CLASS ARTICLES

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LEE	TERKEL	SIMMONS	BERGER
HAMBERG	OAKES	CARNOY	RENDON AND HOPE

#L.A.Times L.A. TIMES - California Perlious Slide: Public Education - http://www.latimes.com/HOME/NEWS/REPORTS/SCHOOLS/

Education for Conflict Resolution: By David Hamburg

In the fall Of 1994, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, former President of the Soviet Union, reflected on a decade of intensive involvement with political leaders all over the world. One of his outstanding conclusions was the large extent to which they see "brute force" as their ultimate validation. His observation, based on abundant experience, highlights a long-standing, historically deadly inclination of leaders of many kinds from many places to interpret their mandate as being strong, tough, aggressive, even violent. For all too many, this is indeed the essence of leadership.

Gorbachev, in control of a vast nuclear arsenal, not to speak of immense power in conventional, chemical, and biological weapons, was wise enough not to interpret his own leadership in terms of brute force. But the world is full of leaders who do. More and more often, they will have massive killing power at their disposal in the twenty-first century Look at the scale of slaughter in Rwanda with penny-ante weapons!

It is time to take seriously the remark of Archibald MacLeish in the aftermath of World War II: "Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace Must be constructed. " He was writing about the mission of the emerging international institutions that were vividly mindful of the carnage of World War II and the Holocaust, but his words apply to the furious small wars of today.

The human species seems have a virtuoso capacity for making harsh distinctions between groups and for justifying violence on whatever scale the technology of the time permits. Moreover, fanatical behavior has a dangerous way of recurring across time and locations. Such behavior is old, but what is historically new and very threatening is the destructive power of our weaponry and its ongoing worldwide spread. Also new is the technology that permits rapid, vivid, widely broadcast justifications for violence. In such a world, human conflict is a subject that deserves the most careful and searching inquiry. It is a subject par excellence for public understanding. Yet today's education has little to say on the subject. Worse still, education almost everywhere has ethnocentric orientations.

Can we do better? Can we educate ourselves to avoid conflict or peacefully resolve it? Is it possible for us to modify our attitudes and orientations so that we practice greater tolerance and mutual aid at home and in the world? Perhaps it is unlikely. But the stakes are so high now that even a modest gain on this goal would be exceedingly valuable. This essay explores a few, and only a very few, of the possibilities brought to light by recent inquiry and innovation. The examples are meant to be evocative - better ones may well be available They are meant to move this subject higher on the world's agenda.

The challenge is immense. Both in field studies and experimental research by social scientists, the evidence is very strong: We humans are remarkably prone to form partisan distinctions between our own and other groups, to develop a marked preference for our own group, to accept favorable evaluations of the products and performances of the in-group, and to make unfavorable evaluations of other groups that go far beyond the objective evidence or the requirements of a situation. Indeed, it seems difficult for us to avoid making invidious distinctions even when we want to.

Orientations of ethnocentrism and prejudice are rooted in our ancient past and were probably once adaptive. Over the millennia, our estimate of personal worth if not our very survival has been built on the sense of belonging to a valued group-a sense that seems in glove with the impulse to assign negative value to those who are not of our group. Both these tendencies historically have been reinforced by parental and social education beginning in early childhood in nearly every human society.

Today, reinforcement occurs at home, in the schools, in the streets, and in the mass media. The cumulative effect of widespread frustrating conditions also exacerbates the development of Prejudice and stereotyped thinking. political fire_ brands put gasoline on the embers. Worldwide, the education received from Multiple sources is still remarkably ethnocentric. In some places ethnocentrism and Prejudice are inflamed by official Propaganda, the cultivation of religious stereotypes, and Political demagoguery, leading to intergroup violence that is justified in the name of some putatively high purpose.

The global outburst of intergroup violence, with its explosive mixture of ethnic, religious, and national striving, is badly in need of illumination. People everywhere need to understand why we behave as we do, what dangerous legacy we carry with us, and how we can convert fear to hope.

MUST CHILDREN GROW UP HATEFUL? A DEVELOPMENTAL PERSPECTIVE

Education, media, and community organizations, must be turned into a force for reducing intergroup conflict. It must serve to enlarge our social identifications in fight of common characteristics and superordinate goals. It must seek a basis for fundamental human iden0cadon across a diversity Of cultures in the face of manifest conflict. we are, in fact, a single, interdependent, meaningfully attached, worldwide species.

The question is whether human beings can learn more constructive orientations toward those outside their group while maintaining the values of group allegiance and identity, From an examination of a great deal of laboratory and field research, it seems reasonable to believe that, in spite of very bad habits from the past, we can indeed learn new habits of mind.

There is an extensive body of research on intergroup contact that bears on this question. For example, experiments have demonstrated that the extent of contact between groups that are negatively oriented toward one another is not the most important factor in achieving a more constructive orientation. Much depends on whether the contact occurs under favorable conditions. if there is an aura of mutual suspicion, if the parties are highly competitive or are not supported by relevant authorities, or if contact occurs on the basis of very unequal status, then it is not likely to be helpful, whatever the amount of exposure. contact under unfavorable conditions can stir up old tensions and reinforce stereotypes.

On the other hand, if there is friendly contact in the context of equal status, especially if such contact is supported by relevant authorities, and if the contact is embedded in cooperative activity and fostered by a mutual aid ethic, then there is likely to be a strong positive outcome. Under these conditions, the more contact the better. Such contact is then associated with improved attitudes between previously suspicious or hostile groups as well as with constructive changes in patterns of interaction between them.

Other experiments demonstrate the power of shared, highly valued superordinate goals that can only be achieved by cooperative effort. Such goals can override the differences that people bring to the situation and often have a powerful, unifying effect. Classic experiments readily made strangers at a boys' camp into enemies by isolating them from one another and heightening competition. But when powerful superordinate goals were introduced, enemies were transformed into friends.

These experiments have been replicated in work with business executives and other professionals with similar results. So the effect is certainly not limited to children and youth. Indeed, the findings have pointed to the beneficial effects of working cooperatively under conditions that lead people to formulate a new, inclusive group, going beyond the subgroups with which they entered the situation. Such effects are particularly, strong when there are tangibly successful out-comes of cooperation - for example, clear rewards from cooperative learning. They have important implications for childhood rearing and education.

DEVELOPING CONSTRUCTIVE ORIENTATIONS IN CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE

Ameliorating the problem of intergroup relations rests upon finding better ways to foster child and adolescent development. This fact should present crucial new opportunities to educate young people in conflict resolution and in mutual accommodation.

Pivotal educational institutions such as the family, schools, community-based organizations, and the media have the power to shape attitudes and skills toward decent human relations or toward hatred and violence. If they really wish to be constructive, such organizations need to utilize the findings from research on intergroup relations and conflict resolution. They can use this knowledge in fostering positive reciprocity, cross-cutting relations, superordinate goals, and mutual aid.

Education everywhere needs to convey an accurate concept of a single, highly interdependent worldwide species - a vast extended family sharing fundamental human similarities a and a fragile planet. The give-and-take fostered within groups can be extended far beyond childhood to relations between adults and to larger units or organization, even covering international relations.

All research-based knowledge of human conflict, the diversity of our species, and the paths to mutual accommodation constitutes grist for the education mill. What follows is a sketch of some possibilities for making use of many different educational vehicles for learning to live together within nations and across national boundaries.

FOSTERING PROSOCIAL BEHAVIOR IN EARLY LIFE

In the context of secure attachment and valued adult models, provided by either a cohesive family or a more extended social support network, a child can learn certain social norms that are conductive to tolerance and a mutual aid ethic. Children can learn to take turns, share with others, cooperate especially in learning and problem solving, and help others in everyday life as well as in times of stress.

These norms, though established on a simple basis in the first few years of life, open the way, toward constructive human relationships that can have significance throughout the life span. Their practice earns respect from others, provides gratification, and increases confidence and competence. For this reason, both family, care and early intervention programs need to take account of the factors that influence the development of attachment and prosocial behavior. This is important in parent education, in child care centers, and in preschool education.

There is research evidence, both from direct observation and experimental studies, that settings that promote the requirements and expectations of prosocial behavior do in fact strengthen such behavior. For example, children who are responsible for tasks helpful to family maintenance, as in caring for younger siblings, are generally found to be more altruistic than children who do not have these prosocial experiences.

In experimental studies, typically an adult (presumably much like a parent) demonstrates a prosocial act like sharing toys, coins, or candy, that have been won in a game. The sharing is with someone else who is said to be in need though not present in the experimental situation. The adult plays the game and models the sharing before leaving the child to play. The results are clear. Children exposed to such modeling, when compared to similar children in control groups, tend to show the behavior manifested by the models, whether it be honesty, generosity, or altruism. Given the child's pensive exposure to parents and teachers, the potential for observational learning in this sphere as in others is very great. Prosocial behavior is particularly significant in adaptation because it is likely to open up new opportunities for the growing child, strengthen human relationships, and contribute to the building of self-esteem.

EMPATHY TRAINING

Empathy, defined as a shared emotional response between observer and subject, may be expressed as "Putting oneself in the shoes of another Person," Empathy training has been tested with eight- to ten-year-old in elementary school classrooms. in one program, children were given thirty hours of exercises in small groups of four to six. Activities were designed to increase their skill in identifying emotional responses and in taking the perspective of another. The intervention group was compared with two kinds of control groups.

The Participants in empathy training showed more Prosocial behavior, less aggression, and more positive self-concept than did children in either control group. This elementary school training model may provide a guide for the enhancement of empathy in other contexts for example, in learning to take the Perspective of other ethnic or religious groups. in any event, responding empathically in potential conflict situations helps to reduce hateful outcomes.

A FRAMEWORK FOR CONFLICT RESOLUTION IN THE SCHOOLS

Much of what schools can accomplish is similar to what parents can do - employ positive disciplinary practices, be democratic in procedure, teach the capacity for responsible decision making, foster cooperative learning procedures, an d guide children in prosocial behavior in the various spheres of their lives. They can convey in interesting ways the truth of human diversity and the humanity we all share. They can convey the fascination of other cultures, making understanding and respect a core attribute of their outlook on the world - including the capacity to interact effectively in the emerging global economy,.

Professor Morton Deutsch of Teachers College, Columbia University, a distinguished scholar in conflict resolution, has delineated programs that schools can use to promote attitudes, values, and knowledge that will help children develop constructive relations throughout their live-es. Such programs include cooperative learning, conflict resolution training, the constructive use of controversy, in teaching, and the creation of dispute resolution centers.

In his view, constructive conflict resolution is characterized by, cooperation, good communication, perception of similarity in beliefs and values among the parties, acceptance of the other's legitimacy, problem-centered negotiations, mutual trust and confidence, and information sharing. Destructive conflicts, in contrast, are characterized by harsh competition, poor communication, coercive tactics, suspicion, perception of basic differences in values, an innundation to increasing power differences, challenges to the legitimacy of other parties, and personal insecurity.

Efforts to educate on these matters are most effective where there is a substantial, in-depth curriculum with repeated opportunities to learn and practice cooperative conflict resolution skills. Students gain a realistic understanding of the amount of violence in society and the deadly consequences of such violence. They learn that violence begets violence, that there are healthy and unhealthy ways to express anger, and that nonviolent alternatives to dealing with conflict are available and will always be useful to them.

COOPERATIVE LEARNING

A substantial body of information during the past two decades has been generated from research on cooperative learning. These efforts stem in part from a desire to find alternatives to the usual lecture mode and to involve students actively in the learning process. They are inspired, moreover, by a mutual aid ethic and appreciation for student diversity. In cooperative learning, the traditional classroom of one teacher and many students is reorganized into heterogeneous groups of four or five students who work together to learn a particular subject matter, for instance, mathematics.

Research has demonstrated that student achievement is at least as high and often higher in cooperative learning activities as it is in traditional classroom activities. At the same time, cooperative learning methods promote positive interpersonal relations, motivation to learn, and self-esteem. These benefits are obtained in middle grade-schools and also high schools, for various subject areas and for a wide range of tasks and activities.

In my view, there are several overlapping yet distinctive concepts of cooperative learning that offer a powerful set of skills and assets for later life: learning to work together: learning that everyone can contribute in some way; learning that everyone is good at something: learning to appreciate diversity in various attributes: learning complementary of skills and a division of labor; learning mutual aid ethic. There is good reason why cooperative learning has lately simulated so much interest. It deserves more widespread utilization along with continuing research to broaden its applicability.

EARLY ADOLESCENCE: LEARNING LIFE SKILLS

The Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development's Working Group on Life Skills Training, chaired by Dr. Beatrix Hamburg, in 1990 provided the factual basis and organizing principles on which such interventions can be based. It also described a variety of exemplary programs.

One category of life skills is being assertive. An example of assertiveness in knowing how to take advantage of opportunities - for example, how to use community resources such as health and social services or job training. Another aspect is knowing how to resist pressure or intimation by peers and other to take drugs, carry weapons, or make irresponsible decisions about sex - and how to do this without spoiling relationships or isolating oneself. Yet another aspect of assertiveness is knowing how to resolve conflict in ways that make use of the full range of nonviolent opportunist that exist. Such skills can be taught not only in schools but in community organizations.

Required community service in high schools, indeed, even in middle grade schools can also be helpful in the shaping of responsible, sharing, altruistic behavior. It is important to have serious reflection on such community service, experience, to analyze its implications, and to learn ways to benefit from setbacks. How we help others is crucial. "Help" must not imply superiority over others but rather convey a sense of being full members of the community, sharing a common fate as human beings together. This orientation can usefully be an important part of parent education as well. As the development of parental competence increasingly comes .to be based on explicit courses of education and preparation for parenthood, the elements of caring for others, of reciprocity and of mutual understanding must be a key part of the task.

VIOLENCE PREVENTION IN ADOLESCENCE

A public health perspective suggests that the prevention strategies that have been successful in dealing with other behavior-related health problems, such as smoking, may be applicable to the problem of adolescent violence. Adolescent experimentation with behavior patterns and values offers an opportunity to develop alternatives to violent responses. A pioneering example is provided by the Boston Violence Prevention Program -a multi-institutional initiative with the goal of reducing fights, assaults, and intentional injuries among adolescents. It trains providers in diverse community settings in a violence prevention curriculum, promotes incorporation of this curriculum into service delivery, and creates a community consensus supportive of violence prevention. The program targets two poor Boston neighborhoods characterized by high violence rates. Its four principal components are curriculum development, community-based prevention education, clinical treatment services, and a media campaign.

The curriculum was first developed in 1983 by Dr. Deborah Prothrow-Stith. It acknowledged anger as a normal and potentially constructive emotion; alerted students to their high risk of being a perpetrator or victim of violence; helped, students find alternatives to fighting by discussing potential gains and losses; offered positive ways to deal with anger and arguments; encouraged students to analyze the precursors of fighting and to practice alternative conflict resolution by playing different roles; and created a classroom climate that is nonviolent.

During the initial stages of curriculum development, it became clear that intervention in the schools alone was insufficient. In 1986 a community-based component was initiated in which community educators provided violence prevention training to youth-serving agencies. Additional materials included informational flyers, a videotape, a rap song, cartoon characters, church sermons, and Sunday school sessions.

The project seeks to reach as many community settings as possible, including multi-service centers, recreation programs, housing developments, police stations and courts, religious institutions, neighborhood health centers, and schools. There is a referral network for health, education, and social services. The community campaign has produced television and radio public service announcements, posters, and T-shirts using the slogan, "Friends for fife don't let friends fight. " it focuses on peer Munches and the responsibility that friends have for helping to defuse conflict situations. It also includes a public television documentary.

Violence prevention efforts of such a systematic and extensive sort are very recent. it would be surprising if the first efforts were highly successful, because of the great complexity and difficulty of the tasks in terribly impaired neighborhoods. One clear finding is that the adolescents -and especially disadvantaged males - are urgently in need of dependable life skills and constructive social supports that foster health, education, and decent human relationships.

TELEVISION AND PROSOCIAL BEHAVIOR

Research has established causal relationships between children's viewing of either aggressive or prosocial behavior on television and their subsequent behavior. Children as young as two years old are facile at imitating televised behaviors. Television violence can affect a child's behavior at an early age and the effects can extend into adolescence. In general, the relationship between television violence and subsequent viewer behavior holds in a variety of countries. Cross-national studies show this in countries as diverse as Australia, Finland, Israel, the Netherlands, Poland, and the United States.

There is some research evidence that television need not be a school for violence - that it can be used in a way that reduces intergroup hostility. The relevant professions need to encourage the constructive use of this powerful tool to promote compassionate understanding, nonviolent problem solving, and decent intergroup relations.

Television can portray human diversity while highlighting shared human experiences. It can teach skills that are important for the social development of children and do so in a way that both entertains and educates. So far we have had only glimpses of its potential for reducing intergroup hostility.

Professor Gerald Lesser at Harvard University has summarized features of the children's educational television program, "Sesame Street," that are of interest in this context. The program originated in the United States in 1969 and appears today in I 00 other countries. Each program is fitted to the language, culture, and traditions of a particular nation. The atmosphere of respect for differences permeates all of the many versions of "Sesame Street."

Research from a variety of countries is encouraging. For example, the Canadian version of "Sesame Street" shows many sympathetic instances of English- and French-speaking children playing together. Children who see these examples of cross-group friendships are more likely to form such friendships on their own than are children who do not see them. The said is true for Dutch, Moroccan, Turkish, and Surinamese children who see "Sesame Street" in Holland. The findings suggest that ,appealing and constructive examples of social tolerance help young children to learn such behavior. These are tantalizing results, making us wish for a wide range of similar programing and experimentation.

LEARNING FROM ALL KINDS OF CONFLICTS

Processes of conflict resolution in any sphere should be examined for their implications in other spheres. it may well be that understanding of the processes of conflict resolution between groups within a nation will commitment enhance our ability to reduce conflict between nations -and vice versa.

Are there lessons to be learned from decent human relations in various spheres of life? Abundant experience and study at the level of interpersonal relations and small-group and community relations provide a way of thinking about decent relations between large groups and even nations. What are the major requirements?

1. Each party needs a basis for self-respect, a sense of belonging in a valued group, and a distinctive identity.

2. Each party needs dependability of communication with the other.

3. Each parry needs from the other a recognition of some shared interests and the fact of interdependence.

4. Each needs civil discourse, including the ability to understand the perspective of the other taken if they do not always agree. Disagreements can also be considered in a civil way. And both parties need to keep in mind their common humanity even - and especially - in times of adversity.

5. Each party has the possibility of earning the respect of the other-in a differentiated way, admiring some attributes but not others.

6. Boundaries for competition and disagreement can be recognized, even if they are sometimes dimly seen.

7. When boundaries fundamentally have to do, each violence, each party can seriously consider and reconsider from time to time the balance between interests of self and the interests of the other.

Such concepts of decent human relations have considerable operational significance in,daily-living. On the whole, they, serve the human species well at various levels of social organization. Could we learn to utilize them in relations between ethnic groups and even adversely powers? The experience of ending the Cold War suggests that this may be possible.

ROLE OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY

The growing threat of prejudicial ethnocentrism as a path to hatred, violence, and mass killing has to emerge as one of the major educational challenges of the next century, with international institutions play in important role. The international community can be a powerful force in broad public education on the entire problem of intergroup violence. It can help and reward conflict resolution leaders build education systems worldwide, and pro-vide useful, sensitive, early intervention.

It is of utmost importance for contending parties throughout the world to be educated on the nature, scope, and consequences of ethnocentric violence, particularly the action-reaction cycles in such violence, with the buildup of revenge motives; the tendency to assume hatred as an organizing principle for life and death; and the slippery slope of proliferation, escalation, and addiction to hatred and killing that emerges so readily in festering intergroup conflict.

Adversaries need to grasp how violent extremists and fanatics tend to take increasing control of the situation; they need to face up to the probable degradation of life -even annihilation -that will occur for all concerned in areas of intense fighting. The international community must make these dangers clear and vivid in the minds of populations involved in potential hot spots.

The policy community in much of the world is not deeply familiar with the principles and techniques of conflict resolution. it must become so, with the United Nations and the Secretary General playing one of the leading roles. The United Nations, respected widely throughout the world, could do more than it has done historically to educate public to the need and possibilities for resolving conflicts without violence. The Secretary General has a bully pulpit of formidable proportions.

Among other initiatives, the U.N. can sponsor world leadership seminars in cooperation with qualified nongovernmental organizations such as universities and research institutes. These leadership seminars might well include new heads of state, new foreign ministers, and new defense ministers.

Ongoing leadership seminars could also clarify how the U.N. and other institutions and organizations can help. Given the contemporary climate, it is singularly important that such seminars deal objectively and in a penetrating way with problems of nationalism, ethnocentrism, prejudice, hatred, and violence. Through the leadership seminars and a wider array of publications, the U.N. can make available the world's experience bearing on conflicts in general and on particular conflicts; on the responsible handling of weapons by governmental leaders and policy makers; on the likely consequences of weapons buildup, especially weapons of mass destruction; on the skills, knowledge base, and prestige properly associated with successful conflict resolution; on economic development, including the new uses of science and technology for development; and on cooperative behavior in the world community, including the handling of grievances.

THE GLOBAL REACH OF RADIO AND TELEVISION

The role of media is a powerful one, for better and for worse. Books, films, music, television, and radio all carry a variety of messages, both cognitive and emotional. The power of the mass media, and particularly television, has revised our concept of what constitutes reality.

Television directs attention to a subject beyond any previous medium's ability. It has the power to focus on one situation and instantly raise the world's awareness. Unfortunately, this power can be and often is used to, exacerbate conflict. Terrorists, for instance, have long recognized the power of television,, to give a small, inter- group international exposure to their cause.

Political power is more and more associated with media coverage. The primacy of television's linkage with political power was well demonstrated in the recent revolutionary events in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics, when control of television output was at the center of the struggle.

Television has immense latent capacity as a force for global transformation. The medium is deeply international, readily crossing boundaries. Each side in a war may be able to watch the other's television broadcasts. in divided Germany, most East Germans watched West German television, which provided an effective antidote to Communist government propaganda. With new digital technologies and more powerful satellites, it will be increasingly difficult to isolate a country from the global media. Cable News Network already has had a powerful effect through its global news distribution and extensive use of live broadcasting from sites on every continent. Although this was most vivid during the Gulf war, it is a daily fact of life on a global basis.

Television has great potential for reducing tensions between countries. it can be used to demystify the adversary and improve understanding. A Cold War example was provided by U.S.-Soviet space bridge programs - live, unedited discussion between the two countries made possible by satellites and simultaneous translation. Starting in 1983, U.S.-Soviet space bridges linked ordinary American and Soviet citizens in an effort to overcome stereotypes. Beginning before the Gorbachev era, they provided an opening to his policy of glasnost. Later, in the news' "Capital to Capital" program, broadcast simultaneously on ABC and on Soviet and Eastern European television, joined members of Congress and the Supreme Soviet for uncensored debate on an-ns control, human rights, and the future of Europe. These space bridge programs were seen by 200 million people at a time. Ted Koppel's "Night-line" program on ABC was dynamic in settings of this sort, especially between the U.S. and South Africa and between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The dramatic "Night-line" town meeting between Palestinians and Israel's in 1988 showed how television can foster reasonable dialogue on tender issues even among, old adversaries.

Independent, Pluralistic media are vital for democracy. They are the main vehicles for clarifying issues and for the public to understand candidates. In the first Post-Soviet Ukrainian election, President Leonid Kravchuk had total control over television throughout the process, whereas other candidates had hardly any access to it. Such elections cannot be considered free and fair. International election monitors must therefore observe access to the media as well as the voting itself.

Radio is exceedingly important because it reaches virtually everyone everywhere almost all the time. Hate radio has been all too effective in inciting violence - remember its role in Rwanda and Bosnia. What about reconciliation radio?

How can the international community foster education via the mass media with respect to prejudice, ethnocentrism, and conflict resolution? Leaders like the extremists in the former Yugoslavia reap political gain from stirring intense hatred among their people. The world is full of ethnic entrepreneurs and skillful demagogues putting acid on the scars, playing on ethnocentric sentiments for their own political purposes, and utilizing electronic media to get their messages across. By doing so they gain power, wealth, and high status. Is it possible to go over the heads of such leaders to educate their public directly about paths to conflict resolution? After all, it is the rank-and-file citizenry that absorbs the terrible bearing of these wars, not the leadership.

Can television and radio help in preventing or coping with deadly conflict within nations? What would be involved in such education? First and foremost, conveying the consequences of continuing on the path of hatred and violence. Television and radio could illuminate slaughter in various areas, both nearby and far away, where ethnocentric violence has gone unchecked and where the consequences for all participants have been far more dreadful than envisioned in the initial phase when wishful thinking predominated. Let adversaries see the disastrous course they are on now, one that others have followed and how much worse it can get the further it is pursued. Let them not be shielded from the consequences of atrocities in the way most Germans were in the events of the Holocaust.

Conflict areas need independent television and radio news channels broadcasting throughout the region. Mass media communication, not only about the consequences of ethnocentric violence, but also about the possibilities for conflict resolution, and the willingness of the international community to help, should become a vital component of the problem-solving machinery in ethnic conflicts.

Television and radio can also be useful in conflict resolution by clarifying how others have succeeded in achieving it: documentaries, for example, on the experiences of Western Europe after World War II, or programs on the transformation of Germany and Japan without revenge by the United States. Let those in hot spots learn about the best of what conflict resolution, civilized human relationships, and democratic institutions have done in the twentieth century and could do for them in the twenty-first.

In principle, it should even be possible to establish a nongovernmental international Educational Telecommunications System, that would effectively link organizations in many nations to sources of creative audiovisual learning materials. There could be an active pool of material over a wide range of content and format generated for a variety of purposes, mainly on peace and democracy, in rich and poor countries alike.

Financing might be provided to the new system through a mix of governmental and private funds from many nations. The highest standards could be ensured by an international commission of impeccable standing, The system would both provide venture capital for creative progaming and carefully select the best available material from the world's broadcasting storehouse.

It might present basic concepts, processes, and institutions on a level perhaps comparable to that of National Public Radio in the United States or the British Broadcasting Corporation in the United Kingdom. This could be done in a variety of languages and adapted to many cultures. In a relatively short time, it might be feasible to enhance the level of understanding throughout the world of what is involved in democracy and its Potential benefits for all especially in Providing reliable ways of coping with ubiquitous human conflicts without resorting to mass violence.

CONCLUDING COMMENT

Let me close with a crucial question for the human future: Can human groups achieve internal cohesion, self-respect and adaptative effectiveness without promoting hatred and violence? Altogether, we need to strengthen research and education on child development, prejudice, ethnocentrism, and conflict resolution to find out. We must generate new knowledge and explore vigorously the application of such knowledge to urgent problems in contemporary society.

Nowhere should the responsibility for promoting social tolerance be taken more seriously than among leaders of nations -not only in government but in business and media and other powerful institutions. They bear a heavy responsibility, all too often evaded, for utilizing the vehicles of mass education for constructive purposes. They can convey in words and actions an agenda for cooperation, caring, and decent human relations.

