizers, educators and philanthropy, seeing a need for a book that brought more comprehensive thinking on policy together in one place.

UCLA Ed&IS: What do you hope it will help people to understand?

BISHOP: This is a critical moment for our country to reckon with our relationship with race and racism, defined by harmful patterns of enslavement, discrimination and the largest justice system in the world. I hope this book helps connects the dots for readers, helping them understand that an entire playbook of prevention and strategic investments exists that will allow us to move away from policies that often replicate inequality in our country. We just haven’t had the foresight or courage to think more boldly about what education policy is, who it’s for and what it can achieve for our young people and families.

UCLA ED&IS: What do you hope the book will make happen?

BISHOP: I’ve been contacted by administrators, educators, policymakers, civil rights organizations and philanthropic groups who want to use “Our Children Can’t Wait” as an organizing framework for mobilization and transformation.  I hope the book can act as a catalyst for people across the country to spark new conversations or to find affirmation in the ideas and scholarship packed in each chapter. Just because policies don’t prioritize issues or people doesn’t mean they don’t matter.  Rather, just the opposite is true.

More importantly, it lays out a plan of action at the local, state and federal level for moving towards more youth and community led policy change that centers on equity and justice in school and outside of school.

Joseph Bishop, Ph.D.

This reality is true for other policy areas outside of education that often haven’t been linked to an education agenda. This includes health services that can be made more readily available to families in schools and school systems, city transportation planning that prioritizes school routes, preventing student exposure to environmental pollutants, and affordable housing strategies that seek to dismantle heavily segregated, under-resourced neighborhoods.

EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER ONE JUST PASSING THROUGH: SEAN’S STORY AS FUEL FOR NEW POLICIES

Sitting in a mustard-yellow classroom chair on the top floor of a drop-in center for unhoused youth, I look across the table at a young man in his early 20s. Sean, who identifies as Latino, is decked out in college football swag, new attire from the dropin center. At night, he is on his own without family or loved ones, sometimes sleeping on the street, couch surfing, or moving from one location to another. We speak after his long morning commute by bus across Los Angeles County. Sean shares with me that he attended six different districts and countless schools before he stopped going to school. When he talks about his schooling history, he describes a system in which he felt overlooked and uncared for: “I felt like I was passing through.”

Sean’s “passing through” reflects structural challenges in our society, realities that have come to define life in America for many youths, especially young people of color. Schools have a clear responsibility to play in the equation to support students but cannot tackle inherited issues of inequality alone. But to a large degree, Black- and Brown-majority schools and communities have been left to fend for themselves. The pandemic has made this abundantly clear. One principal recently shared with me just how much schools have been asked to do in response to COVID, especially in her school that serves mostly Latinx students.

The pandemic has highlighted what a school’s role in society truly means. Bottom line, it turned into an on-theground relief effort for our families. It turned into the place that our families went to in order to get news, in order to get resources, in order to get everything they needed to move forward. Everything.

When our students started losing their housing, we were doing their housing applications for renters’ relief. And when their parents lost their jobs, we were applying for new jobs for them. When family members passed away, we were trying to figure out how to help parents navigate through what it looked like to get a death certificate, to make arrangements, and to try and figure those things out and to get them started on a GoFundMe page.

This type of narrative is sorely lacking in policy discussions; it is one that places schools at the forefront of care and support for families, both in school and before and after the school bell rings. Often, the dominant policy response to supporting young people is what John Powell, a professor at UC Berkeley calls a “moat approach,” in which lawmakers construct moats or artificial barriers around issues or ourselves. This approach is all too common for interrelated issues like stable housing, neighborhood segregation, and education opportunities. For example, moat approaches like in-school-centered policy approaches are very common in education policy, especially at the federal level, as evident with No Child Left Behind (NCLB), which passed after the 9/11 attacks in the early 2000s, and Race to the Top (RTTT), Obama’s signature education strategy. Each has done little to change learning conditions or academic outcomes for the most disadvantaged students (Hussar et al., 2020). NCLB mandated state tests and accountability systems, and RTTT pushed states to develop higher standards

and richer assessments, data systems to support instruction, great teachers and leaders, and a focus on supporting struggling schools. These were worthy pursuits, but each did little to acknowledge just how much conditions outside of schools can fundamentally alter life for young people by the time they reach the classroom. We expect young people to leave their challenges neatly outside the schoolhouse door.

This reality is true for other policy areas outside of education that often haven’t been linked to an education agenda. This includes health services that can be made more readily available to families in schools and school systems, city transportation planning that prioritizes school routes, preventing student exposure to environmental pollutants, and affordable housing strategies that seek to dismantle heavily segregated, under-resourced neighborhoods. Each represents key investments to support greater mobility for families and to change the educational, social, and economic trajectory for future generations. Examples of how a new policy thinking is taking shape across the United States—one that takes a radically different approach—are explored more in this book.

Our Children Can’t Wait presents a clear path forward for our country, by bridging scholarship, ideas, and original thinking on education policy as a vehicle for dismantling inequality, thereby setting a redemptive path forward for reckoning with race in America. Over 50 million students are served in K–12 nationally; 14,000 school districts and 130,000 schools can provide a powerful connection point for education services, health services, social services, job training, and even delivery of hot meals to so many families (Irwin et al., 2021). A different policy approach for lifting young people and families is backed up by significant evidence showing that a variety of “out-of-school” factors (e.g., prenatal influences; inadequate medical, dental, and vision care; food insecurity; environmental pollutants; family relations

The pandemic has highlighted what a school’s role in society truly means. . . . Bottom line, it turned into an on-theground relief effort for our families. It turned into the place that our families went to in order to get news, in order to get resources, in order to get everything they needed to move forward. Everything.

and stress; neighborhood conditions) are the strongest contributors by as much as two-thirds to the persistence of academic disparities among students (Berliner, 2009; Johnson, 2014). A broader conception of education policy that takes in-school (e.g., educator capacity, curriculum, funding, school climate) and out-of-school factors (neighborhood conditions, public health, safety, etc.) into consideration simultaneously, not as mutually exclusive approaches to building school systems anchored in racial equity and justice, has become a national necessity (Bishop & Noguera, 2019). The subsequent chapters not only provide the political, social, and historical context for rethinking policy but also draw linkages between out-of-school factors and the policies needed to radically change education outcomes for a new majority population.

A BEYOND-SCHOOLS APPROACH IN THE COVID LANDSCAPE

Default policy approaches have become especially inadequate during a global pandemic (COVID-19) that has taken the lives of more than 1,000,000 Americans, when the U.S. Surgeon General has warned of an unprecedented mental-health crisis for youth (U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, 2021), and an estimated 167,000 young people have lost a parent or caregiver because of the virus (Stolberg, 2021; Treglia et al., 2021). One school district leader described the reality, explaining just how much broader social inequities have bled into the experiences of students, staff, and families over the past several school years.

The pandemic has brought in all the inequities that exist in the system that supports students, the ecosystem that is surrounding student learning. We think of schools as places where the students come to the classroom, but the school is not alone. It’s not a one isolated ecosystem; the school lives within the context of the community. So, all the factors that affect the health, economic crisis, any type of context of outcomes that happen in the community and especially to parents and families, employment—all of the social-economic factors that live with it outside the sphere of the school affect the school.

Authors challenge readers to consider deeper questions about who policies have been crafted for, or ‘policies for whom?,’ exploring the lack of policy focus on our youngest learners, and the sciences of learning and development provide the impetus for a new policy foundation.

This narrative is reflected in social patterns across the country. Stark differences in unemployment and infection rates for people of color affected by COVID-19 have resurfaced enduring racial tensions and America’s unequal playing field (Kuhfeld et al., 2020). Poverty rates are growing in states such as California, Hawaii, Nevada, and Rhode Island with spiking unemployment numbers because of COVID-19 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2020). Child poverty patterns remain stubbornly persistent, affecting 13 million young people (Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2020).

In our K–12 school system, one of two students, or over 30 million youth, are from low-income families (Southern Education Foundation, 2015). Student demographic patterns suggest that schools are becoming increasingly racially and ethnically diverse, reflecting changes in the broader population (Schaeffer, 2021). However, more public school students attend schools where at least half of their peers are the same race or ethnicity (Schaeffer, 2021), pointing to significant implications for the political and cultural landscape in which policy decisions take shape. Student homelessness is on the rise nationally by 15% over the last 3 years, totaling over 1.3 million students (National Center for Homeless Education, 2021). States like California have seen a 48% increase over the last decade in kindergarten to high school students experiencing homelessness, with 7 out of 10 unhoused students being Latinx (Bishop et al., 2020).