There is little in our very long history as a species to prepare us for this world we have suddenly made. Perhaps we cannot cope with it witness Bosnia and Rwanda. Still, it is not too late for a paradigm shift in our outlook toward human conflict. Perhaps it is something like learning that the earth is not flat. Such a shift in child development and education throughout the world might at long last make it possible for human groups to learn to live together in peace and mutual benefit.

President

Carnegie Corporation of New York

Copyright (c) 1988 by David Hamburg

Education for Conflict Resolution From the Carnegie Corporation Annual Report, Report of the President, 1994 pp. 4-15. Carenegie Corporation of New York, 437 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10022

MANUELA keeps dreaming about the village. She does not think about it very much in the daytime. Even when she thinks about Mexico, it is not usually about the village. In any case, during the day it is the brash, gleaming reality of California that dominates, its loud demand for full attention pushing into the background the old images and feelings. It is at night that the village comes back, reclaiming its power over Manuela. It is then as if she had never left it - or worse, as if she must inevitably return to it.

It is often very hot in the village, though at night one may freeze. The earth is dry. Time moves very slowly, as the white clouds move through the brightly blue sky over the brown and arid hills. Times moves slowly in the faces of the people too, and the faces too are brown and arid. Even the faces of the very young seem to hold old memories. The children do not smile easily. The day is measured by the halting motion of shadows over houses and trees. The years are mostly measured by calamities. The past is powerfully present, although there are few words for it. No one in the village speaks an Indian language, though everyone has Indian blood. Can the blood speak, without words? Do the dead speak from the earth? Somewhere in this blue sky and in these brown hills there are very old presences, more threatening than consoling. Some years ago the schoolteacher dug up some Indian artifacts and wanted to take them to the city, to sell them to a museum. Calamity struck at once, all over the village. The dead do not want to be disturbed, and they are dangerous.

The village is distant. Distant from what? Distant from everything, but most importantly distant from the places where time moves quickly and purposefully. There is no paved road, no telephone, no electricity. Even the schoolteacher only comes on two days of the week. He has two other villages to take care of, and he lives somewhere else. To get to the nearest bus station one rides on a donkey for three hours over footpaths of trampled dirt. Time and distance determine the world of the village, in fact and in Manuela's dreams. If she were to put it in one sentence, this world, she would have to say: It is very far away, and life there moves very slowly. On the maps the village is in the state of Guerrero, in a very specific location between Mexico City and the Pacific Ocean. In Manuela's dreams the village is located in the center of her self, deep down inside rather than out there somewhere.

Manuela was born in the village twenty-two years ago. Her mother died shortly afterward. Her father, already married to another woman with seven legitimate children, never acknowledged Manuela. Indeed, be has never spoken with her. She was raised by one of her mother's brothers, a man without land and much of the time without work, with a large family of his own that he barely managed to support. There was never any question about the family obligation to take care of Manuela; the only question at the time, lengthily discussed by her grandfather and the three uncles still living in the area, was which of the three would take the baby in. But this obligation did not greatly exceed supplying the bare necessities of life. There was never the slightest doubt about Manuel's status in her uncle's household as the unwanted bastard who took the food out of the mouths of her more deserving cousins- and she was told so in no uncertain terms on many occasions. If there was little food, she would be the hungriest. If there was hard work, she would be the one to do it. This does not mean that she received no affection. She was a very pretty, winsome child, and often people were kind to her. But she always knew that affection and kindness were not her right, were given to her gratuitously- and, by the same token, could be gratuitously taken away. As a child Manuela wished for someone who would love her all the time, reliably, "officially." However, she was only dimly unhappy in her uncle's household, since she knew nothing else. She was often hungry, sometimes beaten. She did not have shoes until her tenth birthday, when her grandfather made her a present of a pair. This was also the first occasion when she went outside the village, accompanying her grandfather on a visit to the doctor in the nearest town.

Her grandfather and one of her uncles in the village were ejidatarios, belonging to the minority that owned parcels of land under the village elido (agrictural cooperative). Most of the time the uncle with whom she stayed worked on this land, too, though be would hire himself out for work elsewhere when there was an opportunity. When she was not working in the house or taking' care of her little cousins, Manuela also worked in the fields or with the animals belonging to her family. After her tenth birthday she sometimes worked for outsiders, but she was expected to turn over the money she received for this. Sometimes she succeeded in keeping a few coins for herself, though she knew that she would be beaten if found out. She was allowed to school and, being very bright, she learned to read and write well. It was her brightness that attracted her grandfather, who was amused by her and took a liking to her (much to the annoyance of her cousins).

"Bad blood will show." "You will come to no good end. Like your mother." Manuela must have heard this hundreds of times during her childhood. The prophecy was fulfilled when she was fifteen and made pregnant by the secretary of eiido, one of the most affluent farmers in the village. When her condition could no longer be concealed, there was a terrible scene and her uncle threw her out of the house. Her grandfather, after slapping her a couple of times but mildly, gave her the address of an aunt in Acapulco and enough money to pay her busefare there. It was thus that she left the village.

Manuela, marveled at Acapulco and its astonishing sights, but needless to say, she lived there in a world far removed from that experienced by the tourists. Her Aunt, a gentle widow with two children and a maid's job in one of the big hotels, took Manuela in a very warmly (at least in part because she could use some help in the house). Manuela's baby was born there, a healthy boy whom she named Roberto. Not much later, Manuela also started to work outside the house.

A Mexican campestino, when he migrates, normally follows an itinerary taken before him by relatives and compadres. When he arrives, the latter provide an often intricate net-work of contacts that are indispensable for his adjustment to the new situation. They will provide initial housing, they can give information and advice, and, Perhaps most important, they serve is in informal labor exchange. Such a network awaited Manuela in Acapulco. In addition to the aunt she was staying with, there were two more aunts and an uncle with their respective families, including some twelve cousins of all ages. This family system, of course was transposed to the city from the village, but it took on a quite different character in the new context. Freed from the oppressive constraints of village life, the system, on the whole, was more benign. Manuela experience it as such. Several of her cousins took turns taking care of little Roberto when Manuela started to work. Her aunt's "fiancee" (a somewhat euphemistic term), who was head clerk in the linen supply department of the hotel, found Manuela a job in his department. The uncle, through a compadre who was head waiter to another hotel, helped her get a job there as a waitress. It was this uncle, incidentally, who had gone further than any other member of the Acapulco clan, at least for a brief time, an intelligent and aggressive man, he worked himself up in the municipal sanitation department to the rank of inspector. Through a coup, the details of which were shrouded in mystery, but which were safely assumed by everyone to involve fragility of heroic proportions, Uncle Pepe amassed the equivalent of about one thousand U.S. dollars in a few months time, a staggering sum in this ambience. With thus money, he set out for Mexico City, ostensibly to look into a business proposition. In fact he checked into one of the capitals finest hotels, made the rounds of nightclubs and luxury brothels, and returned penniless but not overly unhappy a month later. The clan has viewed him with considerable aw ever since.

Manuela now had a fairly steady cash income, modest to be sure, but enough to keep going. This does not mean, however, that she could keep all of it for herself and her child. The family system operated as a social insurance agency as well as a labor exchange, ind there was never a shortage of claimants. An Aunt required in operation. An older cousin set up business as a mechanic and needed some capital to start off. Another cousin was arrested and a substantial mordida was required to bribe his way out of jail. And then there were always new calamities back in the village, requiring emergency transfers of money back there. Not least among them was the chronic calamity of grandfather's kidney ailment, which consumed large quantities of family funds in expensive and generally futile medical treatments.

Sometimes, at the hotel, Manuela did baby-sitting for tourists with children. It was thus that she met the couple from California. They stayed in Acapulco for a whole month, and soon Manuela took care of their little girl almost daily. When they left the woman asked Manuela whether she wanted a job as a maid in the States. "Yes," replied Manuela at once, without thinking. The arrangements were made quickly. Roberto was put up with a cousin. Uncle Pepe, through two trusted intermediaries, arranged for Manuela to cross the border illegally. Within a month she arrived at the couples address in California.

And now she his been here for over a year. California was even more astonishing than Acapulco had been when she first left the village, but now she had more time to explore this new world. She learned English in a s hort time, and in the company of a Cuban girl who worked for a neighbor, she started forays into the American universe, in ever-wider circles from her employers' house. She even took bus trips to Hollywood and San Francisco. For the first time in her life, she slept in a room all by herself. And despite her regular payments for Roberto's keep, she started to save money and put it in a bank account. Most important, when started to think about her life in a new way, systematically. "What will become of you when you go back?" asked the American woman one day. Manuela did not know then, but she started to think. Carmelita, the Cuban girl, discussed the matter with her many times - in exchange for equal attention paid to her own planning exercises. Eventually, one project won out over all the alternatives: Manuela would return to go to commercial school, to become a bilingual secretary. She even started a typing course in California. But she would not return to Acapulco. She knew that, to succeed, she would have to remove herself from the family there. She would go to Mexico City, first alone, and then she would send for Roberto.

This last decision was made gradually. It was the letters that did it. Manuela, some months before, had mentioned the amount of money she had saved (a very large amount, by her standards, and enough to keep her and Roberto afloat for the duration of the commercial course). Then the letters started coming from just about everyone in the Acapulco clan. Most of the contents were family gossip, inquiries about Manuela's life in the States, and long expressions of affectionate feelings. There were frequent reminders not to forget her relatives, who took such good care of Roberto. Only gradually did the economic infrastructure emerge from this. There was to be a fiesta at the wedding of a cousin, and could Manuela make a small contribution. The cousin who had been in jail was still to be tried and there were lawyer's expenses. Uncle Pepe was onto the most promising business opportunity of his "long and distinguished career in financial activities" (his own words) and just three hundred American dollars would make it possible for him to avail himself of this never-to-recur opportunity - needless to say, Manuela would be a full partner upon her return. Finally, there was even a formal letter from grandfather, all the way from the village, containing an appeal for funds to pay for a trip to the capital so as to take advantage of a new treatment that a famous doctor had developed there. It took a while for Manuela to grasp that every dollar of her savings had already been mentally spent by her relatives.

The choice before Manuela now is sharp and crystal clear: She must return to Mexico - because she wants to, because of Roberto, and because the American authorities would send her back sooner or later anyway. She can then return to the welcoming bosom of the family system, surrender her savings, and return to her previous way of life. Or she can carry through her plan in the face of family opposition. The choice is not only between two courses of action, but between two moralities. The first course is dictated by the morality of collective solidarity, the second by the morality of personal autonomy and advancement. Each morality condemns the other - as uncaring selfishness in the former case as irresponsible disregard of her own potential and the welfare of her son in the latter. Poor Manuela's conscience is divided; by now she is capable of feeling its pangs either way.

She is in America, not in Mexico, and the new morality gets more support from her immediate surroundings. Carmelita is all for the plan, and so are most of the Spanish-speaking girls with whom Manuela has been going out. Only one, another Mexican, expressed doubt: "I don't know. Your grandfather is ill, and your uncle helped you a lot in the past. Can you just forget them? I think that one must always help one's relatives." Manuela once talked about the matter with the American woman. "Nonsense", said the latter, "You should go ahead with your plan. You owe it to yourself and to your son." So this is what Manuela intends to do, very soon now. But she is not at ease with the decision. Every time another letter arrives form Mexico, she hesitates before opening it, and she fortifies herself against the appeals she knows to be there.

Each decision, as dictated by the respective morality, has predictable consequences: If Manuela follows the old morality, she will, in all likelihood, never raise herself or her sone above the level she achieved in Acapulco - not quite at the bottom of the social scale, but not very far above it. If, on the other hand, she decide in accordance with the new morality (new for her, that is), she has at least a chance of making it up one important step on that scale. Her son will benefit form this, but probably no other of her relatives will. To take that step she must, literally, hack off all those hands that would hold her back. It is a grim choice indeed.

What will Manuela do? She will probably at least start out on her plan. Perhaps she will succeed. Bu once she is back in Mexico, the tentacles of the old solidarity will be more powerful. They will pull more strongly. It will be harder to escape than other village, the village of the mind within herself. The outcome of the struggle will decide whether the village will be Manuela's past or also her future. Outside observers should think very carefully indeed before they take sides in this contest.

Manuela's story is fiction, made up as a composite from several true stories. Manuela does not exist. But many Manuela do exist, not only in Mexico, but all over the Third World. Their moral dilemma must be understood if one is to understand "development."

Copyright (c) 1988 by Peter Berger

Pyramids of Sacrifice: Political Ethics and Social Change

Anchor Books: Garden City, New York (1976)

EDITOR'S NOTE: The !Kung and other Bushmen speak click languages. In the story, three different clicks are used.-

1. The dental click 0, as in lailai, lontah, and Igaugo. The click is sometimes written in English as tsk-tsk.

2. The alveopalatal click (!), as in Benla and !Kung.

3. The lateralclick (//), as in ll gom. Clicks function as consonants; a word may have more than one, as in In!au.

The !Kung Bushmen's knowledge of Christmas is thirdhand. The London Missionary Society broughtthe holidaytothe southern Tswana tribes in theearly nineteenth century. Later, native catechistsspreadthe ideafarand wide amongthe Bantu-speakingpastoralists, even inthe most remote corners of the Kalahari Desert. The Bushmen's idea of the Christmas story, stripped to its essentials, is "Praise the birth of white man's god-chief; what keeps their interest in the holiday high is the Tswana-Herero custom of slaughtering an ox for his Bushmen neighbors as an annual goodwill gesture. Since the 1930s, part of the Bushmen's annual round of activities has included a December congregation at the cattle posts for trading, marriage brokering, and several days of trance-dance feasting at which the local Tswana headman is host.

As a social anthropologist working with !Kung Bushmen, I found that the Christmas ox custom suited my purposes. I had come to the Kalahari to study the hunting and gathering subsistence economy of the!Kung, and to accomplish this itwas essential notto providethem withfood, sharemyown food,or interfere in anywaywith their food-gathering activities while liberal handouts of tobacco and medical supplies were appreciated, they were scarcely adequate to erase the glaring disparity in wealth between the anthropologist, who maintained a two-month inventory of canned goods, and the Bushmen, who rarely had a day's supply of food on hand. My approach, while paying off in terms of data, left me open to frequent accusations of stinginess and hard-heartedness. By their lights, I was a miser.

The Christmas ox was to be my way of saying thank you for the cooperation of the past year; and since it was to be our last Christmas in the field, I determined to slaughter the largest, meatiest ox that money could buy, insuring that the feast and trance-dance would be a success.

Through December I kept my eyes open at the welIs as the cattle were brought down for watering. Several animals were offered, but none had quite the grossness that I had in mind. Then, ten days before the holiday, a Herero friend led an ox of astonishing size and mass up our camp. It was solid black, stood five feet high at the shoulder, had a fve-foot span of horns, and must have weiged 1,200 pounds on the hoof. Food consumption calculations are my specialty, and I quickly figured that bones and viscera aside, there was enough meat -at least four pounds - for every man, woman, and child of the 150 Bushmen in the vicinity of /ai/ai who were expected at the feast.

Having found the right animal at last, I paid the Herero L2O ($56) and asked him to keep the beast with his herd until Christmnas day. The next morning word spread among the people that the big solid blackone was the ox chosen by/ontah (my Bushman name; it means, roughly, whitey) for the Christmas feast. That afternoon I received the first delegation. Ben!a, an outspoken sixty-year-old mother of five, came to the point slowly.

"Where were you planning to eat Christmas?'

"Right here at /ai/ai,' I replied.

"Alone or with others?"

"I expect to invite all the people to eat Christmas with me.'

'Eat what?'

"I have purchased Yehave's black ox, and I am going to slaughter and cook it."

'That's what we were told at the well but refused to believe it until we heard it from

yourseIf"

"Well, it's the black one," I replied expansively, although wondering what she was driving at.

'Oh, no!' Ben!a groaned, turning to her group. 'They were right.' Turning back to me

she asked, "Do you expect us to eat that bag of bones?"

"Bag of bones! it's the biggest ox at /ai/ai.'

"Big, yes, but old. And thin. Everybody knows there's no meat on that old ox. What did you expect us to eat off it, the horns?"

Everybody chuckled at Ben!alsone-liner as they walked away, but all I could manage was a weak grin.

That evening it was the turn of the young men. They came to sit at our evening fire. /gaugo, about my age, spoke to me man-to-man.

"/ontah, you have always been square with us," he lied. "What has happened to change your heart? That sack of guts and bones of Yehave's will hardly feed one camp, let alone all the Bushmen around/ai/ai.'And he proceeded to enumerate the seven camps in the/ai/ai vicinity, family by family. "Perhaps you have forgotten that we are not few, but many. Or are you too blind to tell the difference between a proper cow and an old wreck? That ox is thin to the point of death."

'Look, you guys,' I retorted, mthat is a beautiful animal, and I'm sure you wi II eat it with' Pleasure at Christmas."

'Of coursewe will eat it; it's food. But it won't fill us up tothe point where we will have enough strength to dance. we will eat and go home to bed with stomachs rumbling."

That night as we turned in, I asked my wife, Nancy: "What did you think of the black ox?" It looked enormous to me. Why?'

Well, about eight different people have told me I got gypped; that the ox is nothing but bones."

"What's the angle?" Nancy asked. "Did they have a better one to sell?"

"No, they just said that it was going to be a grim Christmas because there won't be enough meat to go around. maybe I'l I get an independent judge to look at the beast in the morning. Bright and early, Halingisi, a Tswana cattle owner, appeared at our camp. But before I could ask him to give me his opinion on Yehave's black ox, he gave me the eye signal that indicated a confidential chat. we left the camp and sat down.

"/ontah, I'm surprised at you: you've lived here for three years and still haven't learned anything about cattle."

"But what else can a person do but choose the biggest, strongest animal one can find?" I retorted.

"Look ,jus tbecause an animal is big doesn't mean that it has plenty of meat on it. The black one was a beauty when it was younger, but now it is thin to the point of death."

"Well I've already bought it. what can I do at this stage?"

"Bought it already? I thought you were just considering it. Well, you'll have to kill it and serve it, I suppose. But don't expect much of a dance to follow."

My spirits dropped rapidly. I could believethat Ben!a and/gaugojust might be putting me on about the black ox, but Halingisi seemed to be an impartial critic. I went around that day feeling as though I had bought a lemon of a used car.

In the afternoon it was to Tomazo'sturn. Tomazo is a fine hunter, a top trance performer (see "The Trance Cure of the! Kung Bushmen,' Natural History, November, 1967), and one of my most reliable informants. He approached the subject of the Christmas cow as part of my continuing Bushmen education.

'My friend, the way it is with us Bushmen," he began, "is that we love meat. And even more than that, we love fat. When we hunt we always search forthe fat ones, the ones dripping with layersof white fat: fatthatturns into a clear, thick oil in the cooking pot, fatthat slides down your gullet, fills your stomach and gives you a roaring diarrhea," he rhapsodized.

"So, feeling as we do," he continued, "it gives us pain to be served such a scrawny thing as Yehave's black ox. it is big, yes, and no doubt its giant bones are good for soup, but fat is what we really crave and so we will eat Christmas this year with a heavy heart.

The prospect of a gloomy Christmas now had meworried, so I asked Tomazo what I could do about it.

"Look for a fat one, a young one ... smaller, but fat. Fat enough to make us //gom (evacuate the bowels'), then we will be happy."

My suspicions were aroused when Tomazo said that he happened to know of a young, fat, barren cow that the owner was willing to part with. Was Toma working on commission, I wondered? But I dispelled this unworthy thought when we approached the Herero owner of the cow in question and found that he had decided not to sell.

The scrawny wreck of a Christmas ox now became the talk of the /ai/ai water hole and wasthe first newstold tothe outlyinggroups as they began to come in fromthe bush forthe feast. What finally convinced me that real trouble might be brewing as the visit from u!au, an old conservative with a reputation for fierceness. His nickname meant spear and referred to an incident thirty years ago in which he had speared a man to death. He had an intense manner; fixing me with his eyes, he said in clipped tones:

"I have only just heard about the black ox today, or else I would have come here earlier. /ontah, do you honestly think you can serve meat like that to people and avoid a fight?" He

paused, letting the implications sink in. "I don't mean fight you, /ontah; you are a white man. I mean a fight between Bushmen. There are many fierce ones here, and with such a small quantity of meat to distribut, how can you give everybody a fair share? Someone is sure to accuse another of taking too much or hogging all the hcoice pieces. Then you will see what hapens when some go hunry while others eat.

The possibility of at least aserious argument struck me as all too real. I had witnessed the tension that surrounds the distribution of meat from a kudu or gemsbok kill, and had documented many arguments that sprang up from a real or imagined slight in meat distribution. The owners of a kill may spend up to two hours arranging and rearranging the piles of meat under the gaze of a circle of recipients before handing them out. And I also knew that the Christmas feast at /ai/ai would be bringing together groups that had feuded in the past. Convinced now of the gravityof the situation, I went in earnest to search for a second cow; but all my inquiries failed to turn one up.

The Christmas feast was evidently going to be a disaster, and the incessant complaints aboutthemeagernessoftheoxhad alreadytakenthefun outof itforme. Moreover, lwasgetting bored with the wisecracks, and after losing my temper a few times, I resolved to serve the beast anyway. if the meat fell short, the hell with it. In the Bushmen idiom, I announced to alI who would listen:

"I am a poorman and blind. if I have chosen one that istooold and toothin, we will eat it anyway and see if there is enough meat there to quiet the rumbling of our stomachs."

On hearing this speech, Benia offered me a rare word of comfort. 'Its thin,' she said

philosophically, obut the bones will make a good soup."

At dawn Christmas morning, instinct told me to turn over the butchering and cooking to a friend and take off with Nancy to spend Christmas alone in the bush. But curiosity kept me from retreating. I wanted to see what such a scrawny ox looked like on butchering, and if there was going to be a fight, I wanted to catch every word of it. Anthropologists are incurable that way.

The great beast was driven up to our dancing group, and a shot in the forehead dropped it in its tracks. Then, freshly cut branches were heaped around the fallen carcass to receive the meat. Ten men volunteered to help with the cutting. I asked /gaugoto make the breast bone cut. This cut, which begins the -butchering process for most large game, offers easy access for removal of the viscera. But it also allows the hunter to spot-check the amount of fat on the animal. A fat game animal carries a white layer up to an inch thick on the chest, while in a thin one, the knife will quickly cutto bone. All eyes fixed on his hand as/gaugo, dwarfed by the great carcass, knelt to the breast. The first cut opened a pool of solid white in the black skin. The second and third cut widened and deepened the creamy white. Still no bone. It was pure fat; it must have been two inches thick.

'Heylgau,' I burstout, "thatox is loaded with fat. What's this about the ox being too thin to bother eating? Are you out of your mind?'

'Fat?'/gau shotback, "You call that fat? This wreck is thin, sick, dead" And he broke out laughing. So did everyone else. They rolled on the ground, paralyzed with laughter. Everybody laughed except me; I was thinking.

I ran back to the tent and burst in just as Nancy was getting up. 'Hey, the black ox. It's fat as hell! They were kidding about it being too thin to eat. It was a joke or something. A put-on. Everyone is really delighted with it!"

'Some joke," my wife replied. "it was so funny that you were ready to pack up and leave /ai/ai.'

If it had indeed been a joke, it had been an extraordinarily convincing one, and tinged, I thought, with more than a touch of malice as many jokes are. Nevertheiess, that it was a joke lifted my spirits considerably, and I returned to the butchering site where the shape of the ox was rapidly disappearing under the axes and knives of the butchers. The atmosphere had become festive. Grinning broadly, their arms covered with blood well past the elbow, men packed chunks of meat into the big cast-iron cooking pots, fifty pounds to the load, and muttered and chuckled all the while about the thinness and worthieness of the animal and /ontah's poor judgment.

We danced and ate that ox two days and two nights; we cooked and distributed fourteen potfuls of meat and no one went home hungry and no fights broke out.

But the 'joke' stayed in my mind. I had a growing feeling that something important had happened in my relationship with the Bushmen and that the clue lay in the meaning of the joke. Several days later, when most of the people had dispersed back to the bush camps, I raised the question with Hakekgose, Tatswana man who had grown up among the !Kung, married a!Kung girl, and who probably knew their culture better than any other non-Bushman.

'With us whites,' I began, Christmas is supposed to be the day of friendship and brotherly love. what I can't figure out is why the Bushmen went to such lengths to criticize and belittle the ox I had bought for the feast. The animal was perfectly good and their jokes and wisecracks practically ruined the holiday for me."

"So it really did bother you," said Hakekgose. "Well, that's the way they always talk when I take my rifle and go hunting with them, if I miss, they laugh at me for the rest of the day. But even if I hit and bring one down, it's no better. To them, the kill is always too small or too old or too thin; and aswe sit down on the kill site to cook and eatthe liver, they keep grumbling, even with their mouths full of meat. They say things like, 'Oh this is awful! What a worthless animal! Whatever made me think that this Tswana rascal could hunt!"

"Is this the way outsiders are treated?" I asked.

'No, it is their custom; they talk that way to each other too. Go and ask them. if

/gaugo had been one of the most enthusiastic in making me feel bad about the merit of the Christmas ox. I sough him out first.

"Why did you tell me the black ox was worthless, when you could seethat itwas loaded with fat and meat?"

'It is our way,' he said smiling. "We always like to fool people about that. Say there is a Bushman who has been hunting. He must not come home and announce like a braggarts have killed a big one in the bush!' He must first sit down in silence until I or someone else comes up to his fire and asks,'What did you see today?' He replies quietly, 'Ah, I'm no good for hunting. I saw nothing at all [pause] just a little tiny one.' Then I smile to myself," /gaugo continued, mbecause I know he has killed something big.

'In the morning we make up a party of four or five people to cut up and carry the meat back to the camp. when we arrive at the kill we examine it and cry out, 'You mean to say you have dragged us all the way out here in order to make us cart home your pile of bones? Oh, if I had known it was this thin I wouldn't have come.'Another one pipes up, 'People, to think I gave up a nice day in the shade for this. At home we may be hungry but at least we have nice cool water to drink.' if the horns are big, someone says, 'Did you think that somehow you were going to boil down the horns for soup?'

"To all this you must respond..in kind. 'I agree,' you say, 'this one is not worth the effort: let's just cook the liver for strength and leave the rest forthe hyenas. It is not too late to hunt today and even a duiker or a steenbok would be better than this mess.'

Then you set to work nevertheless; butcher the animal, carry the meat back to the camp and everyone eats.' /gaugo concluded.

Things were beginning to make sense. Next, I went to Tomazo. He corroborated /gaugo's story of the obligatory insults over a kill and added a few details of his own.

But,' I asked, 'why insult a man after he has gone to all that trouble to track and kiII an animal and when he is going to share the meat with you so that your children will have something to eat?"

'Arrogance,' was his cryptic answer.

"Arrogance?"

"Yes, when a young man kills much meat he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors. We can't accept this. We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. This way we cool his heart and make him gentle."

'But why didn't you tell me this before?" I asked Tomazo with some heat.

'Because you never asked me," said Tomazo, echoing the refrain that has come to haunt every field ethnographer.

The pieces now fell into place. I had known for a long time that in situations of social conflictwith Bushmen I held all the cards. I wastheonly sourceoftobacco in athousand square miles, and I was not incapable of cutting an individual off for noncooperation. Though my boycott neveriasted longerthan afewdays, itwas an indication of mystrength. People resented my presence at the water hole, yet simultaneously dreaded my leaving. In short I was a perfect target for the charge of arrogance and for the Bushmen tactic of enforcing humility.

I had been taught an object lesson by the Bushmen; it had come from an unexpected corner and had hurt me in a vulnerable area. For the big black ox was to be the one totally generous, unstinting act of my year at /ai/ai, and I was quite unprepared for the reaction I received.

As I read it, their message was this: There are no totally generous acts. AlI "acts" have an element of calculation. One black ox slaughtered at Christmas does not wipe out a year of careful manipulation of gifts given to serve yourown ends. After all, to kill an animal and share the meat with people is really no more than Bushmen do for each other every day and with far less fanfare.

In the end, I had to admire how the Bushmen had played out the farce - collectively straight-faced to the end. Curiously, the episode reminded me of the Good Soldier Schweik and his marvelous encounters with authority. Like Schweik, the Bushmen had retained a thoroughgoing skepticism of good intentions. Was it this independence of spirit, I wondered, that had kept them culturally viable in the face of generations of contact with more powerful societies, both black and white? The thought that the Bushmen were alive and well in the Kalahari was strangely comforting. Perhaps, armed with that independence and with their superb knowledge of their environment, they might yet survive the future.

Copyright (c) 1988 by Jaime S. Wurzel

Toward Multiculturalism: A Reader in Multicultural Education by Jaime S. Wurzel

Intercultural Press, Inc. Yarmouth, Maine (1988)

with C. P. Ellis by Studs Terkel

We're in his office in Durham, North Carolina. He is the business manager of the International Union of Operating Engineers. On the wall is a plaque: "Certificate of Service, in recognition to CP. Ellis, for your faithful service to the city in having served as a member of the Durham Human Relations Council. February 1977.'

At one time, he had beenpresident (exalted cyclops) ofthe Durham chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. He is fifty-three years old.

My father worked in a textile mill in Durham. He died at forty-eight years old. it was probably from cotton dust. Back then, we never heard of brown I ung. I was about seventeen years old and had a mother and sisterdepending on somebodyto make a livin'. It was just barely enough insuranceto cover his burial. I had toquitschool and gotowork. I was about eighth grade when I quit.

My father worked hard but never had enough money to buy decent clothes. When I went to school, I never seemed to have adequate clothes to wear. I always left,school late afternoon with a sense of inferiority. The other kids had nice clothes, and I just had what Daddy could buy. I still got some of those inferiority feelin's now that I have to overcome once in a while.

I loved my father. He would go with me to ball games. We'd go fishin' together. l was really ashamed of the way he'd dress. He would take this money and give it to me instead of putting it on himself. I always had the Ruling about somebody looking at him and makin' fun of him and makin' fun of me. I think it had to do somethin'with my life.

My father and I were very close, but we didn't talk about too many intimate things. He did have a drinking problem. Duringthe week, he would work every day, but weekend he was readyto got plastered. I can understand when a guy looks at his paycheck and looks at his bills, larger than his paycheck. He'd done the best he could the entire week, and there seemed to be no hope. It's an illness thing. Finally you just say: "Theheck with it. I'll just get drunk and forget it."

My father was out of work during the depression, and I remember going with him to the finance company uptown and he was turned down. That's something that's always stuck.

My father never seemed to be happy. It was a constant struggle with him just like it was for me. It's seldom I'd see him laugh. He was just tryin' to figure out what he could do form one day to the next.

After several years pumping gas at a service station, I got married. We had to have children. Four. One child was born blind and retarded, which was a real additional expense to us. He's never spoken a word. He doesn't know me when I go to see him. But I see him, I hug his neck. I talk to him, tell him I love him. I don't know whether he knows me or not, but I know he's well taken care of. All my life, I had to work, never a day without work, worked all the oertime i could get and still could not survive financially. I began to say there's somethin' wrong with this country. I worked my butt off and just never seemed to break even.

I had some real great ideas about this great nation. (Laughs). They say to abide by the law, go to church, do right and live for the Lord, and everything'll work out. But it didn't work out. It just kept gettin' worse and worse.

I was workin' a bread route. The hightest I made one week was seventy-five dollars. The rent oun our house was about welve dollars a week. I will never forget: outside of this house was a 265-gallon oil drum, and I never did get enough money to fill up that oil drum. What i would do every night, I would run up to the store and buy five gallons of oil and climb up the ladder and pour it in that 265 gallon drum. I could hear that five gallons when it hits the bottom of that oil drum, splatters, and it sounds like it's nothin'‘ in there. But it would keep the house warm for the night. Next day you'd have to do the same thing.

I left the bread rout with fifty dollars in my pocket. I went to the bank and I borrowed four thousand dollars to buy the service station. I worked seven days a week, open and close and finally had a heart attack. Just about two months before the last payments of that loan. My wife had done the best she could to keep it runnin'. Tryin' to come out of that hole, I just couldn't do it.

I really began to get bitter. I didn't know who to blame. I tried to find somebody. I began to blame it on black people. I had to hate somebody. Hatin' America is hard to do because you can't see it to hate it. You gotta have somthin' to look at to hate. (Laughs). The natural person for me to hate would be black people, becuase my father before me was a member of the Klan. As far as he was concerned, it was the savior of the white people. It was the only organization in the world that woudl take care of the white people. So I began to admire the Klan.

I got active in the Klan while Iw as at the service station. Every Monday night, a gorup of men would come by and buy a Coca-Cola, go back to the car, take a few drinks, and come back and stand around talkin'. I couldn't help but wonder: Why are these dudes comin' out every Monday? They said they were with the Klan and have meetins close-by. Would I be interested? Boy that was an opportunity I really looked forward to! To be part of somthin'. I joined hte Klan, went from member to chaplain, from chaplian to vice-president, from vice-president to president. The title is exalted cyclops.

The first night I went wiht the fellas, they knocked on the door and gave the signal. They sent some robed Klansmen to talk to me and give me some instructions. I was led into a large meeting room, and this was the time of my life! It was thrilling. Here's a guy who's worked all his life and struggled all his life to be something and here's the momemtn to be somehting. I will never forget it. Four robed Klansmen led me into the hall. The lights were dim, and the only thing you could see was anilluminated cross. I knelt before the cross. I had to make certain vows and promises. We promised to uphold the purity of the white race, fight communism, and protect white womanhood.

After I had taken my oath, there was loud applause goin'throughout the buildin', musta been at leastfour hundred people. Forthisone little ol'person. itwas athrilling momentfor C.P. Ellis.

lt disturbs me when people who do not really know what it's all about are so very critical of individual Klansmen. The majority of'em are low-income whites, people who really don't have a part in something. They have been shut out as well asthe blacks. Some are not verywell educated either. just like myself. We had a lot of support from doctors and lawyers and police officers.

Maybe they've had bitter experiences in this life and they had to hate somebody. So the natural person to hate would be the black person. He's beginning' to come up, he's beginning' to learn to read and start votin' and run for political office. Here are white people who are supposed to be superior to them, and we're shut out.

I can understand why people join extreme right-wing or left-wing groups. They're in the same boat I was. Shut out. Deep down inside, we want to be part of this great society. Nobody listens, so we join these groups.

At one time, I was state organizer of the National Rights party. I organized a youth group for the Klan. I felt we were getting old and our generation's gonna die. So I contacted certain kids in schools. They were havin' racial problems. On the first night, we had a hundred high school students. when they came in the door, we had 'Dixie' playin'. These kids were just thrilled to death. I begin to hold weekly meetin's with 'em, teachin'the principles of the Klan. At that time, I believed Martin Luther King had Communist connections. I began to teach that Andy Young was affiliated with the Communist party.

I had a call one night from one of our kids. He was about twelve. He said: 'I just been robbed downtown by two niggers." I'd had a couple of drinks and that really teed me off. I go downtown and couldn't find the kid. I got worried. I sawtwo young black people. I had the.32 revolver with me. I said: 'Nigger, you seen a little young white boy up here? I just got a call from him and was told that some niggers robbed him of fifteen cents." I pulled my pistol out and put it right at his head. I said: 'I've always wanted to kill a nigger and I think I'll make you the first one." I nearly scared the kid to death, and he struck off.

Thiswasthetimewhenthe civil rights movementwas really beginnin'to peak. The blacks were beginnin'to demonstrate and picketdowntown stores. I never will forget some black lady I hated with a purple passion. Ann Atwater. Every time I'd go downtown, she'd be leadin' a boycott. How I hated-pardon the expression, I don't use it much now-how I just hated that black nigger. (Laughs.) Big, fat, heavywoman. She'd pull about eight demonstrations, and first thing you know they had two, three blacks at the checkout counter. Her and I have had some pretty close confrontations.

I felt very big, yeah. (Laughs.) we're more or less a secret organization. We didn't want anybodyto knowwhowewere, and I began to dosome thinkin'. Whatam I hidin'for? I've never been convicted of anything in my life. I don't have any court record. What am I, C.P. Ellis, as a citizen and a member of the United Klansmen of America? Why can't I go to the city council meeting and say: "This is the way we feel about the matter? We don't want you to purchase mobile units to. set in our schoolyards. We don't want niggers in our schools."

We began to come out in the open. We would go to the meetings, and the blacks would be there and we'd be there. it was a confrontation every time. I didn't hold back anything. We began to make some inroads with the city councilmen and county commissioners. They began to call us friend. Call us at night on the telephone: "C.P., glad you came to that meeting last night."

They didn't want integration either, but they did it secretively, in order to get elected.

Thy couldn't stand up openly and say it, butthey were glad somebody was sayin' it. We visited some of the city leaders intheir home and talktolem privately. itwasn't long before councilmen would call me up: uthe blacks are comin' up tonight and makin' outrageous demands. How about some of you people showin' up and have a little balance?' I'd get on the telephone: 'The niggers is comin' to the council meeting tonight. Persons in the city's cal led me and asked us to be there."

We'd load up our cars and we'd fill up half the council chambers, and the blacks the other half. During these times, I carried weapons to the meetings, outside my belt. We'd go there armed. We would wind up just hollerin'and fussin' at each other. What happened? As a result of our fightin' one another, the city council still had their way. They didn't want to give up control to the blacks nor the Klan. They were usin' us.

I began to realizethis later down the road. oneday I was walkin'downtown and a certain city council member saw me comin'. I expected him to shake my hand because he was talkin' to me at night on the tel ephone. I had been in his home and visited with him. He crossed the street. Oh shit, I began to think, somethin's wrong here. Most of 'em are merchants or maybe an attorney, an insurance agent, people like that. As long as they kept low-income whites and low-income blacks fightin', they're gonna maintain control.

I began to get that feeling after I was ignored in public. I thought: Bullshit,you're not gonna use me any more. That's when I began to do some real serious thinkin'.

The same things is happening in this country today. People are being used by those in control, those who have all the wealth. I'm not espousing communism. We got the greatest system of government in the world. But those who have it simply don't want those who don't have it to have any part of it. Black and white. When it comes.to money, the green, the other colors make no difference. (Laughs.)

I spent a lot of sleepless nights. I still didn't like blacks. I didn' twant to associate with'em. Blacks, Jews, or Catholics. My father said: "Don't have anything to do with lem.' I didn't until I met a black person and talked with him, eyeball to eyeball, and met aiewish person and talked to him, eyeball to eyeball. I found outthey're people just like me. They cried, they cussed, they prayed, they had desires. just like myself. Thank God, I got to the point where I can look past labels. But at that time, my mind was closed.

I remember one Monday night Klan meeting. I said something waswrong. Our city fathers were using us. And I didn't like to be used. The reactions of the others was not too pleasant: "Let's just keep fightin' them niggers.

I'd go home at night and I'd have to wrestle with myself. I'd look at a black person walkin' down the street, and the guy'd have ragged shoes or his clothes would be worn. That began to do somethin' to me inside. I went through this for about six months. I felt I just had to get out of the Klan. But I wouldn't get out.

Then something happened. The state AFL-CIO received a grant from the Department of HEW, a $78,000 grant: howto solve racial problems in the school system. I got atelephone call from the president of the state AFL-CIO. 'We'd liketo get some people together from all walks of life." I said: "All walks of life? Who you talkin' about?' He said: "Blacks, whites, liberals, conservatives, Klansmen, NAACP people."

I said: 'Noway am I comin'with all those niggers. I'm notgonna be associated with those type of people." A White Citizens Council guy said: 'Let's go upthere and see what's goin'on. It's tax money bein' spent. I walk in the door, and there was a large number of blacks and white liberals. I knew most of'em by face' cause I seen'em demonstratin' around town. Ann Atwater was there. (Laughs.) I just forced myself to go in and sit down.

The meeting was moderated by ag reat big black guy who was bushy-headed. (Laughs.) That turned me off. He acted very nice. He said "I want you all to feel free to say anything you want to say." Some of the blacks stand up and say it's white racism. I took all I could take. I asked for the floor and I cut loose. I said: "No sir, it's black rasism. If we didn't have niggers in the schools, we wouldn't have the problems we got today."

I will never forget. Howard Clements, a black guy stood up. He said. "I'm certainly glad C. P. Ellis come becuase he's the most honest man here tonight." I said "What's that nigger tryin' to do?" (Laughs). At the end of that meeting, some blacks tried to come up shake my hand, but I wouldn't do it. I walked off.

Second night, same group was there. I felt a little more easy becuase got some things off my chest. The third night, after they elected all the committees, they want to elect a chairman. Howard Clements stood up and said: I suggest we elect two co-chairpersons.' Joe Beckton, executive director of the Human Relations Commission, just as black as he can be, he nominated me. There was a reaction from some blacks. Nooo. And, of all things, they nominated Ann Atwater, that big old fat black gal that I had just hated with a purple passion, as co-chairman. I thoughtto myself: Hey, ain't no way I can work with that gal. Finally, I agreed 1, either for survival or against black people to accept it,'cause atthis point, I wastired of fightin or against Jews or against Catholics.

A Kiansman and a militant black woman, co-chairmen of the school committee. It was impossible. How could I work with her? But after about two or three days, it was in our hands. We had to make it a success. his give me another sense of belongin', a sense of pride. This helpedthis inferiorityfeelin'l had . A man who has stood up publicly and said he despised black people, all of a sudden he was willin'toworkwith'em. Here's a chance for a low-income white man to be somethin'. in spite of all my hatred for blacks and Jews and liberals, I accepted the job. Her and I began to reluctantly worktogether. (Laughs.) She had as many problems workin' with me as I had workin' with her.

One night , I called her: "Ann, you and I should have a lot of differences and we got'em now. Butthere's somethin' laid out here before us, and if it's gonna be a success, you and I are nna have to make it one. Can we lay aside some of these feelin's?' She said: 'I'm willing if you are.' I said: "Let's do it."

My old friends would call me at night: C.P., what the hell is wrong with you? You're sellin' out the white race." This begin to make me have guilt feelin's. Am I doin' right? Am I doin' wronw. Here I am all of a sudden makin' an about-face and tryin'to deal with my feelin's, my heart. My mind was beginnin'to open up. I was beginnin'to see what was right and what was wrong. I don't want the kids to fight forever.

We were gonna go ten nights. By this time, I had went to work at Duke University, in maintenance. Makin'very little money.Terry Sanford 2ive methisten daysoff with pay. Hewas presidentof Duke atthe time. He knew I was a Kiansman and realized the importance of blacks and whites getting along.

I said:"If we're gonna make this thing a success, l've got to get to my kind of people.' The low-income whites. We walked the streets of Durham, and we knocked on doors and invited people- Ann was goin' into the black community. They just wasn't respondin'to us when we made a "house house calls. Some of'em were cussin'us out. 'You'r sellin'us out, Ellis, get out of my door. I don't want to talk to you." Ann was gettin' the same response from blacks: "What are you doin' messin' with that Klansman?'

One day Ann and I went back to the school and we sat down. We began to talk and just reflect. Ann said: "My daughter came home cryin' every day. She said her teacher was makin' fun of me in front of the other kids." I said: "13oy, the same thing happened to my kid. White

Liberal teacher was makin' fun of Tim Ellis's father, the Klansman. In front of other peoples. He came home cryin'." At this point -- (he pauses, swallows hard, stifles a sob) - l begin to see, here people from the far ends of the fence, havin' identical problems, except hers bein' black and me bein' white. From that monent on, I tell ya, that gal and I worked together good. Ib egin to love the girl, really. (He weeps).

The amazing thing about it, her and l, up to that point, had cussed each other, bawled each other. We didn't know we had things in common.

We worked at it, with the people who came to these meetings. They talked about racism, sex education, about teachers not bein' qualified. After seven, eight nights of real intense discussion, these people, who'd never talked to each other before, allof a sudden came up with resolutions. It was really somethin', you had to be there to get the tone and feelin' of it. At that point, I didn't like integration, but the law says you do this and I've got to do what the law says, okay? We said: ulet's take these resolutions to the school board." The most dishearteningthing I've ever faced was the-school system refused to implementany one of these resolutions. These were recommendations from the people who pay taxes and pay their salaries. (Laughs.)

I thought they were good answers. Some of'em I didn't agree with, but I been in this thing from the beginning, and whatever comes of it, I'm gonna support it. Okay, since the school board refused, I decided I'd just run for the school board.

I spent eighty-five dollars on the campaign. The guy runnin' against me spent several thousand. I really had nobody on my side. The Klan turned against me. The low-income whites turned against me. The liberals didn't particularly like me. The blacks were suspicious of me. The blacks wanted to support me, but they couldn't muster up enough to support a Klansman on the school board. (Laughs.) But I made up my mind that what I was doin' was right, and I was gonna do it regardless what anybody said.

It bothered me when people would calI and worry my wife. She's always supported me in anything I wanted to do. She was changing, and my boys were too. I got some of my youth corps kids involved. They still followed me.

I was invited to the Democratic women's social hour as a candidate. Didn't have but one suit to my name. Had it six, seven, eight years. I had it cleaned, put on the best shirt I had and a tie. Here were all this high-class wealthy candidates shakin' hands. I walked up to the mayor and stuck out my hand. He give me that handshake with that rag type of hand. He said: 'C.P I'm glad to see you." But I could tel I by his handshake he was lyin' to me. This was botherin me. I know I'm a low-income person. I know I'm not wealthy. I know they were sayin': 'What's this little ol' dude runnin'for school board?" Yet they had to smile and make like they're glad to see me. I begin to spot some black people in that room. I automatically wentto'em and that was a firm handshake. They said: 'I'm glad to see you, C.P." I knew they meant it-you can tell about a handshake.

Every place I appeared, I said I will listen to the voice of the people. I will not make a major decision until I first contacted all the organizations in the city. I got 4,640 votes. The guy beat me by two thousand. Not bad for eighty-five bucks and no constituency.

The whole world was openin' up, and I was learnin' new truths that I had never learned before. I was beginnin'to look ata black person, shake handswith him, and see him as a human bein'. I hadn't got rid of all this stuff. I've still got a little bit of it. But somethin' was happenin' to me.

It was almost like bein' born again. it was a new life. I didn't have these sleepless nights I used to have when I was active in the Klan and slippin'around at night. I could sleep at night and feel good about it. I'd rather live now than at any other time in history. it's a challenge.

Back at Duke, doin' maintenance, I'd pick up my tools, fix the commode, unstop the drains. But this got in my blood. Things weren't right in this country, and what we done in Durham needsto betold. I wassomiserable at Duke, I could hardlystand it. I'd gotoworkevery morning just hatin' to go.

My whole life had changed. I got an eighth-grade education, and I wanted to complete high school. Wentto high school in the afternoonson a program called PEP-Past Employment Progress. I was about the only white in class, and the oldest. I begin to read about biology. I'd take my books home at night,'cause I wasdeterminedtogetthrough. Sureenough, I graduated. I got the diploma at home.

I come to work one mornin'and some guy says:We need a union.' At this time I wasn't pro-union. My daddy was anti-labor too. We're not gettin' paid much, we're havin' to work seven days in a row. We're all starvin' to death. The next day, I meet the international representativeofthe Operating Engineers. Hegive meauthorization cards. "Getthese cardsout and we'll have an election.' There was eighty-eight for the union and seventeen no's. I was elected chief steward for the union.

Shortly after, a union man come down from Charlotte and says we need a full-time rep. We've got only two hundered people at the two plants here. It's just barely enough money comin' in to pay your salary. You'l I have to get out and organize more people. I didn't know nothin'about organizing'unions, but I knew howto organize people, stir people up. (Laughs.) That's how I got to be business agent for the union.

When I began to organize, I began to see far deeper. I began to see people again bein' used. Blacks against whites. I say this without any hesitancy: management is vicious. There's two things they want to keep: all the money and all the say-so. They don't want these poor workin'folks to have none ofthat. I begin to see management fightin' me with everything they had. Hire antiunion law firms, badmouth unions. The people were makin' a dollar ninety-five an hour, barely able to getthrough weekends. I worked as a business rep for five years and was seein' all this.

Last year, I ran for business manager of the union. He's elected by the workers. The guy that ran against me was black, and our membership is seventy-five percent black. I thought: Claiborne, there's no way you can beat that black guy. People know your background. Even though you've made tremendous strides, those black people are not gonna vote for you. You know how much I beat him? Four to one. (Laughs.)

The company used my past against me. They put out letters with a picture of a robe and a cap: Would you vote for a Kiansman? Theywouldn'tdeal with the issues. I immediately called for a mass meeting. I met with the ladies at an electric component plant. I said: 'Okay, this is Claiborne Ellis. This is where I come from. I wantyou to know right now, you black ladies here, I was at one time a member ofthe Klan. I want you to know, because they'll tell you about it.' I invited someofmyold blackfriends. I said: 'Brotherjoe, Brother Howard, be honestnow and tell these people howyou feel about me." Theydone it. (Laughs.) Howard Clements kidded me a little bit. He said: 'I don't knowwhat I'm doin'here, supportin'an ex-Klansman." (Laughs.) He said: 'I know what C.P. Ellis come from. I knew him when he was. I knew him as he grew, and growed with him. I'm tellin'you now: follow, followthis Kiansman." (He pauses, swallows hard.) "Any questions?" "No," the black ladies said. "Let's get on with the meeting, we need Ellis." (He laughs and weeps.) Boy, black people sayin'that about me. I won 134 to 41. Four to one.

It makes you feel good to go into a plant and butt heads with professional union busters. You see black people and white people join hands to defeat the fascist issues they use against people. They're tryin'the same things with the Klan. it's still happenin‘ today. Can you imagine a guy who's got an adult high school diplomarunnin'into professional college graduates who are union busters? I gotta compete with 'em. I work seven days a week, nights and on Saturday and Sunday. The salary's not that great, and if I didn't care, I'd quit. But I care and I can't quit. I got a taste of it. (Laughs.)

I tell people there's a tremendous possibility in this country to stop wars, the battles, the struggles, the fights between people. People say: "That's an impossible dream. You sound I ike Martin Luther King.' An ex-Klansman who sounds like Martin Luther King. (Laughs.) I don't think it's an impossible dream. it's happened in my life. it's happened in other people's lives in America.

I don't know what's ahead of me. I have no desire to be a big union official. I want to be right out here in the field with the workers. I wantto walk through their factory and shake hands with that man whose hands are dirty. I'm gonna do all that one little ol' man can do. I'm fiftytwo years old, and I ain't got many years left, but I want to make the best of 'em.

When the news came over the radio that Martin Luther King was assassinated, I got on the telephone and begin to cal I other Klansmen. We just had a real party at the service station. Real ly rejoicin' 'cause that son of a bitch was dead. Our troubles are over with. They say the older you get, the harder it is for you to change. That's not necessarily true. Since I changed, I've set down and listened totapes of Martin Luther King. I listen to it and tears come to my eyes 'cause I know what he's sayin' now. I know what's happenin'.

POSTSCRIPT: The phone rings. A conversation.

'This was a black guy who's director of 0peration Breakthrough in Durham. I had called his office. I'm interested in employin'some young black person who's interested in leamin'the labor movement I want somebody who's never had an opporutnity, just like myself just so he can read and write, that's all.

Copyright (c) 1988 by Jaime S. Wurzel

Toward Multiculturalism: A Reader in Multicultural Education by Jaime S. Wurzel

Intercultural Press, Inc. Yarmouth, Maine (1988)

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Stereotypes: Explaining People Who Are Different

By Ozzie Simmons

EDITORS NOTE: In this article- the author uses 'Mexican" and 'Mexican-Arnerican' more or less interchangeably.

A number of psychological and sociological studies have treated ethnic and racial stereotypes astheyappear publicly in the mass media and also as held privately by individuals.rhe present paper is based on data collected for a study of a number of aspects of the relations between Anglo-Americans and Mexican-Americans in a South Texas community, and is concerned with the principal assumptions and expectations that Anglo- and Mexican-Americans hold of one another; how they see each other; the extent to which these pictures are realistic, and the implications of their mutual expectations.

The Commuiity

The community studied (here called "Border Cityff) is in South Texas, about 250 miles South of San Antonio. Driving south from San Antonio, one passes over the vast expanses of brushlandandgrazing country, then suddenlycomes upon acresof citrusgroves,farmlandsrich with vegetables and cotton, and long rows of palm trees. This is the 'Magic Valley,' an oasis in the semidesert region of South Texas. The Missouri Pacific Railroad (paralleled by Highway 83, locally called 'The longest street in the world") bisects twelve major towns and cities of the Lower Rio Grande Valley between Brownsville, near the Gulf of Mexico, and Rio Grande City, 103 miles to the west.

Border City is neither the largest nor the smallest of these cities, and is physically and culturally much like the rest. Its first building was constructed in 1905. By 1920 it had 5,331 inhabitants and at the time of our study these had increased to an estimated 17,500. The completion of the St. Louis, Brownsville, and Mexico Railroad in 1904 considerably facilitated Anglo-American immigration to the Valley. Before this the valley had been inhabited largely by Mexican ranchers, who maintained large haciendas in the traditional Mexican style based on peonage. most of these haciendas are now divided into large or small tracks that are owned by Anglo-Americans, who obtained them through purchase or less legitimate means. The positionoftheoldmexican-American landowningfamilieshassteadilydeteriorated, andtoday-li these families, with a few exceptions, are completelyovershadowed bythe Anglo-Americans,-'l who have taken over their social and economic position in the community.

The Anglo-American immigration into the valley was paralleled by that of the Mexicans from acrossthe border, who were attracted bythe seemingly greateropportunities forfarm labor created by the introduction of irrigation and the subsequent agricultural expansion. Actually, there had been a small but steady flow of Mexican immigration into South Texas that long antedated the Anglo-American immigration. At present, Mexican-Americans probably constituted about tvvo-fifths of the total population of the Valley.

In Border City, Mexican-Americans comprise about 56 percent of the population. The Southwestern pat of the city, adjoining and sometimes infiltrating the business and industrial areas, isvariously referred to as "Mexiquita," "Mexican-town,'and 'Little Mexico" bythe city's Anglo-Americans, and as the colonia by the Mexican-Americans. With few exceptions, the colonia is inhabited only by Mexican-Americans, most of whom live in close proximity to one another in indifferently constructed houses on tiny lots. The north side of the city, which lies across the railroad tracks, is inhabited almost completely by Anglo-Americans. Its appearance is in sharp contrast to that of the colonia in that it is strictly residential and displays much better housing.