The next several chapters in the book set the stage for understanding how a legacy of slavery and discrimination in the United States have been cemented by largely harmful policies that have reinforced social and educational inequities. Authors challenge readers to consider deeper questions about who policies have been crafted for, or “policies for whom?,” exploring the lack of policy focus on our youngest learners, and the sciences of learning and development provide the impetus for a new policy foundation. Understanding this foundational set of issues in the early chapters requires policymakers and educators to reflect on the origins of education policy in order to shape a new path forward in key places like school-board meetings, city councils, state legislatures, and in the halls of Congress.

https://ourchildrencantwait.com/

UCLA Ed&IS Student and Alumni Research Highlights from AERA 2023

BY JOANIE HARMON AND JOHN MCDONALD

Undergraduate and graduate students participated in the 2023 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) where they highlighted research and work that shows the commitment to the development of new ideas, knowledge and practices that strengthen public education and the school’s commitment to equity, diversity, inclusion and justice. In addition, UCLA Education alumni in prestigious and innovative faculty and leadership positions across the nation also showcased their work, echoing their preparation at UCLA for improving education and increasing opportunity for all.

HIGHLIGHTS

First-year graduate student  Lauren Arzaga Daus presented, “Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies: A High School Case Study,” in which she argues that while California has established an Ethnic Studies requirement, the needs of AAPI students may go unseen and unmet. Her study showed the need to ensure teachers are provided the support they need to create and sustain spaces where they and their students can reimagine and cultivate equity, social justice, and liberation in education, while building their sense of identity and strengthening their understanding of community.

In a poster session, doctoral candidate  Gabriela Corona Valencia shared, “Resisting Carceral State Memory Production: Tracing the Life of Concepcion Ruiz,” the story of a sixteen-year-old Mexican girl sterilized at Sonoma State Home of the Feebleminded in California in 1930, in a study highlighting the impact of eugenic thought and practice in contemporary K–16 public learning environments in East Los Angeles.

“I tried to understand the role of eugenics and the ways in which eugenics plays a very violent role in containing, surveilling and controlling the bodies of Chicana Latina girls. I argue that in sex education and health education discourse, this eugenic violence, the same violence that affected Concepcion, continues to impact Chicana/Latina girls,” Valencia said.

Another poster session featured the work of doctoral candidate Jeffrey Yo, who shared his examination of “The Influence of Teacher-Child Closeness and Kindergarten Children’s Internalizing Behavior on Academic Outcomes.”

“We noticed that teacher-child closeness is positively associated with their academic outcomes,” Yo said in his presentation. “But the variance differs by school. And while teacher-child closeness varies by school, the internalizing behavior did not, which may suggest that internalizing behavior may be more fixed within the child, like more (part) of a personality.”

Gabriela Corona Valencia shared, “Resisting Carceral State Memory Production: Tracing the Life of Concepcion Ruiz,” in a poster session of “Promising Scholarship in Education Research: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research.” Her study highlighted the impact of eugenic thought and practice in historic and contemporary K–16 public learning environments in East Los Angeles.

Graduate student Alice Xu presented her work on “Early Identification of Underperforming Students via Reading Patterns.” Her findings showed that while reading is an important learning process that contributes to academic success, it is difficult to track. By collecting detailed user activity logs, online textbook platforms provided insights into students’ authentic reading behaviors. Xu’s study of college students’ reading patterns of an online textbook showed that students that read more often and maintained a stable reading time performed better in their course.

Jeffrey Yo presented “The Influence of Teacher-Child Closeness and Kindergarten Children’s Internalizing Behavior on Academic Outcomes” during a poster session on “Learning and Motivation in Social and Cultural Contexts.”

Photo by John McDonald

Photo by John McDonald

Kayla Teng, a UCLA undergraduate at the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST) at UCLA, made the case for the education community to study computational thinking and problem-solving with her poster presentation on, “Development and Validation of Game-Based Indicators of Computational Thinking in a BlockBased Programming Game.” Her study used existing data on elementary students who played a programming game called codeSpark Academy. The study revealed the development of the students’ computational thinking skills, including algorithmic thinking, evaluation, and decomposition, during a six-week period of playing the game.