In the occupational hierarchy of Border City, the top level (the growers, packers, canners, businessmen, and professionals) is overwhelmingly Anglo-American. in the middle group (the white-collar occupations) Mexicans are prominent only where their bilingualism makes them useful, for example, as clerks and salesmen. The bottom level (farm laborers, shed and cannery workers, and domestic servants) is overwhelmingly Mexican-American.

These conditions result from a number of factors, some quite distinct from the reception accorded Mexican-Americans by Anglo-Americans. Many Mexican-Americans are stil I recent immigrants and are thus relatively unfamiliar with Anglo-American culture and urban living, or else persist in their tendency to live apart and maintain their own institutions whenever possible. Among their disadvantages, however, the negative attitudes and discriminatory practices of the Anglo-American group must be counted. ft isonly fairto say, with the late Ruth Tuck, that much of what Mexican-Americans have suffered at Anglo-American hands has not been perpetrated deliberately but through indifference, that it has been done not with the fist but with the elbow. The average social and economic status of the Mexican-American group has been improvin& and many are moving upward. 'rhis is partly owing to increasing acceptance by the Anglo-American group, but chiefly to the efforts of the Mexican-Americans themselves.

Anglo-Americcm Assumptions md Expectations

Robert Lynd writes of the dualism in the principal assumptions that guide Americans in conducting their everyday life and identifies the attempt to "live by contrasting rules of the game as a characteristic aspect of our culture.'This pattern of moral compromise, symptomatic of what is likely to be only vaguely a conscious moral conflict, is evident in Anglo-American assumptions and expectations with regard to Mexican-Americans, which appear both in the moral principles that define what intergroup relations ought to be, and in the popular notions held by Anglo-Americans asto what Mexican-Americans are "realw like. in the firstcase there is a response to the "American creed,' which embodies ideals of the essential dignity of the individual and of certain inalienable rights to freedom, justice, and equal opportunity.

Accordingly, Anglo-Americans believe that Mexican-Americans must be accorded full acceptance and equal status in the larger society. When their orientation to these ideals is uppermost, Anglo-Americans believe that the assimilation of Mexican-Americans is only a matter of time, contingent solely on the full incorporation of Anglo-American values and ways of life.

These expectations regarding the assimilation of the Mexican are most cleady expressed in the notion of the Obigh type" of Mexican. It is based on three criteria: occupational achievement and wealth (the Anglo-American's own principal criteria of status) and command of Anglo-American ways. Mexican-Americans who can so qualify are acceptable for membership in the service clubs and a few other Anglo-American organizations and for limited social intercourse. They may even intermarry without being penalized or ostracized. Both in their achievements in business and agriculture and in wealth, they compare favorably with middleclass Anglo-Americans, and they manifest a high command of the latter's ways. This view of the ,vhigh type" of Mexican reflects the Anglo-American assumption that Mexicans are assimilable; it does not necessarily insure a ful I acceptance of even the 'high type' of Mexican or that his acceptance will be consistent.

The assumption thatmexican-Americans will be ultimately assimilated was not uniformly shared by all the Anglo-Americans who were our informants in Border City. Regardless of whether they expressed adherence to this ideal, however, most Anglo-Americans expressed the contrasting assumption that Mexican-Americans are essential ly inferior. Thus the same people may hold assumptions and expectations that are contradictory, although expressed at different times and in different situations. As in the case of their adherence to the ideal of assimilability, not all Anglo-Americans hold the same assumptions and expectations with respect to the inferiorityof Mexican-Americans; and even thosewhoagree vary in the intensityoftheir beliefs. Some do notbelieve in the Mexican's inferiority atall; some are relatively moderateorskeptical, while others express extreme views with considerable emotional intensity.

Despite this variation, the Anglo-Americans' principal assumptions and expectations emphasize the mexicans'presumed inferiority. In its mostcharacteristic pattern, such inferiority is held to be self-wident. As one Anglo-American woman put it, AMexicans are inferior because they are so typical ly and naturally Mexican.' Since they are so obviously inferior, their present subordinate status is appropriate and is really their own fault. There is a ready identification between Mexicans and menial labor, buttressed by! an image of the Mexican worker as improvident, undependable, irresponsible, childlike, and indolent if Mexicans are fit for only the humblest labor, there is nothing abnormal about the fact that most Mexican workers are at the bottom of the occupational pyramid, and the fact that most Mexicans are unskilled workers is sufficient proof that they belong in that category.

Associated with the assumption of Mexican inferiority is that of the homogeneity of this group--that is, all Mexicans are alike. Anglo-Americans may classify Mexicans as being of "high type" and "low type" and at the same time maintain that "a Mexican is a Mexican.' Both notions serve a purpose, depending on the situation. The assumption that all Mexicans are alike buttre&sm the assumption of inferiority by making it convenient to ignore the fact of the existence of a substantial number of Mexican-Americans who represent all levels of business and professional achievenvnt. Such people are considered exceptions to the rule.

Anglo-American Images of Mexican-American

To employ Gordon Allport's definition, a stereotype is an exaggerated belief associated with a category, and its function is to justify conduct in relation to that category. Some of the Anglo-American images of the Mexican have no ascertainable basis in fact, while others have

at least a kernel of truth. Although some components of these images derive from behavior patterns that are characteristic of some Mexican-Americans in some situations, few if any of the popular generalizations about them are valid as stated, and none is demonstrably true of all. Some of the images of Mexican-Americans are specific to a particular area of intergroup relations, such as the image of the Mexican-American's attributes as a worker. Another is specific to politics and describes Mexicans as ready to give their votes to whoever will pay for them or provide free barbecues and beer. Let us consider a few of the stereotypical beliefs that are widely used on general principles to justify Anglo-American practices of exclusion and subordination.

One such general belief accuses Mexican-Anvricans of being unclean. The examples given of this supposed characteristic most frequently referto a lack of personal cleanliness and environmental hygiene and to a high incidence of skin ailments ascribed to a lack of hygienic practices. indeed, there are few immigrant groups, regardless of their ethnic background, to whom this defect has not been attributed by the host society. it has often been observed that for midd le-class Americans cleanliness is not simply a matter of keeping clean but is also an index to the morals and virtues of the individual. It is largely true that Mexicans tend to be much more casual in hygienic practices than Anglo-Americans. Moreover, their labor in the field, the packing sheds, and the towns is rarely clean work, and it is possible that many AngIG-Americans base their conclusions on what they observe in such situations. There is no evidence of a higher incidence of skin ailments among Mexicans than among Anglo-Americans. The belief that Mexicans are unclean is useful for rationalizing the Anglo-American practice of excluding Mexicans from any situation that involves close or allegedly close contact with AngloAmericans, as in residence, and the common use of swimming pools and other recreational facilities.

Drunkenness and criminality are a pair of traits that have appeared regularly in the stereotypes applied to immigrant groups. They have a prominent place in Anglo-American images of Mexicans. If Mexicans are inveterate drunkards and have criminal tendencies, a justification isprovided forexcludingthem from full participation in the lifeofthe community. itistruethatdrinkingisa popularactivityamongMexican-Americansandthattotal abstinence israre,exceptamongsomeProtestantMexican-Americans. Drinkingvaries, however, fromthe occasional consumption of a bottle of beer to the heavy drinking of more potent beverages, so that the frequency of drinking and drunkenness is far from being evenly distributed among Mexican-Aniericans. Actually, this pattern is equal ly applicable to the Anglo-American group. The ample patronage of bars in the Anglo-American part of Border City, and the drinking behavior exhibited by Anglo-Arriericans when they cross the river to Mexico indicate that Mexicans have no monopoly on drinking or drunkenness. it is true that the number of arrests for drunkenness in Border City is greater among Mexicans, but this is probably because Mexicans are more vulnerable to arrest. The court records in Border City show little difference in the contributions made to delinquency and crime by Anglo- and Mexican-Americans.

Anotherclusterof images intheAnglo-American stereotype portraysMexican-Americans as deceitful and of a "lowff morality, as mysterious, unpredictable, and hostile to AngloAmericans. It is quite possiblethatmexicans resortto a numberof devices in their relationswith Anglo-Americans, particularly in relations with employers, to compensate for their disadvantages, which may be construed by Anglo-Americans as evidence of deceitfulness. The whole nature of the dominant-subordinate relationship does not make for frankness on the part of Mexicans or encourage them to face up directly to Anglo-Americans in most intergroup contacts. As to the charge of immorality, one need only recognize the strong sense of loyalty

and obligation that Mexicans feel in their familial and interpersonal relations to know that the charge is baseless. The claim that Mexicans are mysterious and deceitful may in part reflect Anglo-American reaaions to aaual differences in cukure and personality, but like the other beliefs considered here, is highly exaggerated. The imputation of hostility to Mexicans, which is manifested in a reluaance to enter the colonia, particularly at night, may have its kernel of tnith, but appears to be largely a projection of the Anglo-American's own feelings.

All threeof these images can servetojustifyexclusion and discrimination: if Mexicans are deceithil and immoral, they do not have to be acmrded equal status and justice; if they are mysterious and unpredictable, there is no point in treating them as one would a fellow AngloAmerican; and if fey are-hostile and dangerous, it is bestthat they live apart in colonies of their own.

Not all Anglo-American images of the Mexican are unfavorable. Among those usually meant to be complimentary are the beliefs that all Mexicans are musical and always ready for a fiesta, that they are very romantic rather than "realistic' (which may have unfavorable overtones as well), and that they love flowers and can grow them under the most adverse conditions. Although each of these beliefs may have a modicum of truth, it may be noted that theytend to reinforce Anglo-American imagesof Mexicans as childlike and irresponsible, and thus they support the notion that Mexicans are capable only of subordinate status.

Mexican-American Assumptions, Expectations, and Images

Mexican-Americans are as likely to hold contradictory assumptions and distorted images as are Anglo-Americans. Their principal assumptions, however, must reflect those of AngloAmericans, that is, Mexicans must take into account the Anglo-Americans'conflia as to their potential equality and present inferiority, since they are the objea of such amputations. Similarly, their images of Anglo-Americans are not derived wholly independently, but to some extent must reflect their own subordinate status. Consequently, their stereotypes of AngloAmericans are much less elaborate, in part because Mexicans feel no need of ' justifying the present i,.iergroup relation, in part because the very nature of their dependent position forces them to view the relation more realistically than Anglo-Americans do. For the same reasons, they need not hold to their beliefs about Anglo-Americans with the rigidity and intensity so often characteristic of the latter.

Any discussion of these assumptions and expectations requires some mention ofthe class distinctions within the Mexican-American group. Its middle class, though small as compared with the lower class, is powerful within the groupand performs the critical role of intermediary in negotiations with the Anglo-American group. Middle-class status is based on education and occupation, family background, readiness to serve the interests of the group, on wealth, and the degree of acculturation, or command of Anglo-American ways. Anglo-Americans recognize Mexican class distinctions (although not very accurately) in their notions of the *high type" and "low typev of Mexicans.

In general, lower-class Mexicans do not regard the disabilities of their status as being nearly as severe as do middle-class Mexican-Americans. This is primarily a refleaion of the insulation between the Anglo-American world and that of the Mexican lower class. most Mexicans, regardless of class, are keenly aware of Anglo-American attitudes and practices with regard to their group, but lower-class Mexicans do not conceive of participation in the larger society as necessary nor do they regard Anglo-Armrican praaices of excl usion as affeaing them directly. Their principal reaction has been to maintain their isolation, and thus they have not been particularly concerned with improvingtheirstatus by acquiringAnglo-American ways, a course more characteristic of the middle-class Mexican.

Mexican-American assumptions and expectations regarding Anglo-Americans must be qualified,then,asbeingmorecharacteristicofmiddle-thanoflower-classMexican-Americans. Mexicans, like Anglo-Americans, are subject to conflicts in their ideals, not only because of irrational thinking on their part but also because of Anglo-American inconsistencies between ideal.and practice. As for ideals expressing democratic values, Mexican expectations are for obvious reasons the counterpart of the Anglo-Americans--4hat Mexican-Americans should be accorded full acceptance and equal opportunity. They feel a considerable ambivalence, however, as to the Anglo-Affierican expectation that the only way to achieve this goal is by a full.incorporation of Anglo-American values and ways of life, for this implies the ultimate loss Of their cultural identity as Mexicans. On the one hand, they favor the acquisition of AngloAmerican culture andthe eventual remakingofthe Mexican in the Anglo-American culture; but on the other hand, they are not so sure that Anglo-American acceptance is worth such a price. When they are concerned withthis dilemma, Mexicans advocate a fusion with Anglo-American culture in which the "best' of the Mexican ways, as they view it, would be retained along with the incorporation of the 'best' of the Anglo-American ways, rather than a one-sided exchange in which all that is distinctively Mexican would be lost.

A few examples will illustrate the point of view expressed in the phrase, the best of both ways." A premium is placed on speaking good, unaccented English, but the retention of good Spanish is valued just as highly as "a mark of culture that should not be abandoned." Similarly, there is an emphasis on the incorporation of behavior patterns that are considered characterisfically Anglo-American and that will promote "getting ahead," but not to the point at which the drive for power and wealth would become completely dominant, as is believed to be the case with Anglo-Americans.

Mexican ambivalence about becoming Anglo-American or achieving a fusion of the best of both cultures is compounded by their ambivalence about another issue, that of equality versus inferiority. That Anglo-Americans are dominant in the society and seem to monopolize its accomplishments and rewards leads Mexicans at times to draw the same conclusion that Anglo-Americans do, namely, that Mexicans are inferior. This questioning of their own sense of worth exists in all classes of the Mexican-American group, although with varying intensity, and plays a substantial part in every adjustment to intergroup relations. There is a pronounced tendency to concede the superiority of Anglo-American ways and consequently to define Mexican ways as undesirable, inferior, and disreputable. The tendency to believe in hisown inferiority is counterbalanced, however, by the Mexican'sfierce racial pride, which sets the tone of Mexican demands and strivings for equal status, even though these may slip into feelings of inferiority.

The images Mexicans have of Anglo-Americans may not be soelaborateor soemationally charged as the images that Anglo-Americans. have of Mexicans, but they are nevertheless stereotypes, over-generalized, and exaggerated, although used primarily for defensive rather than justificatory purposes. Mexican images of Anglo-Americans are sometimes favorable, Particularly when they identify such traits as initiative, ambition, and industriousness as being ixculiarly Anglo-American. Unfavorable images are prominent, however, and, although they may be hostile, they never impute inferiority to Anglo-Americans. Most of the Mexican stereotypes evaluate Anglo-Americans on the basis of their attitudes toward Mexican-Americans. For example, one such classification provides a two-fold typology. The first type, the "majority," includesthosewhoare cold, unkind, mercenary, and exploitative. Thesecond type, the "minority," consists of those who are friendly, warm, just, and unprejudiced. For the most part, Mexican images of Anglo-Americans reflect the latter's patterns of exclusion and assumptions of superiority, as experienced by Mexican-Americans. Thus Anglo-Ame ' ricans are pictured as stolid, phlegmatic, cold-hearted, and distant. They are also said to be braggers, conceited, inconstant, and insincere.

Intergroup Relations, Mutual Expectations, and Cultural Differences

A number of students of intergroup relations assert that research in this area has yet to demonstrate any relation between stereotypical beliefs and intergroup behavior, indeed, some insistthat under certain conditions ethnic attitudesand discrimination can vary independently. Arnold M. Rose, for example, concludes that "from a heuristic standpoint it may be desirable to assume that patterns of intergroup relations, on the one hand, and attitudes of prejudice and stereotypin& on the other hand, are fairly unrelated phenomena although they have reciprocal influences on each other...." in the present study, no systematic attempt was made to investigate the relation between the stereotypical beliefs of particular individuals and their actual intergroup behavior; but the study did yield much evidence that both images which justify group separatism and separateness itself are characteristic aspects of intergroup relations in Border City. One of the principal finds is that in those situations in which contact between Anglo-Americans and Mexicans is voluntary (such as residence, education, recreation, religious worship, and social intercourse) the characteristic pattern is separateness rather than common participation. Wherever intergroup contact is necessary, as in occupational activities and the performance of commercial and professional services, it is held to the minimum sufficient to acmmplish the purpose of the contact. The extent of this separateness is not constaryt for all members of the two groups, since it tends to be less severe between AngloAmericans and those Mexicans they define as of a "high type.w Nevertheless, the evidence reveals a high degree of compatibility between beliefs and practices in Border City's intergroup relations, although the data have nothing to offer for the identification of direct relationships.

In any case, the separateness that characterizes intergroup relations cannot be attributed solelytdthe exclusion practices of the Anglo-American group. Mexicans havetended to remain separate by choice as well as by necessity. Like many other ethnic groups, they have often found this the easier course, since they need not strain to learn another language or to change their ways and manners. The isolation practices of the Mexican group are as relevant to an understanding of intergroup relations as are the exclusion practices of the Anglo-Americans.

This should not, however, obscure the fact that to a wide extent the majority of MexicanAmericans share the patterns of living of Anglo-American society; many of their ways are already identical. Regardless of the degree of their insulation from the larger society, the demandsof life in the United States have required basic modifications of the Mexicans'cultural tradition. In material culture, Mexicans are hardly to be distinguished from Anglo-Americans, andthere have been basic changes in medical beliefs and pracocesand in the customs regarding godparenthood. Mexicans have acquired English in varying degrees, and their Spanish has become noticeably Anglicized. Although the original organization of the family has persisted, major changes have occurred in patterns of traditional authority, as well as in child training and courtship practices. Still, it is the exceedingly rare Mexican-American, no matter how acculturated he may be to the dominant society, who does not in some degree retain the more subtle characteristics of his Mexican heritage, particularly in his conception of time and in other fundamental value orientations, as well as in his modes of participation in interpersonal relations.manyofthemostacculturatedMexican-Americans can have attempted to exemplify what they regard as "the best of both ways.' They have become largely Anglo-American in their way of livin& but they sti II retain fluent Spanish and a knowledge of theirtraditional culture, and they maintain an identification with their own heritage while participating in Anglo-American culture. Nevertheless, this sort of achievement still seems a long way off for many Mexican-Americans who regard it as desirable.

A predominant AngIo-American expectation is that the Mexicans will be eventually assimilated into the larger society; but this is contingent upon Mexicans' becoming just like Anglo-Americans. The Mexican counterpart to this expectation is only partially complementary. Mexicans want to be fijl I members of the larger society, but they do not want to give up their cultural heritage. There is even less ccxnplementarity of expectation with regard to the present conductor intergroup relations. Anglo-Arnericans believe they are justified in withholding equal access to the rewards of full acceptance as long as Mexicans remain "different," particularly since they interpretthe differences (both than which have sonv basis in reality and those which have none) as evidence of inferiority. Mexicans, on the other hand, while not always certain that they are not inferior, clearly want equal opportunity and full acceptance now, not in some dim future, and they do not believe that their differences (either presumed or real) from Anglo-Americans offer any justification for the denial of opportunity and acceptance. moreover, they do not find that acculturation is rewarded in any clear and regular way by progressive acceptance.

It is probable that both Anglo-Americans and Mexicans will have to modify their beliefs and practices if they are to realize more nearly their expectations of each other. Mutual stereotyping as well as the exclusion practices of Anglo-Americans and the isolation practices of Mexicans, maintains the separateness of the twogroups, and separateness is a massive barrier tothe realization of theirexpectations. The process of acculturation is presently goingon among Mexican-Americans and will continue, regardless of whether changes in Anglo-Mexican relations occur. Unless Mexican-Americans can validate their increasing command of AngloAmerican ways by a free participation in the larger society, however, such acculturation is not likely to accelerate its present leisurely pace, nor will it lead to eventual assimilation. The Corona is a relatively safe place in which new cultural acquisitions may be tried out, and thus it has its positive functions; but by the same token it is only in intergroup contacts with AngloAmericansthat acculturation is validated, thatthe mexican't level of acculturation istested, and that the distance he must yet travel to assimilation is measured.

Conclusions

There are major inconsistencies in the assumptions that Anglo-Americans and MexicanAmericans hold about one another. Anglo-Americans assume that Mexican-Americans are their potential, if not actual, peers, but at the same time assume they are their inferiors. The beliefs that presumably demonstrate the Mexican-Americans' inferiority tend to place them outside the accepted moral order and framework of Anglo-American society by attributing to them undesirable characteristics that make it "reasonable" to treat them differently from their fellow Anglo-Americans. Thus the negative images provide not only a rationalized definition of the intergroup relation that makes it palatable for Anglo-Americans, but also a substantial support for maintaining the relation as it is. The assumptions of Mexican-Americans about Anglo-Americans are similarly inconsistent, and their images of Anglo-Americans are predominantly negative, although these are primarily defensive rather than jusdficatory. The mutual expectations of the two groups contrast sharply with the ideal of a complementarity of expectations, in that Anglo-Americans expect Mexicans to become just like themselves, if they are to be accorded equal status in the larger society, whereas Mexican-Americans want full acceptance, regardless of the extent to which they give up their own ways and acquire those of the dominant group.

Anglo-Americans and Mexicans may decide to stay apart because they are different, but cultural differences provide no moral justification for one group to deny to the other equal opportunity and the rewards of the larger society. if the full acceptance of Mexicans by AngloAmericans is contingent upon the disappearance of cultural differences, it will not be accorded in the foreseeable future. in our American society, we have often seriously underestimated the strenpth and tenacity of early cultural conditioning. we have expected newcomers to change their customs and values to conform to American ways as quickly as possible, without an adequate appreciation of the strains imposed by this process. An understanding of the nature of culture and of its interrelations with personality can make us more realistic about the rate at which cultural change can proceed and about the gains and costs for the individual who is subject to the experiences of acculturation. In viewing cultural differences primarily as disabilities, we neglect their positive aspects. Mexican-American culture represents the most constructive and effective means Mexican-Americans have yet been able to develop for Coping with their changed natural and social environment. Theywill furtherexchange old ways for new only if these appear to be more meaningful and rewarding than the old, and then only if they are given full opportunity to acquire the new ways and to use them.

1) Robert S. Lyrid, Knowledge for What? (Princeton: University Press, 1948).

2) Gordon W. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (Cambridge: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1954).

3) Arnold M. Rose, 'Intergroup Relations vs. Prejudice: Pertinent Theory for the Study of Social Change" Social Problems 4 (1956):173-176.

Copyright (c) 1988 by Jaime S. Wurzel

Toward Multiculturalism: A Reader in Multicultural Education by Jaime S. Wurzel

Intercultural Press, Inc. Yarmouth, Maine (1988)

SPECIAL REPORT

PART I - OUR FAILING SCHOOLS

Sunday, May 17, 1998

Seeking Causes and Solutions at Seven California Campuses : Lower Standards, Money, Changing Student Body Are the Challenges By ELAINE WOO, Times Education Writer

If a majority of students are failing,'' a young teacher agonizes aloud, ''is it their fault, or is it mine?'' It's Monday morning, 8:05 a.m. Another week is just beginning in California's public schools. But already the frustration is building in a dusty, bare-walled classroom, Room 173, at Los Angeles' Manual Arts High School, where a dozen teachers are hashing out school goals. ''It's not about us failing the kids,'' a second teacher retorts. ''They're failing themselves.'' A third launches into a rant about students who play hooky, students who sleep in class and students who only want to get to their jobs at fast-food restaurants. ''You can't blame teachers,'' she says. ''It's a failure of the entire system.'' How bad are our schools? Who is to blame? How do we fix them? Such questions rumble throughout the state's system of public education. For good reason.

At Manual Arts, teachers routinely help students take tests…actually sit beside them and walk them through each question…because 80% read below grade level. At Anaheim's Katella High, tattoo magazines and superhero comics pass as acceptable material for the ritual ''silent reading'' at the start of class. At Kern County's Taft Union High, teachers have students copy lessons off the blackboard because they won't study at home. Even at Arcadia High School, an academic star in the San Gabriel Valley, the English department is ordering grammar books because too many students stumble over the mechanics of good writing. These are the daily realities behind the dismal numbers that produce front-page headlines every few months: California's fourth-graders tie for last, with Louisiana, in reading. In math, they surpass only the fourth-graders of Mississippi. In science, eighth-graders lag a full year behind counterparts nationally. A late afternoon game of pickup basketball in the shadows of Ted Williams Field at Hoover High School in San Diego.

High school students? Half of those who go on to California State University…meaning they are among the top third of all graduates…require remedial help in math or English. PacBell has to screen seven applicants to find one high school graduate with the math and reading skills needed to be a telephone operator. And California's teachers? More than 31,000 classrooms are presided over by men and women who do not have a teaching certificate…who are still learning their craft. Almost half of high school math classes are led by teachers who never even minored in the subject.

Given all that, not many people are shocked when California's main gubernatorial contenders admit…at least one, proudly…that they send their own children to private schools. Education has risen high on the public's agenda. According to a Times poll, nearly one out of three Californians see it as the state's most important problem…ahead of immigration and just behind crime. Thirty years ago, California was fifth in the nation in per-pupil spending, and its schools were admired for their innovations. Although it was never quite the ''golden age'' some graybeards recall, even the Los Angeles Unified School District once provided free summer school for all who wanted it, and 300,000 students signed up. Since the tax-cutting crusades of the late 1970s, however, California's per-student expenditures have remained stagnant at best, while nearly every other state's has grown by double digits. So there's a bookcase in Room 173 at Manual Arts High…with hardly any books in it.

But perhaps the greatest failure of California's officials has been their mishandling of the demographic tide that swept over the state's schools. California now has 45% of the nation's immigrant students. The number of youngsters not proficient in English exceeds the total enrollment in the public schools of 38 other states. Yet more than 1,000 schools did not advance a single such child to English fluency last year. Meanwhile, achievement has flagged across the board…not only, as stereotypes suggest, among minorities, the poor and immigrants. Whites and the children of college graduates, long thought immune to bad schooling, trail their counterparts across the country as well. ''No one population or school setting is responsible for the problem in California,'' says Marshall S. Smith, acting deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Education.

In California, Smith concludes, ''there is a problem with the overall quality of schools.''

Seeking answers to the perplexing questions fueling the current debate over public education, The Times spent six months peering inside California's schools. A three-pronged Times poll explored the perceptions and experiences of students, teachers and parents statewide. UCLA education experts and Times computer specialists analyzed dozens of databases…test scores, teacher qualifications, course-taking patterns, student backgrounds and much more…covering all 8,000 public schools in the state. Finally, a crew of reporters was sent to education's front lines, observing a week in the life of seven high schools, from one in a middle-class white suburb of Sacramento to an immigrant-rich, inner-city campus in San Diego.

To be sure, there's much good news in an education system that again produced the nation's Academic Decathlon champion, the runner-up in the Science Bowl and hundreds of ''AP scholars,'' students who ace eight or more Advanced Placement exams. One encouraging trend is how many more poor and minority students are taking tests like that, along with the classes…English literature to calculus…required for college admissions.

But even that raises a troubling question: If students are completing rigorous high school work, why are so many found lacking when they reach college? At some high schools, all the graduates who went on to the elite University of California system failed a basic writing exam.

Of course, there is no single reality in California's ''system'' of elementary and secondary schools. A week at seven high schools finds a mind-boggling diversity of cultures, communities and values.

At Oakmont High in Roseville, outside Sacramento, two sisters carry backpacks bulging with texts, one weighing 20 pounds. At Hoover High in San Diego, scores of children show up daily bearing not a single book. At Katella High, in the shadow of Disneyland, administrators struggle to keep students from dropping out, enticing them with a panoply of clubs and electives in animation. But at Arcadia High, the challenge is to keep the students from taking too many of the honors and Advanced Placement classes that make college applications shine. Something binds all these schools together, however: an undertow of concern, a recurrent self-doubt, self-examination. At Arcadia, the worry is about competition from the private schooling offered all over suburbia. So the faculty churns out new courses…25 in a single year, like Mandarin 5 or virtual geography…to make sure they ''keep kids at Arcadia High.'' A world away, at inner-city Manual Arts, all of Monday has been set aside for the staff to talk things over, as at the gathering in Room 173, where teacher Ady Sukkar drops the question ''is it me or is it them?'' Even as the Manual Arts crew lets off steam, much the same is going on south in San Diego. What gets the juices flowing at Monday's teachers meeting at Hoover High is an offer by a millionaire philanthropist, the founder of the Price Club, to bring in university experts to boost test scores. ''We've had too many new ideas and programs imposed on us over the years,'' special ed teacher Alan Marshall complains to colleagues, ''so many things that last two years…and then are discontinued.'' His reaction to this latest plan to overhaul the school? ''Skeptical.''

It's a wobbly start for another week in the trenches of California schools.

Monday: Room 305 at Hoover High

The students pour past El Cajon Boulevard's busy strip malls, tire stores and tamale factory, and by a billboard for ''Jammin' Z-90 Nonstop Hip Hop and R & B.'' Then they go through the metal gates, past the security guards and onto the campus named for the 31st president of the United States, whose face…incredibly white and round and stern…still peers down from a portrait in the library of San Diego's Herbert Hoover High School.

Today is a tardy sweep day, so they scurry in before the bell rings, the gate closes and counselors escort stragglers to the cafeteria for punishment…the Andrews Sisters crooning ''Want Some Seafood, Mama.'' Amid the boys in baggy pants and Raiders jackets and T-shirts with outlandish sayings come Somali girls in colorful African gowns, flowing from head to ankle.

A boy heads for the principal's office to explain, in Spanish, how he had to go back to Mexico and missed the last three years of school, why he has no transcripts, and why his English…what little he knew…has faded.

A Vietnamese teenager treads in his Nikes to the English-as-a-second-language class of Rita El Wardi, who begins looking through students' essays. Most bungle verbs, syntax and other intricacies of English. Then she gets to his paper, and reads aloud his poignant image: ''I felt very worried like a blind bird in a jungle.'' Amazed, El Wardi remarks, ''You won't get that kind of language from too many students born in San Diego.'' Welcome to the new reality in California public education. Now wander to Room 305. Here, 12 seats are occupied by students who are new to the country. Three others hold students with serious learning handicaps. One girl has a mother in prison. She has written a poem to her: ''I hope I can stop hating you soon. . . .'' Another has a swelling belly, pregnant by a man almost twice her age. A boy has dozed off, worn out from his after-school job washing cars. ''Wake up!'' teacher Lee Mongrue admonishes. ''Home is for sleeping, not school.'' When Hoover opened in 1930, the area was nearly all white and middle-class. The jobs were in the military and manufacturing, the early airplane industry. Baseball legend Ted Williams went to school here.

Of Hoover's 1,901 students today, roughly 50% are Latino, 20% Asian American, 20% African American. Only about 5% are white. The majority are so poor that they qualify for free school lunches and welfare. Hoover reflects the explosive changes that have challenged California like nowhere else in the country. Between 1988 and 1996, the proportion of the state's high schools that are predominantly minority has increased by more than half, to 16%, according to a UCLA analysis. Today, nearly 60% of all the state's public high schools are at least one-third black and Latino. But far more significant is how the poverty rate among students has more than doubled…to 28%…since 1969.

The devastating impact of poverty is well documented. But when researchers at the UCLA-based Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing examined the available data on California's high schools, they were startled by the degree to which students' economic standing, something ''outside the control of the school,'' seemed to dictate their success, whether measured by SAT scores or how many complete college prep classes.

It's like the link between smoking and cancer, only stronger…44% of the difference between two schools' scores on the college entrance exams could be explained by the poverty rate of the students. ''It's not insurmountable,'' concludes UCLA researcher Richard Brown, ''but it's certainly a steep climb to overcome.''

Then add in how many students move from school to school: California's students have the highest mobility rate in the country. About 75% change schools at least once before the 12th grade, and 33% change three or more times…for reasons other than normal promotion. And the more a student moves, the lower his or her chance of graduating from high school, according to UC Santa Barbara education professor Russell Rumberger, who analyzed records of 13,000 U.S. students.

At Hoover, also add the practical challenge of having students who speak 29 languages, from Tagalog to Swahili. In a nod to such diversity, next month's graduation ceremony will be delivered in 10 languages. The soccer team is mainly black and Latino, the badminton team nearly all Southeast Asian. The swim team has two Africans, a Filipino, a Mexican, a Guatemalan and a white. The football team is a miniature United Nations too, but the victories of earlier eras elude the ragtag crew. ''It's hard to compete,'' a coach says, ''when your front line is all named Nguyen.'' Such signs of change abound in the six other high schools as well.

At Katella High in Orange County, so many students return to Mexico or Guatemala or follow parents from job to job, that a third of the 2,000 disappear before the school year is up. Arcadia High, where almost 60% of the student body is Asian, has taken on a new flavor. The cafeteria menu is as likely to feature stir-fried beef as burgers. Not even Granada Hills High in the San Fernando Valley…once Los Angeles' bastion of whiteness…is untouched by currents of change. Filipino and Korean students crouch by the front gate over games of pusoy dos, poker with an Asian twist. And although the school still is nearly 40% white, ''white'' at Granada Hills doesn't necessarily mean made in the USA. It could mean a student born in Israel, Lebanon or Pakistan. It could mean someone like 17-year-old Amy Hassan, an Egyptian immigrant with olive skin, black hair and deep brown eyes. ''We are Caucasians,'' says Amy, whose parents speak Arabic at home, ''but you can't say we're white.''

Californians are divided as to whether this changing face of public education has been good or bad. One-third of the adults polled by The Times said that immigrants have had a positive impact on schools; 37% said the impact is negative. White parents, whose children represent 39.5% of the state's enrollment from kindergarten through high school, are most pessimistic: 51% said immigrant children have hurt schools, compared with 39% of black parents, 36% of Latinos and 14% of Asian Americans.

Clearly, though, the demographic upheaval has changed the way teachers teach.

In Lee Mongrue's class at Hoover, today is a big day. Although this is advanced humanities, the ninth-graders are tackling their first test of the school year. In March. Doris Alvarez, Hoover's principal, doubts the validity of traditional paper and pencil tests for immigrants, minorities and low-income students. So her teachers are encouraged to have students create portfolios of their best work. Then they give oral ''exhibitions'' and answer questions in a process called portfolio defense. Report cards have been redesigned to grade students not only in traditional subjects, like math and history, but in ''inquiry, ''technology,'' ''organization,'' ''communication'' and ''collaboration.'' Such innovations helped win Hoover the title New Urban High School by the U.S. Department of Education. And last year Alvarez was national Principal of the Year. But the San Diego Board of Education is not so impressed: It has Hoover on a list of five campuses targeted for closure if test scores don't improve. More than 80% of Hoover's 10th-graders rank below the 50th percentile on a standardized reading test, and more than 50% score that poorly in math. Indeed, the school's philosophy runs against California's current tide. Gov. Pete Wilson has pushed for standardized testing of every student in every school. No exemption for poor children. None for language handicaps. No excuses. ''The day for arguing about tests is over,'' says San Diego school board President Ron Ottinger. He wants Hoover to teach test-taking skills and remedial reading. ''Basically, the middle class is bypassing Hoover,'' says Ottinger, worried that those families…mostly white and Asian American…will continue to flee the area or send their children to private schools. ''We've got to change that. We do not want Hoover to be only a school for new immigrants and the poor.'' Mongrue, the teacher, could have fled too. About 60% of his colleagues have bolted over the past four years, most to suburban schools where for the same pay the challenges are less daunting. One reason he remains is that it's convenient…he lives nearby. But mostly, he says, he feels needed. ''I know it sounds trite, but you can make a difference at Hoover.'' If that means bending the conventions of schooling, he's all for it. So he eases his class into the test. ''Listen carefully,'' he tells them. ''I'm going to cut a deal with you…you know what that means?'' His part: ''I will give you 10 minutes max for you to review with your buddies.'' Their part: ''You do your best on this test.'' It's an essay question about the sub-Saharan section of Africa. As they scribble, he watches for signs of frustration. After a few minutes, he's encouraged. ''They're still engaged,'' he says. ''They haven't quit on me. I'm pleased.''

Tuesday: Even White Kids Sing the Blues

It's Tuesday, a day like any other on the quad. At Arcadia High, the longhairs loll under the shady trees, cheerleaders near the lawn. At Granada Hills, the black kids fill the benches while a few shaved-head Mexicans in baggy pants hug the area by the mural . . . of a Scottish highlander wearing a kilt. At Katella, early birds cluster by a map of the world, etched in the concrete. Buses pull up minutes before the 8 a.m. bell, disgorging classmates from apartments and motels near Disneyland, home to the work force for the Magic Kingdom. Meanwhile, in the town of Taft, up near Bakersfield, the preppies gather under the old wisteria vines. And the band kids…a smart and outgoing bunch…occupy the loudest table in the cafeteria, knocking the school dress code (''no backless shoes . . . no exposed bellies'') and making cracks about the students who slouch on the sidewalk across the street. Those are the stoners or slackers, a ragtag group in leather jackets, flannel shirts, boots, chains and tattoos. Unmotivated? Yes. Anti-school? Almost always. Big goals for the future? Why bother. ''Smoke cigarettes, have fun,'' says one, summing up the stoner life. It's a credo of disengagement, particularly from academics. It's also a fitting metaphor for the general problem at Taft Union, where, in too many classrooms, students doze or doodle. Many people may want to believe that low expectations…and poor performance…are the scourge only of inner-city schools or of poor, minority youths. But those problems thrive here too, in a small-town high school where 86% of the students are white. Junior Jerry Rowe is repeating sophomore English. Rowe admits that he doesn't care for studying, rarely participates in class, yet somehow expects to attend college and catch up then. ''They'll run that through me again…English,'' he says with alarming nonchalance.

California's white students, as a whole, aren't holding their own. Compelling evidence comes from the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Nationally, 33% of white fourth-graders read below the basic level in 1994. In California, 44% tested that poorly…14 points worse than their counterparts in Texas, a state with a similar demographic profile.

The proportion of white fourth-graders who read proficiently in California actually shrank from 1992 to 1994, by seven points, to 20%.

Even high-end students…those with parents who graduated from college…have lost ground: Only half were reading at or above the basic level in 1994.

The students at Taft are not high-end. This isn't Palo Alto or Pacific Palisades. Most are the sons and daughters of roustabouts and roughnecks who work the surrounding oil fields and live in clapboard shanties around the arid San Joaquin Valley community. Many are the descendants of another generation's poor immigrants…the Okies of Steinbeck's ''The Grapes of Wrath.''

Yet at Taft, students don't have to contend with gangs or violence or substandard facilities. ''This is like going back to 1950,'' English teacher Steve Shinn says. ''It is a wonderful, clean, quiet place.''

Here, it's hard to blame educational problems on money. For years, the school was the beneficiary of taxes from the oil beneath the foothills. There are no graffiti or mounds of trash. It has modern classrooms equipped with computers wired to the Internet. Teachers have ample textbooks.

Taft also has tight community bonds going for it. Nearly every class has the son or daughter of a teacher. The principal…a refugee from Los Angeles…loans his pickup to students who need a ride.

Scholastically, however, Taft is not even average.

Reading scores for the ninth through 12th grades range between the 39th and 48th percentile nationally. Math scores are lower.

Taft's average SAT was 975 last year; the national average 1016. And of 192 seniors, only 17% even took the college entrance exam.

Although 70% go on to higher education, that usually means the two-year variety…Taft Junior College, right next door.

Education experts have a hard time explaining exactly why California's students do poorly on measures such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Some say that it's all those uncredentialed teachers. Or the acceptance of mediocrity that plagues much of American education: 70% of California parents in The Times poll said their children do at most an hour of homework a night…and that's fine with them.

Others blame the state's affection for fads: notably the venture into ''whole language,'' which assumed that students would pick up reading naturally, almost by osmosis, if exposed to good stories.

At Taft, a call to read often is ignored.

Caroline Schoneweis' basic English class begins with ''silent reading,'' adopted by many schools to make sure students do some reading, even if they won't do it on their own at home.

One student pulls out an automotive magazine. Others chatter with classmates. A rebellious-looking girl with a ring in her nose is drawing an intricate design in the web of her thumb. One boy is slumped over his desk.

''You want me to stay awake?'' he asks Schoneweis, feigning surprise.

''I think she does,'' another student pipes up.

''You guys! One more time…get the books out and read!'' urges an exasperated Schoneweis.

Around the state, such scenes are not hard to find.

At Katella High, where the third period includes 18 minutes for independent reading, some students flip through teen magazines. Others go to a classroom magazine rack for a National Geographic, then study the glossy photos, bypassing the text. A few girls pick at their nails or powder their noses.

At Manual Arts, teacher Sukkar…now in her second year…tries to launch a discussion of ''Macbeth.'' But her seniors haven't finished Act II, last night's assignment. And one girl says she just doesn't understand it.

''Did you try? You've got to try!'' Sukkar implores.

It sounds eerily similar to a plea Schoneweis makes in her class, when another student bows his head to sleep instead of taking a test on diagraming sentences.

''Just guess,'' she begs, ''and you'll get some of these right.''

On days like this, education seems like a battle to reach one student, any student.

When Schoneweis takes her class to the school library late in the day to research periodicals, Kasey Mitchell dutifully gets a Time magazine to read about life in an orphanage.

Kasey is the girl with the nose ring. She hangs with the stoners. ''I don't fit in anywhere else,'' she explains.

But she is trying to distance herself from the influence of that crowd or other ''low-life people.''

In fact, after several years of drifting…she was kicked out of junior high for fighting and ran away from home…she has begun to turn around. Her GPA is up to 3.9, and she made honor roll this year.

She has a purpose. She wants to keep her grades above 3.0 ''so I can save enough money to get out of here and go to beauty school.''

When the last bell rings, the campus empties in minutes.

Some students head to work. A few pick up their babies at a campus child-care center. Jerry Rowe plans to ''go home and sit around.''

And many, like David Keyes, go cruising.

For 30 minutes, he and two Taft pals, Simon and Puni Maui, drive along streets lined by Depression-era bungalows, hungry for action.

They try Snob Hill…nothing. Then the main drag…bingo.

A classmate in a pickup pulls beside them. Keyes floors his $400 Oldsmobile. Engines roar.

In moments, it's over. The pickup speeds ahead, victorious.

''We ate it really bad,'' Simon Maui says.

The school week is two days through.

Wednesday: Progress and Illusion at Manual Arts

The boys are decked out in tuxedos, the girls in floor-length satin gowns. And the 36 members of the Taft Union concert band are facing down the jitters…they're about to enter their first competition, at Wasco High, 45 miles away. Just past 9 a.m., they bow their heads . . . and pray.

At Arcadia, it's a big day too…900 sophomores have to choose next year's classes. Counselor Peggy Bott trundles boxes of transcripts from one classroom to another, patiently answering questions like, ''Why can't I take four Advanced Placement classes?''

Up at Oakmont, the thermometer has reached the mid-60s, and snow caps the Sierra Nevada. But the daily bulletin brings bad news: Two Mr. Viking contestants have been suspended, so the contest…for male bathing beauties…is postponed. And the basketball team? Trounced in last night's playoffs.

In Los Angeles, students at Manual Arts have basketball on their minds too. But, unlike at Oakmont, their team is still alive.

''Go hard, go hard, pick it up!'' coach Randolph Simpson yells to senior Ricky Duff, 6-foot-6 with the bulging muscles of a stevedore. Each time he jams the ball, the gym fills with a ''Yeah!''

On Friday, the Toilers face Westchester for the city title.

But it's not only in athletics that Westchester is a threat. Located in a middle-class neighborhood near the airport, it snares many of Manual Arts' black students, who regard it as a better school.

These days, Manual Arts is trying to overcome a history of low academic performance, and…like Hoover…reconcile two clashing distinctions.

One is captured in a banner in the main hall. ''California Distinguished School,'' it reads.

That honor, bestowed by the state in 1996, recognized its improvements: suspensions down; attendance most improved of all Los Angeles Unified's 49 high schools; and grants for a raft of new computers and to start ''academies'' in finance and the humanities.

It's a safe campus too, contrary to horror stories about the inner-city. Principal Wendell Greer Jr. boasts that no student has been killed at or on the way to school since he took over four years ago. He posts deans near the gates every morning to clamp down on any attire that could be remotely gang-inspired…monkey face insignias, even hair ribbons dyed blue, the Crips' color.

But Manual Arts also is on the list drawn up by Supt. Ruben Zacarias…of Los Angeles' 100 worst schools. It's 17th from the bottom.

The reason: test scores. Its ninth-graders are in the 17th percentile in reading and the 20th in math. The average SAT score is about 700, 300 points below the national average.

Being on the dubious list naturally irks many here.

''We're making some major moves at this school,'' protests English teacher C.C. Ryder, Manual's union chair. ''That's why it's such a contradiction for us to be on the 100 schools list.''

Its contradictions, though, make Manual Arts typical of much of what is happening in California.

On the one hand, schools are doing many of the things policymakers want.

Dropout rates are scandalous? They're now tracking down the bodies. Wood shops are out of date? Everyone offers computer animation. Students need to learn problem-solving in groups? Bring on team projects. Students need literature about people like them? Everyone's reading Toni Morrison and RudolfoAnaya.

And minority students aren't taking enough demanding courses? Well, look at the numbers now.

Statewide, the percentage of black students who have completed the roster of college prep courses has soared, increasing 56% just since the 1994-95 school year. And Manual Arts, 80% Latino, is among the top 30 schools in California in graduating students who complete the course work recommended for admission to the state colleges, a Times analysis showed.

An impressive 68% of Manual Arts' graduates finish the college prep program, placing it in the same league as elite suburban schools such as San Marino.

On the other hand, here's what happens when Manual students arrive at college:

Five graduates enrolled at University of California campuses last fall. All failed UC's basic writing exam.

The school sent 18 graduates to Cal State campuses: 17 had to take remedial math and 16 remedial English.

Clearly, taking the college prep courses has not adequately prepared these students for the rigors of college.

It's similar around the state. At eight other Los Angeles County high schools, every one of the graduates entering UC also failed the writing exam. And 54% of all the high school graduates entering the CSU system need remedial help in math, 47% in English.

Nor have those college prep classes paid off another way: in higher SAT scores. In fact, SAT scores dropped in the last decade among what should be California's best students…those getting A's on the college prep courses.

And in the era of grade inflation, there are plenty of such students. The percentage of test-takers with A grades rose 3 to 4 points.

What is going on? How can more students be completing and getting A's in college prep programs…which typically require them to read more books, write more essays and absorb more difficult concepts…yet founder on basic skills tests after they finally begin their university careers?

The answer is really not a secret. Visit the schools and the teachers tell you: Too many college prep classes in California are college prep in name only. They are watered down to accommodate the marginal skills of the students.

Take a look at Wilson Yee's biology course or Rich Moody's advanced physical science class at Manual Arts. Either would bolster a UC or Cal State application.

But Yee figures most of his students cannot comprehend a 10th-grade text's discussion of parasitic nematodes, so he simplifies the main points on the chalkboard. Then they copy the notes. ''We're using class time for instruction that should be done at home,'' he says.

The students might point out that there aren't enough texts for them to take home. Yee assumes that even if there were, they wouldn't do the work.

As for Moody, his advanced science class…beginning a three week unit on fossils…was meant for students who could handle trigonometry. But most of his 11th-graders are still trying to pass algebra. So the former petroleum engineer avoids lab experiments that require too much math.

Usually it comes back to reading and writing.

That's why Sukkar…the ''is it their fault, or is it mine?'' teacher…has her students run through five drafts of autobiographical essays until the spelling and grammar are right. And why she sits with them while they take tests to help them understand the questions.

She figures they read at fourth- or fifth-grade level.

''My objective is that they learn,'' she says. ''It's not to trip them up on a test question.''

Is it wrong to lower standards for students whose skills are lacking? Are these bad teachers for doing so?

To answer no, as many at Manual would, goes against the tide today, when the mantra is standards, standards, standards…setting the same high requirements for learning math, English and science for all students, regardless of background.

It also runs against public opinion. The Times poll found that almost two-thirds of Californians believe that raising academic standards, rather than increased funding, is the best way to improve schools.

''I don't frankly care if students come to us poor or dysfunctional or in wheelchairs,'' state Supt. of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin said in a recent address to Pasadena teachers. ''We set one standard for them all.''

The issue is complex, though, and wrenching.

At Manual Arts, some ponder whether high schools should teach basic phonics that should have been covered in the first grade. But it's hard to forget how students at a school like this, which opened in 1910 to help youths learn a trade, would have been routinely relegated to dead-end remedial classes.

Why not instead place then in classes labeled college prep and at least expose them to ''Siddhartha'' or ''Of Mice and Men''?

''We're kind of fooling ourselves,'' says English teacher Curt Ullman.

So the meetings continue: over whether to require vocabulary drills or have all teachers file course descriptions on the school's Internet site.

The principal, Greer, wants the latter so parents can sign on to see what the school expects their children to learn. He also wants to determine if the school is teaching the material covered on the SAT and Los Angeles' new standardized exam. You can't raise scores if students aren't learning what the tests demand.

But this idea runs into choppy waters at an English teachers gathering.

''It's busy work!'' veteran Josephine Zarro declares. ''The day they start telling me what to teach, and how, is the day I quit.''

Copyright Los Angeles Times

Reading Blues - Teachers Say They Must Water Down Classes Because Students Lack Basic Skills

By RICHARD LEE COLVIN, Times Education Writer

Their teachers' lsson plans say the students are getting the high school classics…Hemingway's ''Old Man and the Sea,'' Steinbeck's ''Of Mice and Men'' and, of course, Shakespeare's ''Romeo and Juliet.''

That's the theory.

The reality is that in schools across the state, from white-collar suburbs of San Francisco to inner-city neighborhoods of Los Angeles, high school teachers say those are books that many of their students simply cannot read.

''We find that these kids are just not keeping up, and since we don't have reading specialists anymore, we can't give them the help they need,'' said Anastasia Condas, an English teacher in the affluent San Ramon Valley east of Oakland.

Nationally, reading levels have remained stable. Nationwide tests conducted in 1996 show that, on average, 17-year-olds are reading no worse than they did 25 years ago. African American and Latino high school seniors, in particular, are reading significantly better today than in the past, the test scores show.

But in California, the picture appears to be notably different…and worse. California has had no statewide tests…they began this spring after a decade-long absence. But according to many middle and high school teachers, reading levels have declined sharply in the state in recent years.

A Los Angeles Times poll of California teachers found 45% of high school teachers saying that no more than half their students are able to read the normally assigned books. An even higher percentage of middle school teachers, 53%, said the same thing.

The result, teachers say, is that they now have to choose between sapping the academic rigor of their lessons by dumbing them down, or writing off those students…often a majority…who are far behind.

It's a choice that angers high school teachers who are trained to deal with the subtleties of motivation in ''Macbeth'' or the causes of the American Revolution, but not the intricacies of phonics and breaking words into syllables.

''It isn't our job in high school to teach reading, it's to teach thought,'' said Camille Konigsberg, who chairs the English department at Manual Arts High School, southwest of downtown Los Angeles.

But her colleague Linda Caillet says that although her students are smart, they just can't read. So, instead of having them write essays, she often lets them draw pictures.

''They love to draw, so sometimes what they miss in reading, they get in a different way,'' she said.

Larry Klinkhammer, who teaches 10th-grade English at Katella High School in Anaheim, said he noticed the reading skills of his students beginning to slide about 10 years ago. And one of the biggest problems, he said, is the limited range of students' vocabularies.

On a quiz, one student writes that an illegitimate baby is one that cannot read. Another said ''articulate'' means to do something well, as in: ''My mom was told she's very articulate because of the neat sweatshirts she designs.''

Why is California falling behind?

Some attack TV and video games for distracting students. Others talk about the destruction of the two-parent family.

Rising rates of child poverty are widely mentioned as a culprit. So is the dramatic increase in students whose native language is not English and the ineffectiveness of the state's bilingual education methods.

But underlying all those problems, many reading experts now blame the state's plunge in the late 1980s into an instructional philosophy called ''whole language.''

That philosophy downplayed explicit lessons in phonics…the sounds of letters…in favor of lots of writing exercises and repeated exposure to books. The idea was that most students would pick up the ''code'' of the alphabet more or less naturally.

For many students, it didn't happen.

Two years ago, after the state's fourth-graders came out at the bottom of a 39-state assessment of reading skills, state lawmakers pulled the plug on ''whole language'' and passed bills requiring lessons, textbooks and teacher training focusing on phonics.

But it was too late for the current crop of middle and high school students.

Even if students are able to read the words, teachers say, they have trouble picking up the main idea of what they're reading. They have particular trouble gleaning information from nonfiction books, which have been downplayed in the past decade in favor of literature.

''It's not that they can't laboriously get through a line,'' said Marion Joseph, a State Board of Education member who has been a key force in addressing the reading problems of younger children.

''But you have to be able to read well. You have to be fluent. You have to be fast. That is the point.''

Experienced teachers say that most children who are likely to have reading difficulties are identifiable in kindergarten. They come to school not knowing the alphabet, cannot associate the sound of ''a'' with ''apple'' and, crucially, lack what experts call ''phonemic awareness.'' That is the understanding that, for example, changing the ''c'' in ''cot'' to ''r'' produces ''rot.''

Taught well, most of those pupils can overcome those obstacles. But they need to be addressed early on. Children who do not read at least moderately well by the end of third grade, long-term studies show, have a very poor chance of even graduating from high school.

John Shefelbine, a Cal State Sacramento reading expert, said poor readers fall behind rapidly beginning in fourth grade.

''These books in the fourth grade on up are written with a kind of academic language that is quite different from conversational language,'' Shefelbine said. ''Students who don't read much find themselves faced with learning . . . in what is almost like a second language to them.''

Until recently, high schools have largely avoided dealing with the reading problem, passing it along, in turn, to community colleges and Cal State campuses, where statistics show that well over half the entering students require remedial reading courses.

Now, however, high schools are starting to recognize that the problem will not go away and that it undermines all aspects of their academic programs.