Doctoral student  Demontea Thompson discussed “Educational Journeys of Foster Youth in California: Preliminary Findings of a Statewide Study,” in a roundtable session. His presentation highlighted the experiences of his research subjects, who navigated their educational journey with limited or no help. Even though they were confronted by low expectations, many spoke of higher aspirations for educational success and an intent to give back to their communities.

Doctoral student  Lindsey Kunisaki explored unequal access to postsecondary arts education in her poster presentation, “From High School to Art School: Socioeconomic Inequalities in Creative Arts Opportunities to Learn.” Her study examined the relationship between socioeconomic status, access to out-of-school time creative arts opportunities-to-learn, and the likelihood of declaring a postsecondary arts major. Implications included a call for increased access to affordable creative arts opportunities-to-learn, for a more socioeconomically diverse body of aspiring postsecondary arts students.

In a session on “Preservice Instructional Teaching Practices,” graduate students Olivia Obeso and Andrea Nicole Kern joined with Professor Marjorie Faulstich Orellana to present their paper, “Moving Critique Into Action: Teacher Candidates’ Imagination of Their Future Practice.” Their study highlighted the role of teacher education programs as an important site for future teachers to learn to identify and critique harmful language ideologies, and the researchers’ concerns around how teachers will (or will not) be able to translate these critiques of the construct of academic language into linguistically equitable practice.

Graduate student  Melanie Seyarto presented her work on “Linking Professional Development to Classroom Quality: Differences by Early Childhood Education Sector,” in a paper session. She posited that while high-quality early education can be a powerful way to support children’s development, preparation for early educators is inconsistent, leaving many teachers without the skills needed to provide young children with enriching learning experiences. Her study used data from a community sample of early educators working in state Pre-K and child care sites to provide new evidence about teachers’ professional development experiences and the links between professional development and classroom practice.

Kai Monet Mathews, director of the California Educator Diversity Project in the UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools (CTS), presented findings on, “The Six Barriers to Racial Equity in Teacher Education Programs,” a study she conducted with Cathy Balfe, CTS research analyst, CTS

doctoral student researcher Erika Yagi, and UCLA alumni Earl Edwards and Christopher Mauerman. Using the Kohli healthy racial climate model as a theoretical framework, the team identified six barriers to racial equity including compositional diversity, financial burden, capitalistic values, community and culture, curriculum and pedagogy, and testing requirements.

Associate Professor  Ananda Marin and  Brenda Lopez, research associate and media coordinator at the UCLA Center for Critical Race Studies in Education, presented their study on “Freedom Dreams Nested Within the Small Stories of Improvisational Jazz Artists,” in an AERA Vice-Presidential Session on “Consequential Futures: The Contested Pursuit of Truth in Freedom Dreaming.” Their study, conducted with doctoral student researcher  Lindsay Lindberg, explored where and with whom creative artists develop their expertise, how the arts serve as a nexus for social, political, and ethical discourses, particularly in regard to education, and how freedom dreams often germinate in collaborative and improvisational contexts.

UCLA alumnus  Mike Hoa Nguyen, now an assistant professor at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, chaired the symposium, “Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institutions: Honoring the Past, Examining the Present, and Imagining the Future,” which featured the perspectives of fellow Bruins,  Cynthia Alcantar, now an associate professor and director of Higher Education Administration at Loyola Marymount University, and doctoral student Rikka Venturanza

UCLA alumna Tunette Powell, an assistant research professor and director of the K–12 Education of the Children’s Equity Project at Arizona State University, and graduate student researcher  Brande Otis, presented “Methods Toward Black Freedom Dreaming: Intergenerational Work with Black Families,” in a paper session on “Strengthening the Voice of Black Families in Family, School, Community Partnerships.”

“We cannot ignore the legacy of exploitation and extraction in research for Black folks … and the deficit-based narratives that sort of circulate [around] Black families in research,” said Otis in their presentation. “We want to dream and to imagine new ways of doing research … in ways that honor and resonate with our communities and us.”

We cannot ignore the legacy of exploitation and extraction in research for Black folks … and the deficit-based narratives that sort of circulate [around] Black families in research … We want to dream and to imagine new ways of doing research … in ways that honor and resonate with our communities and us.