The state last year set aside money to train middle school teachers to teach reading. This year, Gov. Pete Wilson is proposing to invest more than $30 million for addressing the needs of high school teachers as well.

Reading consultant Sheila Mandel is already busy training high school teachers up and down the state to use a curriculum that includes basic phonics, grammar, punctuation and spelling.

The lessons go all the way back to the beginning, meaning that high schoolers are doing activities common to preschoolers, such as spelling out ''B-A-T'' and ''R-A-T'' using plastic letters.

Spending valuable time on such basic skills bothers some teachers. But Mandel said nothing else matters unless high school graduates can read well enough to get a job or gain job skills.

''We're finally convincing schools that it's more important to make them literate than to pretend that they are actually learning anything,'' Mandel said.

Copyright Los Angeles Times

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Sunday, May 17, 1998

Campus Restrooms: 'They Stink, They're Gross' - While teachers focus on big issues, students deal with more mundane problems…such as finding a bathroom that works.

By RICHARD LEE COLVIN, Times Education Writer

When Vce President Al Gore came to Ball Junior High in Anaheim in March to talk about plans to spend billions of dollars to upgrade school campuses, the students focused on one aspect of those buildings they found particularly galling.

The restrooms.

One eighth-grader griped about the lack of paper. Another said she had to walk five minutes to the far side of campus…even in the rain…to get to the only restroom left open. A third echoed the first two.

''This seems to be a recurring theme,'' Gore drolly noted.

Restrooms may sound like a small point when evaluating the quality of public education in California. But that's just the point: If educators can't handle something so basic as keeping restrooms adequately stocked and maintained, how can they be expected to fix more complex problems such as teaching students to read?

And by that fundamental measure, California schools have much room for improvement, a Times poll of middle school and high school students found. Of those surveyed, 48% said they avoid using the restrooms at their school. The reasons? They're filthy. The toilets don't flush. The sinks don't work. There's no toilet paper and no doors on the stalls.

''If they're public schools, they're public bathrooms and they're trashed,'' said 15-year-old Javier Felix, who avoids using the restrooms at his school in Madera. ''When anyone thinks of school restrooms, they think of them being in bad shape.''

''They stink, they're gross,'' said Alana Howard, a senior in the Bay Area suburb of Fairfield. ''I try to avoid them, like, seriously.''

''Telling the difference between the sink and the urinal is quite a challenge,'' said James Douglas, a senior at El Capitan High School in the San Diego County town of Lakeside.

If students consider the restrooms in their schools offensive, educators see them as, inch for inch, the source of some of their biggest headaches.

Part of the problem is that many campuses have far more students than they were built to handle. Although schools add portable classrooms to accommodate overflow students, they can't usually afford to install more restrooms.

Many of California's schools are approaching 50 years old and strapped districts have not invested in basic maintenance of pipes and fixtures.

But many of the problems are caused by destructive students.

Students at many campuses take pride in stuffing paper towels into sinks and letting the water run so it overflows. Another trick is to urinate into the toilet paper dispensers, ruining the paper. At Belmont High School, students have burned paper towels.

Many schools simply lock up restrooms they can't afford to monitor constantly. That was what administrators at Katella High School in Anaheim did after one of two boys bathrooms became a target for graffiti and a hangout for smokers.

Locke High School in South Los Angeles took an additional step to combat vandalism and graffiti. There, only one set of restrooms, down the hall from the principal's office, is kept open. And students are subjected to the indignity of having to sign in with a monitor every time they have to attend to a private function.

Los Angeles school officials are fighting restroom problems with technology. Using money from the district's $2.4-billion bond issue, they are installing ''smart'' fixtures, costing $7,000 per bathroom, in 17 elementary and middle schools.

The idea is that automatic hand dryers will eliminate paper towels, which then can't be stuffed into toilets and sinks. Automatic faucets will prevent water from overfilling sinks and covering floors. The district gave up on auto-flush toilets, however, fearing that students would break them. All of that is supposed to free custodians to spend more time on classrooms and hallways while, in the long run, saving money.

To prevent students from disabling hand dryers by squirting water into their motors, officials are installing equipment that they hope is tamper-proof.

At Manual Arts High School, Principal Wendell Greer is trying a different tack…with some success.

When a gang member's tag is found in a bathroom, Greer gets on the public address system and asks for help in identifying the culprit. Those who have been turned in have been made to clean it up.

He also has made a pact with the students. He has pressured custodians to keep the restrooms stocked and clean. And he promises to buy lunch for any student who finds a restroom that is ill-kept or without toilet paper.

In the girls' restrooms, he had doors reinstalled to give privacy. And he even puts vases of flowers there on occasion.

It's a matter of showing mutual respect, he said.

Copyright Los Angeles Times

Saving Daniel - One woman sensed something wrong. She made sure one boy didn't fall through the cracks.

By DUKE HELFAND, Times Staff Writer

One of the students was growing listless.

Catherine Alawami, an interpreter for the deaf at Granada Hills High School, couldn't help but notice. How the boy seemed unable to concentrate in history class. How he eyed classmates as they munched potato chips and sipped sodas. How the 17-year-old, once hefty, began to drop weight.

Alawami noticed. And because she did, a deaf boy has a new life. And her own life has changed as well.

The boy is Daniel Hamilton and, as Alawami discovered last fall, he had entered the 11th grade living on his own, hungry and near-penniless. How had that happened? A child of divorce, he had come from Washington state to California to live with an older sister. Then the sister moved away.

It took a while for people at the school to realize he was adrift, because he kept it to himself, managing to keep his grades up.

But when Daniel thought no one was looking, he stole bread in the mornings from a nearby grocery store. Or he scavenged the school cafeteria for half-eaten pizzas.

''When you're starving, you don't care about anything but food,'' he said.

Daniel's case is extreme, of course. But people in education understand all too well these days that what happens to students outside school often has more impact on how they learn…or don't learn…than anything that goes on inside the classroom.

Sometimes teachers rant and rave about how hard it is to reach kids, how futile it seems. But sometimes someone in the system decides to reach out beyond the walls and change the kids' world.

And sometimes for all their faults, schools can still save a life.

It can be the basketball coach at Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles promising a dying woman that he will make sure her grandson graduates, then offering to adopt the boy, left orphaned and caring for three other relatives.

It can be a school superintendent outside Sacramento growing so frustrated trying to handle the most troubled kids, those bounced around foster care, that he sets out to establish a boarding school for them. If their homes aren't working, the school district will create a better one.

Or it can be an interpreter for the deaf wondering about a kid in history class in Granada Hills.

The first thing Alawami did was send Daniel to a school counselor. That's when he confided how he was struggling to survive.

Alawami and the counselor began supplying Daniel with tuna or turkey sandwiches, fruit and cookies. Alawami took up a collection among Granada Hills' staff. She asked her family and neighbors to pitch in, too…bread, cans of soup, anything would do.

By the time Alawami invited Daniel to move into her West Hills home…with her husband and two children…a couple of other staffers at the school also were offering to take him in.

''I didn't want Daniel to fall through the cracks,'' said Alawami, 39. ''I knew…put this kid in a group home and he'll go down.''

Daniel accepted her offer in part because she knows sign language. But her place wasn't bad, either: three bedrooms, a pool and Jacuzzi at the base of hills in a quintessential suburban neighborhood, where fathers shoot hoops with their sons in the driveway.

Daniel arrived last Thanksgiving weekend. He was given what instantly became the largest bedroom in the house, a converted garage with plush beige carpeting. It previously served as a playroom for Alawamis' daughter, 8, and son, 11.

Within days, the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services certified Alawami as a foster parent.

It's a family for our time. Alawami is a Latina. Her husband, Haider, an associate planner for the city of Thousand Oaks, is Saudi Arabian.

Since arriving, Daniel has made his room his own. It now is furnished with a burgundy couch, a television and a CD boombox with a rack full of CDs. Daniel uses hearing aids to listen.

''Living with them,'' Daniel says of his new family, is ''a big relief.''

Here's where he came from:

At 8, Daniel was placed in the Washington School for the Deaf, across the river from Portland, Ore.…a two-story brick complex where he would spend the next eight years. ''I never learned anything from that school,'' he recalls.

With his mother's approval, he moved south in the summer of 1996 to live with his older sister, a student at Cal State Northridge, and her husband. Both are deaf.

It was just by fortune that Granada Hills, located blocks from the campus, has a highly regarded magnet program in which deaf and hearing students attend classes together. He enrolled in 10th grade.

Things began to unravel, he says, by year's end. His sister and her husband divorced. She left Los Angeles.

And he drifted. Surviving on $490 a month in federal disability benefits, he slept first at friends' homes. Then he settled into an apartment with two Northridge students. He secured a summer job, at minimum wage, as a stock boy at Sears in the Northridge Fashion Center. Added to the disability check, he could pay his share of the rent and other bills.

But when summer ended, so did the job. It was time for 11th grade. The $100 he had saved over the summer lasted only through September.

That's when he began stealing food.

Daniel says he kept what was happening from his mother and other relatives back in Washington. He cannot recall the precise ages of his seven siblings.

''Me and my family,'' he says, ''we were never close.''

His county social worker says she won't order him to go back.

A Hollywood script might have Daniel struggling as a student before the caring school staff steps in and rescues him. Then he would be transformed into an honor student.

The reality, though, is arguably more remarkable: Daniel always was a high-achieving student. He maintained a 3.0 grade-point average despite a demanding course load that included Advanced Placement classes. From the day he arrived at Granada Hills High, he was the sort who sat in the front row and was the first to raise his hand.

''Education,'' he says, ''is the only way you can get yourself somewhere in life.''

Daniel is determined to attend college. During spring break, he went to New York to visit NYU and Columbia University.

On one wall of his room he has fashioned a homemade sign in large letters: ''Knowledge Is Power. Experience Is Wisdom.''

Next to the sign hangs the first-place medal he won in a 1996 academic competition among schools for the deaf in the western United States.

On a third wall, Daniel has cut out a newspaper advertisement. ''If you had total access to every piece of knowledge on earth, where would you go?'' it asks. ''What would you do? Who would you be?''

Alawami's kids dash in, signaling him for dinner. A good thing, too.

''He's been known to eat full pizzas,'' his foster mom says, ''and polish off half a gallon of cookie dough chocolate chip ice cream.''

Copyright Los Angeles Times

EDITORIAL - California's Challenge

Why Johnny Can't Read,'' a national bestseller in 1955, attacked the abandonment of phonics in the nation's public schools. A similar critique could be written today, cataloging California's encyclopedic failures in public education.

All of course is not bad. Top California students can take credit for winning the national Academic Decathlon championship, placing second in the Science Bowl, acing multiple Advanced Placement exams and racking up other academic honors. More students are also taking the more difficult academic courses needed for college admission and many get good grades. But the bigger picture is unacceptable: statewide standardized test scores are well below the national average and huge numbers of students need remedial math and reading.

It's all laid out in grim detail in this Times special project, ''Public Education: California's Perilous Slide,'' which continues through Tuesday. In reading, the state's fourth-graders tie for last with Louisiana; in math, they are second from the bottom.

Reading Meltdown

In part, these children are casualties of the state's faddish embrace of the laissez-faire whole-language method of reading instruction, which did not include a proper balance with essential phonics-based instruction. California led this failed revolution when the state Department of Education in 1987 all but abandoned phonics in favor of an enriched, literature-based approach to reading instruction, which worked for only the brightest and hardest-working students. Most other states soon followed, as did major textbook publishers. California also got sidetracked on prolonged multicultural debates. Too much well-meaning but misguided energy was drained in foolish arguments over whether schools should teach Mark Twain or whether textbooks spent enough pages on Shakespeare or James Baldwin. The answer was not either/or and should have been simple: Teach all that our children need to know in a global marketplace and ought to know in a diverse nation and state.

The result of all of this has been a growing national concern about reading comprehension, and a return by most states, led by California, to systematic phonics-based instruction, which teaches a child to read by associating letters and sounds. But the lingering damage requires another revolution, in remedial reading.

Reading, a gateway skill to other subjects, is especially critical in high school because students are expected to master more sophisticated material. An in-depth look by The Times at seven high schools across the state finds many examples of how poor reading comprehension forces teachers to lower expectations, simplify course work, avoid the classics and water down tests. On many campuses, the lack of literacy is compounded by a shortage of textbooks and library books.

High school teachers shouldn't be expected to teach reading. But somebody had better do it. California needs a new initiative that assigns reading specialists to every campus where children are failing on the state's new standardized tests. Remedial reading, currently nonexistent in most school districts, should be required daily for all students who cannot read accurately and easily with good comprehension. These students should get intensive extra help during and after the regular school day. And what better time to revive another sensible idea: summer school, or for the year-round schools, winter school.

Gaining Accountability

This additional instruction will be expensive, but Sacramento should be willing as long as schools deliver results.

''Results'' is a dirty word in California education circles. No one is held accountable when a student fails. Not the principal, not the teacher, not the parents, not even the student. Schools don't get an extra dime if they improve, nor do they lose a cent if test scores plunge.

Consider Texas, which is demographically similar to California. Its fourth-grade math scores now rank in the top 10 among the 39 states that can be compared; its reading scores are at the median. California students rank at or near the very bottom. In every category--white, Latino, black, children of college-educated parents, children of high school dropouts--young Texans outperform young Californians. That broad success, which will be outlined in Tuesday's special section, is attributed to rigorous accountability that includes an innovative use of test data to track individual student performance. Every student is held to the same standard. Schools that raise test scores, improve student attendance and reduce the dropout rate are rewarded. Schools that perform at unacceptable levels are sanctioned. Each school receives a public rating--exemplary, recognized, acceptable or low performing. A transforming performance pays off with promotions for principals and career boosts for teachers. A poor performance can result in intervention from state-appointed managers who oversee a troubled district, or the firing of faculty members. Failing schools also get extra help. The result, over the past five years, has been steady improvement in test scores.

The Texas reform would not have been possible without the prodding of influential business leaders who, concerned about the poor quality of the state's work force, championed improvement. The business community got help from an unusual ally, the state's largest teachers union. The coalition attracted strong support in the Texas Legislature.

Why not do it in California?

As California's steady erosion of literacy skills portends trouble, so too does the failure of bilingual education in a state that is home to nearly half of the nation's immigrant students and where nearly one-fourth of students speak little or no English when they start school.

Among the more startling findings of The Times' special education project: More than 1,000 schools with limited-English students failed to redesignate a single bilingual student last year. Whether the teachers used traditional bilingual instruction in the child's primary language or taught solely in English, no students in those schools learned enough English to progress into regular classes. Without consequences to or assistance for such schools, there is no incentive to succeed. There is a disincentive, in fact, since students classified as limited-English draw extra federal, state and sometimes local funds to a school. Instead, the state should consider a per-pupil bonus to every school that quickly teaches children proficiency in English.

Role of Parents, State

Progress for all kids begins with parents: Mothers and fathers who hold high expectations of their children, help them achieve in every way possible, require them to work hard and praise them for a job well done.

Reading to a child must begin at home, long before school age. Once children enter the primary grades, classrooms should be staffed by experienced teachers trained in reading instruction that emphasizes phonics and reading comprehension. Teachers holding emergency credentials, who have never taken a course in how to teach reading, should not be assigned to teach what they do not know.

The Legislature needs to lengthen the school year, toughen requirements for teacher training, increase professional development for teachers already in the classroom and link it to the skills urgently needed. Principals and teachers who get results should be rewarded. Those who don't, year after year, should be forced out.

A reinvestment in public education would cost billions, and no taxpayer wants to throw good money after bad. The Legislature should target investments, in the same way the space race of the 1950s and 1960s directed infusions of public money into specific efforts that paid off for all Americans.

If California students are to compete globally, the state's education crisis should be treated like the national crisis sparked in 1957 when the Russians beat the U.S. into space.

The success of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth, urgently reordered national priorities. ''No event since Pearl Harbor set off such repercussions in public life,'' according to Walter A. McDougall in ''The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age.'' Winning became patriotic. The space race launched a government-sponsored technical revolution that pumped billions into math and science teacher-training, secondary and college education, research and development and a new agency named NASA. The collective effort got results in high school classrooms, on university campuses, in aerospace careers and the fledging computer industry, in technological and medical advances, and of course with a victory: the first man on the moon. Just as Americans set a goal then and worked hard together to reach it, California must take the initiative, set a goal--first, reading proficiency for all children--and work collectively to reach it.

Copyright Los Angeles Times

PART II - CULTURE AND LANGUAGE

Monday, May 18, 1998

Home Life Plays a Crucial Role in Students’ Success or Failure By ELAINE WOO, Times Education Writer

When Arcadia High School sophomore Johnson Lee gets home, his mother has vegetable sushi and eggrolls waiting on the kitchen table. When he stays up late before a big exam -- say, to cram with friends over the Internet -- she brews a pot of coffee to keep him going. And when there’s just no room in his backpack for a hefty Advanced Placement biology textbook, no problem -- she copies the chapters he needs on the machine outside his bedroom.

In this household, failure is spelled B.

Up in Kern County, Taft Union High School student Dusty Watkins, the son of a petroleum company worker, wants to be a police officer or game warden. Watkins, though, seldom does his homework -- ''It’s boring.''

Sure, his father will ground him for nine weeks if he gets a shoddy grade. But what’s a bad grade in this family? D.

Down at San Diego’s Hoover High School, there’s a group that calls itself the Crazy Brown Ladies. They wear heavy makeup -- ''ghetto paint,'' they call it -- and loathe carrying schoolbooks. For their academically inclined sisters, they’ve reserved a special slur: ''School Girls.''

What gives Lee his drive? Why does Watkins shrug off schoolwork? Why do the Crazy Brown Ladies eschew all things academic?

The answer may be culture.

What goes on in students’ lives outside the classroom often does more to shape school performance than what transpires inside it. One of the strongest outside influences is the mix of attitudes, beliefs and expectations about education that can mold motivation -- and may underlie startlingly persistent differences in academic achievement among white, Asian, black and Latino students.

Of course, averages for large, diverse racial or ethnic groups do not account for individual achievements.

At Katella High School in Anaheim, there’s Karina Valenzuela. The Tijuana-born senior has hopscotched through 10 schools since her arrival in the United States 12 years ago. For a while she and her family of six lived in a van. In spite of such hardships -- usually a formula for academic disaster -- Karina has a 3.8 grade-point average and is bound for college.

Yet despite such examples, in one measure of academic fitness after another -- dropout rates, grades, enrollment in advanced courses -- the patterns shout: Asians generally come out on top in California’s schools, whites second, blacks third, Latinos last.

A Search for Causes

What’s going on? Race or ethnicity by itself does not explain these differences. Social scientists have widely discredited the notion that one ethnic group is innately smarter or works harder than another.

Nor does immigration status fully account for the performance gap. Indeed, contrary to some stereotypes that criticize immigrants as a source of trouble in the state’s schools, repeated studies have found that immigrant children of almost any origin tend to do better in school than ethnic peers who have been in the United States longer. The problem is that subsequent generations do worse than the first -- suggesting that exposure to American culture weakens immigrants’ drive, rather than the other way around.

Nor does money fully account for the distinctions. Yes, Asian Americans and whites are richer on average than Latinos and blacks. With greater income comes greater access to the tools of success -- computers, books, museum trips and a quiet place to study -- making money a major factor.

And of course, racial definitions always over-generalize, particularly in a population as large and varied as California’s. Racial categories lump together many people of different heritages who often have little in common culturally or socially.

But still ethnic differences remain, even after accounting for income, parent education or the language a student speaks at home.

The accomplishments of Asian American students are one of ''the most consistent findings'' of studies on school achievement in America, according to Temple University researcher Laurence Steinberg, who writes about ethnic differences in academic performance in his 1996 book ''Beyond the Classroom.''

''It is more advantageous to be Asian than to be wealthy, to have non-divorced parents or to have a mother who is able to stay home full-time,'' he writes.

Why? And what are the implications for schools?

UC Berkeley anthropologist John Ogbu offers one possibility: that years of workplace discrimination have discouraged blacks and Latinos from investing time and effort in school.

Ogbu, an African American social scientist, was one of the first to describe ''the burden of acting white,'' a theory that suggests that many black students resist schooling to protect their self-image and distinguish themselves from a majority culture that too often devalues their abilities.

Ana M. ''Cha'' Guzman, a Texas community college administrator who recently headed a presidential commission on Latino education issues, cites another factor: Many Latinos face intense pressure to join the work force and ''see the pursuit of a college degree as a selfish choice'' that puts their own welfare ahead of their family’s.

Nationwide, Latino men have the highest work force participation of any ethnic group. But Latinos also drop out of school at the highest rate -- about 30%, according to federal estimates -- and attend college at the lowest.

''Latino students, perhaps because of a cultural issue, tend to take themselves out of the [education] game prematurely,'' says UC Davis education professor Patricia Gandara, ''whereas other groups gut it out more.''

As far back as 1986, education researcher Harold Hodgkinson, in a report ''California: The State and Its Educational System,'' urged state officials to ''think of ways in which the motivations and achievements'' of Asian Americans ''could be transferred to others.''

That would include striking at the complacency that hampers so many of California’s white students, who have shown a sharper drop on reading scores in California in this decade than either blacks or Latinos.

Or it may mean trying to change the habits that immigrants can carry over from impoverished countries like Mexico or El Salvador. In some Los Angeles schools, for example, officials find that attendance drops sharply on rainy days -- a phenomenon they attribute in part to immigrants who come from places where schools simply shut down when it rains.

The Latino superintendent of the San Francisco Unified School District sees the role of culture in low achievement. What is needed, says Waldemar Rojas, is to ''eliminate the disparity that is there because of despair -- [the attitude that] school is never for me. . . .''

Consider attendance, how three-quarters of the Chinese and Japanese students in San Francisco are present for virtually all -- more than 90% of -- their classes. Only 29% of the black students -- and 54% of the whites -- attend class that regularly.

''Certainly, we have to transfer that disposition to learn -- and that work ethic'' -- of Asian Americans to others, he says. ''Intelligence is modifiable. But if you’re not in class, it’s less modifiable.''

More educators are beginning to favor a frontal assault on cultural issues.

Already, for example, 18 California high schools with large numbers of underachieving Latino students are participating in the Puente program.

Puente is designed to prepare them for college through small classes, extensive counseling, exposure to successful Latino professionals, and an intense focus on writing and the literature of Mexican American authors.

Ethnic Trends

The persistence of ethnic gaps in school success is a key finding of a months-long examination of the state’s public schools by The Times, which analyzed school records and trailed students from a variety of backgrounds around California.

Analyses conducted for The Times by UCLA, for example, show that proportionally twice as many Asians as whites take the high school courses required for admission to the University of California. In certain areas, the gap is even more stark: Asians enroll in advanced math and chemistry classes, for instance, at as much as three times the rate of whites.

In a separate study by Times computer data analysts, students in Asian- and Latino-majority high schools were found to be quite similar in two key factors. In both types of schools, 24% to 30% of students spoke limited English and about 20% were from families on welfare.

Yet 45% of the seniors in the majority-Asian schools completed the college preparatory courses recommended for admission to the University of California, compared with 30% in the mostly Latino schools.

Research provided to The Times by the College Board, the New York-based organization that sponsors the SAT, also shows marked disparities in performance despite common group traits. Similar percentages of Asian and Latino SAT-takers last year spoke a language other than English at home, for example, and proportionally more whites than Asians are from families earning $40,000 or more annually. Yet the Asians had the highest grade-point averages.

As an example of how even low-income groups of Asian American immigrants have achieved educational success, consider the Hmong.

Originally refugees from Laos who immigrated to the United States in the 1970s after the end of Indochina’s wars, the Hmong have the highest poverty rates of all immigrant groups in California. Yet according to Michigan State University sociologist Ruben Rumbaut, who tracked 2,000 immigrant students in San Diego over five years, Hmong students put in more homework time than anyone -- as many as four hours a night.

Lia Thao, a senior at Hoover High, immigrated when she was 5 years old after spending a few years in a Thai refugee camp. When she started first grade in the United States, she spoke no English.

Now she lives in a three-bedroom apartment near Hoover with her parents and five siblings. To help her family make ends meet, she works at a middle school as a classroom aide and at a taco restaurant.

Despite those demands, she spends four to six hours on homework each night. With the second-highest grade-point average among Hoover graduates this year -- a 4.3 -- she plans to attend UC San Diego as a premed.

She gives much of the credit to her father, who fought the communists in Laos and who now delivers produce.

''One of the things he tells me is, a pen is heavier than a sword.''

Of course, not all Asians perform at the same levels. Rumbaut found that San Diego’s Hmong, despite all their homework, had a 2.9 grade-point average as 10th-graders, lower than Filipino and Vietnamese students -- but still higher than Mexican immigrants.

At Arcadia High, it escapes no one’s notice the astonishing degree to which Asians dominate academically. You can measure it simply by walking through classrooms -- the tougher the course, the more seats they fill.

The numbers also tell the story. Of 902 Advanced Placement exams last year that earned a passing score of 3 or better at the school, 713, or 79%, belonged to Asian students, who make up 56% of Arcadia’s 3,000 students.

Whites, 34% of the students, accounted for only 95, or 10%, of the passing exams.

The school’s Pathways program for failing students, by contrast, enrolls mainly whites and Latinos. One is James White, a friendly sophomore with shoulder-length blond locks who attended about a dozen different schools before landing at Arcadia.

Although James completes assignments much of the time and enjoys reading Shakespeare on his own, his highest grade last term was in auto shop. ''I really don’t like school,'' he says. He rarely spends more than 20 minutes on homework, and if it is too hard, ''I just don’t do it.''

A veteran teacher at Arcadia says: ''[Asian parents] say, ‘We’re going to go here and you will perform.’ They’ll sacrifice everything to move here for the education. White families I don’t think have that attitude.''

Findings from a Times poll back that up. Among Asian parents of school-age children in California, 22% said some students achieve more than others because they work harder. By contrast, only 14% of Latinos, 8% of blacks and 5% of whites cited working hard. Members of those ethnic groups were more likely to cite parental involvement or a stable home life.

Asian parents were also most likely to report that their children spend a hefty chunk of time on homework. Almost 50% of Asian parents reported two hours or more on homework every night, compared with 33% of blacks, 27% of whites and 18% of Latinos.

''There is nothing magical going on here,'' says Temple University’s Steinberg. ''Asian youngsters and their parents are more likely to believe that hard work pays off.'' That belief is rooted, at least in part, in Confucianism, the ancient philosophy that people can improve themselves through effort and instruction.

Perhaps even more important, Steinberg found, is that Asians also strongly believe that failing to work hard in school will bring negative consequences. Whites and other non-Asians, on the other hand, are ''far more cavalier'' about the downsides of sloughing off, he says.

At nearly all-white Taft Union High near Bakersfield, the anti-work ethic seems widespread. Many students, like aspiring game warden Dusty Watkins, admit they just don’t try hard. Moreover, the school doesn’t expect them to. Many students don’t do their homework, so teachers often don’t bother giving it.

It’s a vicious cycle, one that makes some Taft teachers throw up their hands in defeat.

''If you assign them to read a story and two-thirds haven’t read it, where are you?'' English teacher Steve Shinn asks with resignation.

Raising Expectations

The process of changing such attitudes is not easy.

Prompted by the observations of a Times reporter who spent a week on the Taft campus as part of this series -- as well as the findings of a school accreditation team -- Taft administrators and faculty are stiffening requirements to prevent students from just sliding by.

The school suffers from ''different levels of expectation'' for its students, says Taft Principal Bill Wickwire.

The plan now is to merge lower-level ''general education'' courses with the college track to help raise the learning standards for large numbers of students.

The principal worries, however, whether it will work.

''Teachers couldn’t cope with the low reading ability of a large group of the kids. That’s their fear,'' Wickwire said.

The Puente experience, however, suggests it is possible to transform students’ anti-achievement attitudes.

More Puente students complete college-prep courses than do non-Puente students matched by socioeconomic levels and grades. And grade-point averages of Puente students have increased slightly.

But the program’s real value, UC Davis’ Gandara says, is cultural -- as illustrated by a question posed to 1,000 students, half in Puente and half not.

Researchers asked the students to pick one of the following types to identify with: a popular student who gets invited to the best parties; a nice person who listens to others’ problems; a cool student who is fun to be around; or a good student who helps others with school work.

Puente students were most likely to choose the smart student identity. By contrast, non-Puente students listed the good student image as their third choice.

''These Puente kids are much more willing to say, ‘I want to be a scholar. I’m willing give up things to make it happen,’ '' Gandara says.

Many of them also have embraced a technique used effectively by Asian American students: study groups. Puente classes encourage participants to work cooperatively, a practice that has begun spilling over to after-school hours.

''It’s absolutely possible'' to teach others some of Asian American students’ strategies, she concludes.

Iris DeLeon, a sophomore enrolled in the Puente program at Pasadena High School, has heard the message.

The petite, green-eyed daughter of a Guatemala-born gardener and a Mexican mother, Iris admits she was not a stellar student in junior high. She was used to people telling her that she was ''too dumb'' to bother with school. So when she entered the ninth grade, she gave in to temptations -- ditching class to hang out with others who had already dropped out.

But the ditching soon got boring, and getting caught was no fun. So, when a counselor asked her to consider the Puente program, she agreed.

Iris found herself working harder than ever before. Some days, she would go home and cry, stressed out by demands such as writing a thesis on Shakespeare.

A year later, her best friends are all Puente students. And she has enough confidence that on Cinco de Mayo, she got up before hundreds of schoolmates in an auditorium decorated with streamers, tissue-paper flowers and portraits of Mexican American leaders. She had rummaged through books and newspapers for days, searching for a poem she could recite at the assembly celebrating the Mexican holiday.

She stumbled across an anonymous poem called ''When, Raza?''

Her favorite line went like this: Yesterday is gone, and manana doesn’t come.

To Iris, it sums up the lesson of the last year. ''It means, ‘Today you’re here, but tomorrow where are you going to be?’ ''

If she can keep pulling up her grades, now mostly Cs, Iris knows where she will be: college.

''I want to be a doctor.''

In essence, what programs like Puente are trying to do is replicate parts of the mixture of inner drive, family support and school strategies that powers the success of students like Johnson Lee.

His day starts at 6:30 a.m. in the converted attic bedroom of a modestly furnished home near campus that he shares with his mother, Yvonne Lee, and sister Michelle. He lingers in bed until 7:30, cramming a little more for three tests today -- in biology, calculus and a course on ancient Greek history and literature. Homework was heavy the night before; he’s had barely four hours of sleep.

By a little after 8 a.m., he is reciting sentences with reflexive verbs in Spanish. By 9:30, he is bent over a quiz on seed germination in Advanced Placement biology. By 10:30, he is at his seat as sophomore class president announcing that 10th-graders are planning a carwash fund-raiser.

By 11:05, he is snacking on a piece of licorice as he walks across campus to meet the counselor who will help students choose courses for next year.

This is what he wants to take: Advanced Placement English, Advanced Placement U.S. history, Advanced Placement calculus, Spanish 3, marching band and Advanced Placement physics.

The counselor, Peggy Bott, suggests that four AP classes is too much. ''Johnson,'' she says gently, ''you’ve been looking very stressed out this year.''

There’s no doubt that, for ambitious students like him, Arcadia is not a happy-go-lucky school. It’s a pressure cooker: Johnson worries that the one B he got last term -- in Advanced Placement biology -- will hurt him.

But he ignores Bott’s advice for now. ''I’m going for everything,'' he says later. ''You can only stay in high school for four years and you want to do everything. I want colleges to pick me, not say, ‘Oh, he didn’t do enough, his classes weren’t hard enough.’ ''

When the school day ends, he heads to a nearby middle school, where he volunteers as a clarinet tutor. For the next hour he and two other tutors run through some new songs -- a minuet by Faber, another by Mozart and a Handel selection. When he dismisses the younger students, it’s not without homework. ''Play your arpeggios!'' he commands.

By 4:30, he is home, plunging into Spanish homework as his mother sets out the sushi. At 8 p.m., he is off to a class with a private biology tutor. At 10, he is back home, sipping a soda for energy. Sometime after 11, he falls asleep over a copy of ''Lord of the Flies,'' the subject of tomorrow’s English test.

Yvonne Lee, a Taiwan native, says that Johnson needs no prodding to study hard. ''My job is to be the driver,'' she says, joking about his frenetic schedule.

Yet Lee plays a strong supporting role. Aside from the hearty snacks and pots of coffee, she has equipped him and his older sister with a fax machine, a copier and computers wired to the Internet. Johnson uses the fax to send homework problems to classmates. He goes on the Internet for late-night chat sessions with buddies cramming for the same big exam. He has a beeper and his own phone line so that friends seeking or offering homework help after midnight can reach him without waking up the household.

Lee, who runs a small El Monte company that distributes plastic bags and pallets, says she immigrated to the United States in 1987 so her children could attend school here.

She makes sure that Johnson does not forget that.

''My job is, I take care of you. Your job is only to study. Your job,'' she tells her son, ''is education.''

Copyright Los Angeles Times

Bilingual Classes: A Knotty Issue

Dispute: Schools at opposite poles in the debate show that neither the bilingual approach nor English-only instruction is succeeding very well in moving students into English fluency.

By NICK ANDERSON and AMY PYLE, Times Staff Writers

The idea took hold just as a new wave of immigration was taking off. Experts proposed, activists insisted, politicians consented: Children who spoke little or no English could be taught in Spanish, Chinese or whatever tongue they had learned at home, and at the same time become fluent in America’s dominant language.

But almost a quarter century after California began its experiment in bilingual education, tens of thousands of schoolchildren, tagged by the system as ''limited English proficient,'' are languishing for years without mastering the language they need for a chance at a well-paying job or a college degree.

Last year, more than 5,800 schools statewide had at least 20 students with limited English skills. Of those schools, 1,150 did not move a single student into English fluency, according to a Times analysis of state records.

For more than half of those schools, it was the second year in a row of complete futility.

Overall, fewer than 7% of limited-English students are becoming fluent each year.

Those figures might sound like an indictment of bilingual education—an umbrella term for an array of programs that teach children in two languages, often with long spans solely in their native language.

The truth, however, is that one-third of the schools that failed last year to move any students into English fluency were teaching only in English.And many of the rest teach mostly in English.

''Despite relatively substantial efforts in a wide variety of places to wrestle with this problem, we don’t know how to solve it,'' said Douglas E. Mitchell, an education professor at UC Riverside who heads a research cooperative of 28 school districts. ''This is a huge problem. The system is swamped. . . . People have strong beliefs about what should work, but they don’t have strong evidence on what does work.''

California’s response to the enormous wave of immigration of the last two decades has polarized the public schools.

At one extreme are campuses with entrenched dual-language programs. Here, many students wind up in bilingual classes even if they speak a fair amount of English and were born in the United States. And often they are placed there without much discussion with parents and, in a few cases, despite parents’ objections.

At the other pole are the many school districts offering little help to those struggling to learn English. Some students are left to sink or swim, much as earlier immigrants did in an era when most of the foreign-born were expected to take a job before they finished high school.

The state’s lack of success in making all its children fluent in English has generated a bitter public debate, which now focuses on an initiative appearing on the June ballot that would eliminate most bilingual programs.

But regardless of what policy the voters choose, the challenge is only going to get tougher.

The number of students in the state who are not fluent in English soared from 520,000 in 1985 to 1.4 million in 1997, or one quarter of the public school enrollment. Half are in Los Angeles and Orange counties and many are in deep poverty, making them hard to educate under the best of circumstances.

To put the numbers in perspective, California’s population of limited-English students exceeds the total public school population of at least 38 states.

How California deals with that challenge affects even children who never set foot in a bilingual classroom.

Consider how would-be teachers were being trained recently in a ''methods'' class at Cal State Long Beach. The exercise explored how students might create ''me'' books, mini-autobiographies.

Many of the teachers-in-training came up with elaborate posters, some with no words at all. They were praised for seeking such a ''total physical response,'' meaning that students would mostly cut, color and paste.

Why? Because the teachers-to-be will probably wind up in classrooms with a large number of students not fluent in English. So they were encouraged to find ways to avoid writing, instead of emphasizing it.

State Policy Works Against Fluency

The failure of schools to make children fluent in English should not be a surprise. California policy actually works against the transition.

School districts receive extra state aid based in part on their count of students with limited English.And they face no penalty if those students fail to advance.

Explaining why many schools statewide year after year fail to move any students into English fluency, Lois Tinson, president of the California Teachers Assn., said: ''School districts see the bucks coming in.''

Indeed, an extensive bureaucracy has sunk roots in California’s school system since the state’s first major bilingual education law was enacted in 1976.

Los Angeles schools pay bilingual teachers as much as $5,000 extra per year, reflecting the scarce supply of qualified specialists. Statewide, school districts also employ thousands of bilingual teaching assistants, bilingual school coordinators and other staff to track limited-English students, administer English proficiency tests, apply for grants and do the thousand and one tasks required in programs monitored by federal and state governments.

Then there are supply industries.

In February, thousands of teachers and advocates traveled to San Jose by bus, plane and car from all points of the state to attend seminars onpedagogy and political survival at the convention of the California Assn. for Bilingual Education.

Promoters filled an exhibit hall with new bilingual textbooks, computer software, handicrafts from Mexico and Central America, videotapes, testing materials and such storybooks as ''Los Tres Cerdos,'' described in one brochure as a ''nonviolent version of ‘The Three Pigs’ that takes place in the Southwest.''

At a rally attended by more than 1,000 educators, Santiago Wood, superintendent of Alum Rock School District in San Jose, exhorted listeners to defend their bilingual programs.

He likened their critics to passengers who critique the operation of a jet—in the process displaying a ‘we know best’ defiance.

''I dare any of us who have flown in an airplane to try to tell a pilot how to fly that plane,'' Wood said. ''This is my business. This is my field.''

Bilingual Approach Run Amok?

Opponents of bilingual education point to places like Santa Barbara’s Adams Elementary School.

Half of the students have limited English skills; half receive subsidized meals; and a tiny fraction each year achieve English fluency.

Latino children in Santa Barbara have for years been routinely placed in bilingual classes even though 90% were born in this country, most right at the city’s Cottage Hospital. In Adams’ kindergarten class this year, only two of the children with limited English skills were born outside the United States.

In her bright, airy bilingual kindergarten classroom, Sela Viscarra was teaching upper- and lowercase letters.

''D mayuscula, d minuscula,'' chanted the children surrounding her feet. N was the letter of the day, so it got special treatment, with the chant leading to flash cards of N-words for which no English translation was provided, though they all began with N in English as well—numeros (numbers), nariz (nose), nido (nest), nueces (nuts).

One kindergartner finishing an art project at her desk interrupted. ''Teacher, I don’t know how to do this,'' she said in clear English.

The response came in Spanish.

Viscarra was not being stubborn; she was adhering to the educational theory that switching from one language to the other confuses students. She would teach in English on other days, but this day’s plan called for Spanish.

Principal Jo Ann Caines has pushed her teachers to give more English to their students.

She used to work in a middle school, after all, and saw how the kids faltered there without adequate English skills. They were a long way from being ready for Advanced Placement courses.

''It’s really obvious that they need full exposure to English for three years before middle school in order to get there,'' she concluded.

But the district is planning more drastic changes. During sometimes-bitter meetings over the past year, school board members reviewed the results of bilingual education—and found extensive evidence that it was not working.

Last year, for example, Adams fifth-graders—when tested in English—scored at the 12th percentile nationally in reading, at the 17th in math.

Even when tested in Spanish, children in the bilingual program districtwide were performing far below grade level.

And worst of all was how graduates of the bilingual program performed when they reached high school: abysmally.

This was most distressing, because long-term prowess is the strongest claim of bilingual program supporters. The idea is that a solid academic base in another language seamlessly translates by high school into a solid academic base in English.

Seeing that didn’t happen, Santa Barbara school officials decided in January to do away with the bilingual program. Entirely. As of September.

They did promise extra support to limited-English speakers, both in Spanish and English, plus an English summer school. But typical of how the debate has become so heated, the proposal set off a parent boycott—for bilingual education.

Community activist Ruben Rey, who is married to a bilingual teacher, mocked the other side for doing away with the program. ''Quicker! Quicker! Get these kids into English quicker!'' he snarled, snapping his fingers for sarcastic emphasis.

His prediction for the English-only approach: ''It’s doomed to failure.''

Flailing in a Sea of English

For every Santa Barbara, which opponents consider an example of bilingual education run amok, there is a Lone Pine.

In this community of 2,100 in the shadow of Mt. Whitney, there are no bilingual classes at the elementary school and few instructors qualified to teach English as a second language.

There is no shortage, however, of Spanish-speaking newcomers who need help at Lo-Inyo Elementary—children of factory workers, motel maids and others who are turning the demographics of this rural area upside down.

Thirteen-year-old Joel Murillo, a new arrival from the Mexican state of Zacatecas, toils in the afternoons over an English grammar book, surrounded by fifth-graders speaking a language he barely comprehends.

His teacher, Shawn Morrison, who speaks what she calls ''rusty'' Spanish, happened to notice Joel one day at recess with ''that glazed look in his eyes.'' She volunteered to tutor him in English when she could.

But that does not amount to much. ''Twenty minutes a day,'' she said.

The tutoring has helped—a bilingual teacher from a nearby high school pitches in—but Joel confesses, in Spanish, that the school feels ''strange'' to him ''because there’s no one I can talk with here.''

School officials in Lone Pine, 200 miles north of Los Angeles on U.S. 395, between the High Sierra and Death Valley, say they are trying their best, and improving.

But ''we’re isolated. We don’t have the budget to hire specialists,'' said Nancy Prather, who teaches reading and computer skills at the school.

From 1992 to 1997, state records show, Lo-Inyo Elementary did not move one student into English fluency, even as its population of limited-English children swelled from 10 to 33. There are now 42, out of a total enrollment of 284 from kindergarten through eighth grade.

California’s schools, particularly in rural districts, have lots of students who are left to learn English almost entirely on their own.

Lone Pine is far from the worst. Its students, like Joel, are at least getting some help.

More than 220,000 limited-English students in California last year got none at all. A chronic teacher shortage is largely to blame.

As of 1997, California had about one bilingual teacher for every 92 limited-English students. Most of those teachers were Spanish-speaking, not surprisingly, reflecting the dominant position of Latinos among the state’s ethnic minorities and the historic importance of bilingual education in Latino politics.

But even for Spanish speakers, the state has just one bilingual teacher for every 77 limited-English students. In other languages, the shortage grows to ridiculous proportions. For Vietnamese speakers, the ratio is 535 to 1. For the 20,000 limited-English students who speak Khmer—the language of Cambodia—there are only five certified Khmer-English teachers—a ratio of 4,000 to 1.

The sink-or-swim approach has a long history in American schools.

Nostalgics often claim that the approach succeeded in moving immigrants into the mainstream.

Too often, however, immigrant students never graduated from high school, and others obtained only a rudimentary grasp of English. After years of controversy in a period of growing awareness of immigrant rights, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1974 that schools have a duty to offer students with limited English some form of help.

It might surprise the conservative opponents of bilingual education today to learn that mandatory English-only instruction already had been ended in California by then—under Gov. Ronald Reagan.

Emotional Topic in California

California is hardly alone in grappling with growing numbers of students not fluent in English. But you won’t see the same emotion in Miami, say, as in Santa Barbara: Bilingual education has been sold there as making economic sense for all children. To work in a bilingual world, the logic goes, you need to be bilingual.

The issue raises such passions in California because it is part of a bigger debate over the status of immigrants in the late 20th century, especially those of Mexican origin.

It starts with California having once belonged to Mexico, as activists readily note. And the Latino civil rights movement in California early on married the issues of societal discrimination with English-only instruction in schools. Now attacks on bilingual education are seen as the latest affront: Let them do your menial labor; don’t let them speak their language.

For the most part, other immigrant groups have not seized on bilingual education as a civil rights cause.

At Third Street Elementary School in Los Angeles, Principal Susie Oh would not dare to impose classes taught in Korean on her students—their parents simply would not hear of it.

Chinese parents in the San Gabriel Valley want their children to learn Mandarin, sure—on the weekend, in private school.

In Westminster’s Vietnamese community, you hear about immigrants such as Tony Lam, now 62, who brought six children with him in 1975, none speaking English, yet all graduated from colleges here—without any bilingual education.

And as one survey after another has shown, Latinos are hardly of one mind: Among those registered to vote, a recent Times poll found, 50% supported the ballot measure to end most bilingual education. Only 32% of Latino voters opposed the initiative, which would place children with limited English skills into mainstream classes after about one year of special English-language instruction.

The bottom line is that most immigrant parents simply want their children to learn English.

Still, Ana M. ''Cha'' Guzman, who recently chaired a White House commission on Latino education, argues that there is something different at play among Latinos. Although immigrants from all parts of the world arrive here to become Americans ''all the way through,'' Latino immigrants—who often come from areas closer to the United States—feel more need ''to keep in touch with our roots,'' she says.

That yearning can be seen at Stanford Avenue Elementary, an outpost of the Los Angeles school system in South Gate. Four out of five students at the school have limited English skills.

They seem caught between two worlds.

Bilingual teachers speak almost entirely in English during physical education, art and music classes and certain other times set aside for what is known as ''English language development.''

Their youngest students get a heavy diet of Spanish in most core subjects. But few students of any age in this school perform at grade level on basic skills tests. English transition rates have been below the state’s own mediocre average for years.

At Stanford, even the Pledge of Allegiance is an exercise in bilingual education as a thousand students show one spring morning on the sunlit blacktop. Two classmates lead the group in English and Spanish, concluding, ''una nacion, bajo Dios, con libertad y justicia para todos.''

Then the Stars and Stripes is put away. Red paper flags emblazoned with the black Aztec eagle of the United Farm Workers emerge.

A Clouded Example of Bilingual 'Success'

Instruction: The Calexico district is touted as a shining example of how to teach students facing barriers of language and poverty. But its approach…and its results…are not as clear-cut as some claim.

By KEN ELLINGWOOD, Times Staff Writer

CALEXICO -- It’s an unlikely spot to find an educational cause celebre -- a poor and sun-scorched farm town on the Mexican border.

Yet the school district here has achieved renown far beyond its alfalfa and hay fields. It is touted by supporters of bilingual education as a model for teaching students who speak little English.

The acclaim was evident recently in Denver, where the head of the nation’s largest Latino organization lauded Calexico Unified School District for keeping its students from dropping out and sending so many -- 80% -- on to college.

''Calexico, the poorest school district in California with the highest rate of farm workers and most Latinos, is graduating kids at a higher rate than Beverly Hills!'' boasted Raul Yzaguirre, president of the National Council of La Raza.

But here at Calexico High School, 120 miles east of San Diego, folks are uneasy with the role-model talk. The schoolyard chatter -- in a borderland fusion of Spanish and English -- is about the prom, tests coming up and the fate of the Bulldogs baseball team. Not educational miracles.

That bit about beating Beverly Hills? People here know better. Calexico’s 2.8% dropout rate is an achievement, half the state average for Latinos. But almost no one bails out in Beverly Hills.

And while a survey of last year’s 380 graduates did find an impressive 271 planning to continue their studies, fewer than 40 were headed to four-year colleges. In most cases, higher education here means the local community college.

Still, it’s easy to see why Calexico has become a provocative talking point in the debate over bilingual education. For its schools defy the popular notion that what’s most important is movingkids quickly into English fluency. The measure of success here is simpler -- how kids turn out in the end.

This is a place where a corps of dedicated teachers and concerned parents and the closeness of a small town help legions of children surmount the hurdles of language and poverty that seem to trip up their counterparts elsewhere.

Here you find teachers such as Juan Orduna, who holds extra calculus classes every Saturday and gets local groups to pay for students’ Advanced Placement exams.

''What you try to do is create a culture where everybody supports everybody,'' said Orduna, who -- like nearly half the school’s faculty -- is a product of Calexico schools. Support can mean early morning tutoring or a simple endearment -- mijo, ''my son'' -- in Spanish.

Poverty Is Prevalent

Though sprawling Mexicali is just over the border, rural Calexico seems distant from urban ills. The town has responded quickly to sporadic gang outbreaks. A dress code means no bare midriffs for the 1,425 high school students. Graffiti are next to unknown.

Yet poverty is as near as the fields. Almost a fourth of the students are the sons and daughters of migrant farm workers, many immigrants from Mexico. The average family makes less than $12,000 a year. Unemployment runs above 25%.

What’s most significant for the schools, though, is this: Hardly anyone enters kindergarten speaking English. Three-fourths of the district’s 7,180 students are classified as having limited English skills.

Nearly 30 years ago, Calexico was one of the first districts in America to take advantage of federal bilingual education money. Students usually start kindergarten being taught in Spanish and get more instruction in English as they proceed through the grades. The goal is to make the full transition to English in about four years. But bilingual help is offered all the way through high school for students who enter the system late.

Even so, getting the children to master English has proved tricky. Calexico students trail the state average for achieving English fluency (4.7% a year compared with 6.7% statewide) and score below average on the verbal SAT(422 compared with 490 statewide).

Supt. Roberto Moreno insists that it is more important to ask whether students are staying in school -- and going on to the next level.

But those who reach college often face a struggle. Of 25 Calexico graduates entering the elite University of California system last year, 20 required remedial writing classes.

And while some local kids go on to Yale, Stanford and Berkeley, the lion’s share pursue their education at the two-year Imperial Valley College. Many attend because there are few alternatives in the area -- job prospects are dim.

''They stay one year and a lot of them just stop,'' said calculus teacher Orduna.

He’s not the only one who gives a measured appraisal of the district’s touted results.

''Calexico is a fair argument in favor of bilingual education,'' said Gary Watts, who teaches Advanced Placement English. ''We do a good job of protecting students who are disadvantaged by language.''

Even in a senior college-prep English class, though, Spanish is in the air as students in small groups hunt literary features in a Blake poem. ''Tenemos syntax?'' one girl asks her group. ''Que es motif, eso?'' inquires a classmate.

Watts said many students lack the proficiency to tackle sophisticated literary concepts, such as spotting metaphors.

Maricruz Acevedo, 17, a senior in Watts’ class, said she will sit out the Advanced Placement test -- she fears that her writing is weak. She hopes to attend Imperial Valley and later transfer to a UC campus.

But it’s clear there’s a culture of learning at Calexico, nourished by care.

About 400 parents showed up at a recent high school open house. They picked up report cards, addressing teachers as maestro and maestra in respectful Spanish.

Jesus Santillanes made the rounds with his wife, Francisca, and their 17-year-old daughter, Fabiola. With a son at San Diego State, Santillanes has high hopes for Fabiola, a budding poet.

She is uncomfortable, however, writing in English. That worries her father, who speaks halting English learned on his delivery job. He frets that he has hindered Fabiola’s progress by insisting that she speak proper Spanish or proper English -- not the hybrid ''Spanglish'' favored by her friends.

''We need to know the language,'' Santillanes said. ''Why are we in this country?''

An assistant principal, Mario Martinez, recalled the similar proddings of his father, an appliance repairman, as he grew up here en route to UC Berkeley.

''He said, ‘With an education you don’t have to do this kind of work. You can hire someone to do it.’ ''

To some on campus, the challenge for Calexico is to not lose sight of that culture, and the real gains, even as the schools endure streams of visitors drawn by the they-beat-Beverly Hills hype.

Acclaim is nice, Orduna said. So would be replacing two dozen outdated computers lining his classroom.

''We’ve done some good things,'' the calculus teacher said. ''But we have to keep our feet planted on the ground.''

Copyright Los Angeles Times

---

Monday, May 18, 1998

Old and New - Traditions: The family's dinner hour is surviving changing times.

By DUKE HELFAND, Times Staff Writer

Nancy Soliman, the eldest daughter, arrives home first, at 5 o’clock. The UCLA senior sets the table and whips up a salad with cucumbers and cilantro.

The parents—Akila and Saad—filter in from their jobs minutes later. Akila Soliman, 45, a financial consultant, quickly puts the finishing touches on a top sirloin with mushrooms and a spicy zucchini-and-tomato side dish, baked the way her own mother might have back in Egypt.

Her husband, Saad, who owns a picture-framing business, plops down in the sunken living room, in front of the TV.

Finally, the younger daughter, Nellie, 17, steps through the front door.

Nellie is often the last one home because she baby-sits for nearby friends every day after high school lets out. She leaves that jobat 6:30 p.m. sharp, however, for dinner at the Soliman home in Granada Hills means: Everyone at home at 6:30. Everyone around the table.

If you are looking for an updated version of Ozzie and Harriet, the quintessential American family of 1950s television, here it is.

The Soliman family lives in a four-bedroomhome with red tile roof, vaulted ceilings and marble fireplace near the top of a road winding up the foothills of the San Fernando Valley.

Nellie attends Granada Hills High School, which once was synonymous with white suburbia. ''E.T.'' was filmed blocks away. The school’s most famous alumnus is a blond quarterback, John Elway.

These days, the statistics still list the school as having a white plurality, at 39%. But the school’s corridors are filled with sounds of Spanish, Urdu and Arabic.

Nellie is typical, then, of the new Granada Hills. She is as popular as the characters on a favorite show of this era, ''Beverly Hills, 90210.'' She will soon join her sister at UCLA.

But not typical of this generation, or of America any longer, is how she’s home for dinner at 6:30.

''Eat,'' Akila Soliman urges this evening.

She passes along rice, salad and lemonade.

The family usually dines in the kitchen. On this night, though, Nancy, 21, has brought her boyfriend, Farhad Heidari, 22. There are too many for the kitchen table. Dinner is served in the dining room.

No one rushes. The conversation is laced with Arabic. A light breeze drifts in from an open window.

Saad Soliman has been in the United States for 29 years, his wife for 24.

When it comes to their children, they are old school. Nancy lives at home while attending UCLA. Nellie plans to do the same.

Their mother still doesn’t know what to call Farhad, nearly 18 months after Nancy met the young man from Iran on the Westwood campus, where both are seniors.

''He’s not your boyfriend in the American sense of boyfriend, because the American sense of boyfriend goes a little too far,'' Akila reminds Nancy. ''That’s not what we are accepting.''

The women clear the dishes and Nancy produces a tray of bananas, pears, apples and oranges in traditional Egyptian style. Akila then excuses herself to pray, a ritual she performs five times a day in accordance with Muslim law.

After she goes upstairs, the conversation runs from celebrity gossip—''Monica Lewinsky did a photo shoot in Vanity Fair,'' Nancy reports—to school gossip.

''OK, Nellie. Who are you going to ask to prom?''

Nancy turns to their father: ''Is it OK if Nellie goes to prom? I went.''

Quiet though he may be, Saad Soliman is the patriarch. ''Then, Nancy,'' he declares, chuckling, ''you go with her.''

The fruit finished, Saad and Farhad settle in the living room to watch a Lakers basketball game.

Nellie does the dishes. Nancy prepares a tray of tea and serves slices of apple pie and chocolate cake. The family settles onto an L-shaped sofa.

Nellie sips her tea and reads an Advanced Placement history study guide, copying information on flashcards as she prepares for the AP test.

Only after dessert does everyone move on. Nancy drives Farhad home to Woodland Hills. Nellie heads upstairs to do homework.

Saad and Akila linger on the sofa, chatting about how glad they are that their youngest daughter is going to college close to home.

Copyright Los Angeles Times

Tuesday, May 19, 1998

Too Many Teachers Are Ill-Prepared

By RICHARD LEE COLVIN, Times Education Writer

When Heidi Brooks decided to try teaching, she was a burned-out Hollywood agent looking for a temporary job…as a substitute…to tide her over.

She quickly found that becoming a teacher in California is nearly as easy as getting a job at McDonald's. No experience? No problem. An hour on the phone snagged the 28-year-old three interviews…and three offers of permanent jobs.

She wound up at Main Street Elementary in South-Central Los Angeles in charge of a class of Spanish-speaking first-graders…thanks to having minored in Spanish at USC.

''They didn't even ask me if I was fluent,'' said Brooks, who isn't. ''I think it hurts children severely . . . because they're being taught by someone like me.''

Brooks' frankness may be rare. Her situation is not.

More than 31,000 California classrooms are presided over by men and women who do not have teaching certificate…instructors who are still learning their craft even as they teach children to read and write and add.

Californians love their teachers.

A Times poll found that even among those who offer a low rating of public schools, only 4% blame teachers. And among those who rate schools highly, the largest number, 38%, credit the teachers.

But even teachers say that the public schools struggle with too many instructors who are unlicensed and untrained; too many classrooms with no permanent teacher, just a parade of substitutes; and too many teachers who see the job as a temporary stopover on the way to a real career.

There is such a need for warm bodies in front of the blackboard that, on any given day, 2,000 classes are headed by ''long-term'' substitutes who work a maximum of a month and move on. Several thousand other teachers are hired under waivers allowing them to remain in the classroom although they lack even a college degree or have been unable to pass a simple test of arithmetic, reading and writing that is pitched at about the 10th-grade level.

In the Compton school district…the first in history to be taken over by the state…nearly one in five teachers has not passed that test.

All this has not escaped the notice of state leaders. Gov. Pete Wilson has proposed spending $145 million extra this year on efforts to attract more good teachers, improve their skills and ensure that they stick around.

Manifest Problems

All around California, a visitor to schools can see why that effort is needed.

In suburban Glendale, a fifth-grade instructor, diagraming the sentence ''There was a smear of blood,'' tells the students…wrongly…that ''smear'' is an adjective. Later, he tells them…wrongly…that ''his'' is a noun, because it describes a person.

His students, in putting together booklets illustrating grammar concepts, spell it ''gramer'' and ''grammer.''

In South-Central Los Angeles, Debra Crawford, a veteran teacher, went on maternity leave for six months. Three substitutes filled in during her absence.

When Crawford returned in February, she found her students far behind. They struggled to add two numbers, as simple as 7 plus 1, using plastic bears for help.

By that point in the year, the children would normally have read five small books and half the stories in a thick anthology, and used a computer to make three books of their own. None had done any of that.

At least three were still at a pre-primer level, meaning they had yet to learn the alphabet, didn't know the sounds of letters and couldn't write their names.

''Their behavior had deteriorated to the point,'' Crawford said, ''they're having a hard time sitting down for 15 minutes.''

The need for bodies should have come as no surprise. The state has had repeated warnings that the student population would grow rapidly and that schools would need more teachers. In the early 1980s, the state was handing out 3,200 new ''emergency'' permits annually amid dire predictions that if the trend continued, a third of the state's teachers would lack the required training.

Instead of solving the problem, however, the state and its school districts have created a front-door, back-door arrangement.

The ''front door'' is the noble way teachers are supposed to enter the classroom: Start with an undergraduate degree, add an array of specialized courses in teaching…about two semesters' worth…then cap it off with tests and a supervised stint as a student teacher.

The ''back door'' has allowed virtually anyone with a college degree into the classroom…especially if they are willing to teach in an urban area, or work with students who don't speak English, or work with those with learning handicaps.

The last time figures were calculated nationally, in the 1992-93 school year, California trailed all the states except New York and Hawaii in the percentage of teachers with full credentials.

Today, 11% of the state's teachers lack full credentials. The Los Angeles Unified School District…where needy students cry out for the best, most experienced instructors…has 6,000 holding emergency permits. In a dozen other districts in Los Angeles County, more than 20% of the teachers are in the same boat. In Compton's elementary schools, it's 60%.

Some elite schools still have their pick of teachers, receiving 10 applications for every opening. But the shortages are beginning to hit suburban districts too, places such as Garden Grove and Simi Valley.

Through the 1950s and '60s, teaching drew some of the most academically able Americans, in part because it was one of the few professions that welcomed women and minorities.

As opportunities for those groups bloomed in other fields, however, the popularity of teaching ''nose-dived, fell off the charts,'' said UCLA professor Alexander Astin, who has tracked such trends for three decades as part of a survey of college freshmen.

Today, the SAT scores of high school students interested in teaching are relatively low, averaging 964 nationally…higher only than those of students planning to major in home economics, public affairs and technical and vocational fields. In California, would-be teachers score 40 to 60 points below the state average in math on the college entrance exam.

Most…enough to produce 60% of the state's teachers…come through the 22-campus Cal State University system. The early stages of the problems that plague the state's teachers are on display there.

Barely Getting By

It's dark on a chilly winter's evening and Dan O'Connor, a Cal State Long Beach political science professor, is questioning the 20 men and women in his class…each about to complete the prescribed undergraduate program to become an elementary school teacher.

Do you feel you're ready to teach arithmetic?

Not a single hand.

Then, the follow-up.

Why didn't you take more math?

''I barely get by in math classes,'' said 24-year-old Sue Orloff. ''If I get a bad grade, my grade point average will go down and I won't get into grad school to become a teacher.''

Instead, she focused on learning to use art and dance to reach children.

Another student ''loves history,'' so she signed up for more of those courses. The problem was, she said, ''all of the history classes I've taken are worthless because that history is not taught in elementary schools.''

Dana Miller, another of O'Connor's students, concentrated on courses exploring the ''cultural and social diversity'' of students in Southern California.

''I learned so much,'' she says.

Like most aspiring teachers at Cal State campuses, these students are majoring in ''liberal studies.''

The students at Cal State's campuses often arrive only marginally prepared for college work. At many campuses, half the entering class fails to satisfy writing requirements. An even greater percentage have to take remedial math.

The liberal studies major was designed to take those students and expose them to the breadth of subjects that youngsters are taught in elementary school. But over time, it has become something of a symbol for what ails teacher preparation in California: superficial, unfocused and not aligned with the most pressing needs of the state's schools.

Out of 371 liberal studies students at Cal State Long Beach, only six this year chose to take the courses for a concentration in science, and four focused on math. Far more popular was physical education.

O'Connor analyzes his students' abilities this way: The top 20% of them, he says, would do well in any college. Those in the middle 60% would be able to ''survive'' at more demanding colleges. And the bottom 20% would bomb out if asked to meet higher standards.

But O'Connor knows that even those on the bottom rung would probably have no problem getting hired as teachers.

One encouraging note, as O'Connor sees it, is that the best of his students are not done with their educations. Following the ''front door'' approach…the way training is supposed to work…they stick around to take a fifth year of courses focusing on teaching ''methods.''

Without that graduate training, said Kris Clemens, a beret-wearing senior, ''You could know the subject, but what good is that if you can't teach.''

The problem is that many of the students will not stick around to finish their training. They feel the lure of a job…the opportunity to go straight to work under an emergency permit. Start out at, say, $30,000 a year. For nine months' work. Pay off those college loans. Move out of mom and dad's house.

And they can pick up what they have skipped…like the essentials of running a classroom…at night school. Of course that means studying after spending a draining day on the job, reducing their ability to teach and to learn, but many try to earn their credential that way.

Rae Ann Montoya, sitting off to the side in O'Connor's class, was worried that she hadn't yet learned how to discipline students. She found that out while working in an after-school child-care program and trying to get the children to do homework. ''I totally lost control of my group,'' she said.

Still, Montoya was undeterred.

''I'm filling out applications now,'' she said. ''Most of the districts, they'll take me . . . only the more affluent districts said "No.' ''

As O'Connor put it, ''If you have a degree and a pulse you get snapped up.''

A Question of Standards

Does all this matter?

Kristi Jones, who heads the liberal studies program at Cal State Long Beach, would actually like to see current standards lowered.

Right now, a student must have a B- average to get into the school's teacher education program. Jones believes that perhaps a C should be good enough.

''It isn't that they're dumb, it's the amount of time they can devote to their studies,'' she says, noting that many students are working even while going to school and haven't the time to study.

''Many of them can make good teachers,'' she insists.

Many Americans believe that being a good teacher is something innate and ''that therefore all you need is to . . . love kids and have a sincere desire to do what's right,'' said Terry Dozier, an ex-classroom teacher who advises Secretary of Education Richard W. Riley on instructional issues.

''The general attitude of the American people is that teachers are . . . asked to do the impossible…with limited resources,'' she says. ''We say, "If they want to be there and care about kids, what damage can they do?' ''

There is no doubt that a dedicated teacher is a wonder to behold.

Spend a day following Susan Kim, 24, who is in her first year at Granada Hills High in the San Fernando Valley.

Because of overcrowding, Kim's ''classroom,'' as she calls it, is a two-wheel suitcase rack holding a black bag with the necessities…lesson book, tests, student assignments, pens and pencils. She drags it through the halls to teach in five different rooms each day.

''The stairs kill me,'' she says as the two-wheeler clunk-clunk-clunks to the classroom that will be her home for the next period.

Or watch Adie Sukkar, a newcomer at Manual Arts High,who calls out, ''Bye! I love you!'' after leading her students…most of whom speak English as a second language…through Shakespeare's ''Macbeth.''

But as the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future observed last fall, it's dangerous to think that dedication is enough. Unlicensed doctors or lawyers would not be tolerated. But teachers are.

Repeatedly, California has seen that shortfalls in teacher training can jeopardize even the most well-meaning educational reforms.

Fifteen years ago, for example, California decided to toughen the requirements for graduation from high school. Students would have to take more English, history and math.

But because of the shortage of trained teachers, 46% of the state's math classes are now taught by someone who did not even minor in math in college. That figure places California third from the bottom among states in the math expertise of its teachers.

Not surprisingly, the 1996 National Assessment of Educational Progress found that California's eighth-graders ranked 28th among the 39 states and jurisdictions where math tests were given. The picture was even worse for the state's lowest achieving youngsters. And it is the children at the bottom of the heap who are most likely to have unlicensed teachers.

Last year, the Long Beach Unified School District gained national attention for its plan to set up a special eighth-grade ''academy'' as a way station for middle-schoolers who were failing.

The academy was supposed to tailor its approach to students who were among the neediest in the school system. Instead, when it opened, the program had 18 teachers…13 were new to the classroom, and seven of them were uncredentialed.

Out of 415 students who started in the academy, only 300 are left and only 225 now are ready to start the ninth grade.

''We should have made a greater effort to recruit more outstanding teachers,'' said Supt. Carl Cohn.

Or consider Gov. Pete Wilson's effort to reduce class sizes in kindergarten through third grade…which has cost $2.5 billion so far.

For every two classes trimmed from 30 to 20 students, a new class had to be created. And a new teacher found.

The result?

This last year, California schools hired three times as many teachers on an ''emergency'' basis as were hired two years ago, according to a report presented this month to the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing.

''If the teachers are learning on the job . . . aren't we getting the results that we should expect?'' asks Allen A. Mori, dean of the School of Education at Cal State L.A.

A Demanding Job

Heidi Brooks, the talent agent turned teacher, had a typical fate for a novice without a license: a difficult assignment.

When she started more than a year ago at Main Street School, she was given a group of first-graders who had already had two other temporary teachers. After a month, she was sent to another class.

Finally, in September, she started with a class of her own:

Half the 20 students were supposed to be taught in Spanish. Only two could recite the alphabet.

Three had fathers in jail. Brooks had to fill out child abuse referral forms for one boy, whom she suspected was being beaten. His speech was slurred and hard to understand.

The mother of another child, who comes to class impeccably dressed in color-coordinated outfits, confided that her daughter was born on the street while she was homeless, having spent all of her money on drugs.

One day, not long ago, Brooks led her students haltingly through the alphabet. Then they moved on to spelling, although several could not read the words. Rather than let the children struggle to come up with a sentence using the words, Brooks did it for them.

''The queen is on the swing and she is swinging,'' she wrote.

One student begged to read it, only to stumble over the word ''and.'' Growing nervous, he sat on his hands and rocked. Brooks told the others to draw a picture of the queen and the swing and write their own sentences, then turned to give the boy individual attention.

Slowly, though, things began to fall apart.

Antoine balanced a plastic nickel, to be used in a math lesson, on his eye.

''How many pennies in a nickel?'' Brooks asked the students, sitting in a circle on the rug. Blank stares.

She sent them to their desks to practice a series of money problems. She did not have enough plastic money, however, so she began cutting more out of paper. Some pupils began wandering around the classroom. A special education student wrote random numbers. Others wrote nothing.

Soon, Luis was on the floor, pretending to be a charging bull. Juanito was in a martial arts stance, chopping the air with his hands and feet. Shakeeshia carried Khadija on her back.

''Now I've lost them,'' Brooks sighed, throwing up her hands.

The principal of Main Street is Javier Centeno. He praises Brooks' enthusiasm for her job.

''Techniques, classroom management, I can teach her that,'' he said. ''You can't teach enthusiasm.''

But in Brooks' case, the enthusiasm in running out: Her tour of duty will end in June.

''I love children and I really wanted to give back to society for a while,'' she said. ''But this is not what I want to do for my life.''

So if she continues working in a classroom, she explained, it will be as she originally envisioned…as a substitute. And then only at schools close to her home, on the Westside.

High Turnover Rate

Like Brooks, many teachers in Los Angeles, and other urban areas are merely passing through.

In Los Angeles, for example, a third of the teachers hired in 1994 quit within three years. Other districts report attrition rates as high as 50%. Among unlicensed teachers, attrition is estimated to be as high as 70%.

That causes a constant churning…costly both to the system and to students.

Attracting the best people to teaching, helping them out once they're in the classroom, keeping the good ones from quitting is already a high priority with state leaders.

The most earnest among those leaders envision teaching as a ''profession,'' similar to medicine or law, in which candidates would work under the wings of veteran coaches for one or two years before gaining their independence.

Already, school districts, backed with state money, are bringing on ''interns'' and giving them lots of help in the classroom; rounding up assistants and transforming them into bona fide teachers and even trying to push high school students to pursue a career in education.

Some schools, with the support of grants and nonprofit groups, are trying to make professional development seminars…long disdained by most teachers as irrelevant…more useful.

Math teacher Salima Husain, a veteran of 16 years in the classroom, was a participant in one such seminar last fall at Van Nuys Middle School and she gained a painful insight.

Each teacher was to demonstrate a math lesson and be critiqued by colleagues. Husain's students had failed miserably with an assignment that required them to calculate the area of a living room. When she presented the lesson, her colleagues wound up similarly confused.

Husain was stunned. ''What is going on here?'' she wondered. That night, she went home and cried to her husband. She thought about her students in a different light and was crushed by guilt. It hadn't been their fault…it had been hers.

With her colleagues' help, Husain analyzed what she had been doing wrong. When she got back to her regular classroom, she taught the lesson over. This time, 90% of her 150 students aced it.

But the sheer number of teachers makes such scattershot efforts to upgrade teaching daunting. As foreseen years ago, school enrollment is surging across the country, just as a generation of veteran instructors is retiring. School districts from Texas to New York to Florida are gearing up to add or replace about 2 million teachers.

In California, schools may need to hire as many as 300,000 new teachers in the next decade, more than currently work in all the state's classrooms.

At the Cal State system, the new chancellor, Charles Reed, has already said that whatever else he does, what will define his tenure is how he responds to California's urgent need to recruit and train almost an entirely new teaching force.

Reed has set a goal of rapidly increasing the number of teachers the system turns out each year from the current 10,000 to 15,000 by the year 2001.

Cal State has embarked on a variety of other projects to improve teacher training: establishing closer relationships with school districts, for example, and making education classes more accessible by offering them at nights and on weekends.

But it will be hard to fill the need through the front door.

State Sen. Betty Karnette (D-Long Beach), a former junior high math teacher, recently offered a small proposal to upgrade standards for California's classrooms: requiring that all teachers have a college degree and pass the state's basic skills test.

The proposal drew immediate opposition and was killed in a legislative committee.

Who was opposed?

The California School Boards Assn. and a group of suburban school districts.

Why? They were worried about finding enough warm bodies.

Heidi Brooks, who was hired with no experience, teaches Spanish-speaking first-graders at Main Street Elementary in South-Central. ''They didn't even ask me if I was fluent,'' says Brooks, who isn't.

Copyright Los Angeles Times

Little Training, Poor Oversight - No One Knows If Money Is Well Spent

By RICHARD LEE COLVIN and ELAINE WOO, Times Education Writers

SACRAMENTO--Gathered together in their Sacramento office not long ago, the top three California education officials who track school performance were asked this question: Are students doing better or worse these days?

Their answer: a collective shrug.

''That's not our responsibility,'' one said.

The problem is, it's no one's responsibility.

California spends $36 billion…more than the entire budgets of many states…on education. But in handing out those dollars, the state has never paid that much attention to whether it was getting its money's worth.

Sure, there were test scores. Between 1961 and 1991, California had the longest-running statewide testing program in the nation. But except for the discomfort they caused for low-scoring districts, the scores hardly mattered, certainly not to teachers. The state flirted with paying schools for improving their scores, but that experiment…and eventually the testing…disappearedamid political squabbling in 1990.

In the absence of any real measures for accountability, the state has been flying blind for most of this decade. That is a prime reason California's abysmal showing in 1994 on federal tests of reading…tied for last with Louisiana…came as such a shock.

That sort of shock could not have occurred in many other states. In Texas, test scores anchor what has become one of the nation's strongest statewide systems for holding schools accountable.

Texas is California's cousin in the composition of its students…with similar percentages of poor and Latino youths. Yet in Texas, students from all backgrounds…poor, African American, white, Latino, children of dropouts and college graduates…perform better than their counterparts in California. Texas officials credit accountability…measuring school performance with each group and requiring progress…with making much of the difference.

School Improvement Program

In California, state officials have tied up school districts in paperwork on dozens of specific programs…each with its own requirements, constituents and bureaucracies. But the state has never linked all that to student performance.

Take, for example, the grandfather of all such programs…the optimistically named School Improvement Program.

Begun in 1972, the program sent extra funds directly to schools, no strings attached, to pursue their own ideas for how to improve. For its time, it was innovative because it required schools to give parents some say-so in how to spend the money.

What the schools weren't required to do was show results.

A quarter-century later, even though the program technically no longer exists, the money…now a $400 million-a-year river paying for everything from copying machines to landscaping…continues to pour out, no questions asked.

Or take class size reduction, one of the most expensive state education initiatives in U.S. history. Although the Legislature and Gov. Pete Wilson agreed in 1995 to spend $1 billion on it the first year, legislators wouldn't shell out an additional $100,000 to see if the effort was actually improving student learning.

And so it goes…one grand gesture piled atop another and no way of knowing which ones are working and which ones aren't.

Children can't read? Bring on ''whole language.'' Or Ebonics. Or a tutoring program from New Zealand.

''California has gone through 40 different versions of reform over the past 20 years and . . . one would hope we'd know more about which particular types of programs or interventions are the most cost-effective, and we really don't,'' said Bruce Fuller, a UC Berkeley associate professor of education.

''There's almost been an anti-evaluation mentality,''he said, noting that conservatives and liberals, for different reasons, each object to spending money on keeping track of what works.

Now, however, that mentality is under siege. Across America, public education is being subjected to scrutiny of its bottom line, heralding what some refer to as the Age of Accountability.

States such as Kentucky and South Carolina have cast themselves in the role of enforcer, handing out rewards and punishments. In Arkansas, schools deemed to be underachievers can be forced to merge with more successful ones nearby.

Gauging Students' Abilities

Texas' program is the most thorough, yielding data so specific that it's easy to compare from school to school or even classroom to classroom how well, for example, Latino fourth-graders are learning their fractions.

Schools in Texas can reap financial rewards for gains in scores on the three-day Assessment of Academic Skills tests, a reduction in the dropout rate or higher student attendance.

The tests, administered in third through eighth grade and again in 10th grade, measure students against state standards for reading, writing and math. On the basis of the tests and dropout rates, each school receives a public rating…exemplary, recognized, acceptable or low performing.

This spring, California students, for the first time since the 1960s, began taking statewide, standardized tests. But those tests, whose results will be released in June, will measure students against national averages rather than against state educational standards that specify what they are supposed to learn in, say, ninth-grade math or fourth-grade reading.

A poor performance in Texas can bring on state-appointed managers to oversee districts or…in the worst case…the dismissal of members of the faculty.

Most important, however, the data doesn't wind up gathering dust in the principal's office. Instead, it is used for planning how to get better…a process taken for granted in business, but rare in public education.

At Bel Air High School in El Paso, Assistant Principal Susan Gonzalez, the school's self-described ''data queen,'' steeps herself in computer printouts.

The printouts showhow each of the school's 2,000 students…90% of whom are Latino and 70% poor…scored last fall on a mock version of the crucial test. She can see how they did on the six objectives in reading, seven in writing and 13 in math…and she can look for patterns.

Gonzalez also keeps close track of grades. The combination of grades and test scores allows her to monitor the performance of teachers.

That sort of data helped Gonzalez counsel an algebra teacher to rely less on group work and more on formal lessons. And she informed English teacher Joe Beaumarchais that his 10th-graders were weak in combining sentences.

Like other teachers at Bel Air, Beaumarchais spends about three minutes of each class period having students brush up on a skill they will be tested on.

Surprisingly, most of the teachers at Bel Air don't seem to chafe under such close monitoring. In the bad old days of just three years ago, Beaumarchais said, Bel Air was a freewheeling place where no one paid much attention to attendance, let alone learning.

''Teachers were teaching the same thing for years,'' he said. ''Staff development was a joke.''

Then, the superintendent of the Ysleta Independent School District, which includes Bel Air, held a dramatic news conference in which he accused the school of ''educational malpractice.''

Soon after, the school got a new administration. Every teacher was required to reapply for his or her job, and half the faculty was either not rehired or decided voluntarily to leave. Texas officials call that process reconstitution.

''It was extremely difficult. Many teachers had been here over 15 years,'' Beaumarchais said. ''But, in the long run, it was the right thing. . . . Our scores since reconstitution have shown that.''

To be sure, Texas' system is far from perfect. Latinos and blacks have long complained of discrimination in the state. Last year, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund has filed a lawsuit charging that the new state tests are discriminatory and have driven many Latino and African American students to simply drop out because they cannot pass and therefore won't graduate.

But it's hard to argue with Texas' national rankings on student achievement.

In the 1996 National Assessment of Educational Progress in math, Texas fourth-graders finished in the top 10, along with Maine, North Dakota and Connecticut. California was in the bottom 10…ahead of only the states of Louisiana and Mississippi.

Texas spends about $300 per pupil more than California, but ''what explains why Texas is improving and California isn't…and why Texas is narrowing the gap between minorities and whites and California isn't is very much it's accountability system,'' said Kati Haycock, head of the Education Trust, a Washington-based organization that tracks minority achievement in schools.

''In California, mediocre or poor results are always blamed on the demographics. In Texas, that doesn't happen.'' Texas requires schools to show improvement for all groups of students. Demographic challenges are ''not allowed to be an excuse,'' she said.

Question of Accountability

Understandably, many California educators have trooped to Texas in the last year to see what they could learn. And, a bill is moving through the Legislature that would institute some of the same policies here.

But many remain skeptical of the state operating such a system. In California, authority is centralized in Sacramento, but accountability is diffused among several elected officials and agencies, none of which can easily be held responsible for school performance.

In Texas, local districts are held accountable, but they also have the power to raise money with local tax increases and have broad discretion as to how they meet the state's standards.

In California virtually all education money comes out of Sacramento…except for local bonds to build or repair school buildings…and bureaucrats track it to the penny. But because the state is so vast…and its political structure so diffuse…officials have never figured out a way to ensure that the money buys student performance.

Take the state math standards adopted in December. The standards were widely praised by mathematics professors, teachers unions and conservative think tanks for their rigor and balance. Yet state Supt. of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin nonetheless continues to campaign against them. And Los Angeles Unified School District Supt. Ruben Zacarias told his staff to ignore them…even though students will soon be tested on them. Eastin and Zacarias both say the standards wrongly emphasize calculating at the expense of mathematical understanding.

Ultimately, many believe, it will take not just legislation but a cultural shift before California public schools embrace accountability.

That shift may be starting. Witness what occurred in November, when the schools receiving money through the $105 million Los Angeles Annenberg Metropolitan Project gathered to issue a progress report. The elementary and middle schools associated with Lincoln High School in northeast Los Angeles had their students, all wearing red T-shirts, perform a quasi-musical to ''express the excitement of coming together'' as partners, said teacher team leader Edward De Brava.

But the schools presented no test score data at all. ''It was generalities. It wasn't specifics,''he said. Those doling out the money objected. School officials now ''know we need to get focused on results,'' De Brava said. ''We know it is coming.''

Starting June 30, the state will release test scores on everything from second-grade reading to 11th-grade social studies for every school in the state. The data will be posted on the Internet. Educators worry that the results will be poor. But California will know if its students are doing better or worse.

Copyright Los Angeles Times

Japan's Example - Teachers, After Passing Rigorous Exams, Receive Intense Supervision in First Year

By SONNI EFRON, Times Education Writer

OKOHAMA, Japan -- Imagine an applicant for a teaching job in America answering this exam question: Take the equilateral triangle ABC and rotate it along the BC axis. What is the volume of the resulting body?

Toru Teraoka can tell you. Before the 25-year-old was hired to teach at Nara Elementary School, in a pleasant suburb between Tokyo and Yokohama, he had to pass three days of daunting tests, including problems like that one. He also had to show that he could draw, play the piano and the recorder…even swim laps.

And that was after earning his bachelor's and master's degrees in education from Yokohama National University.

Teraoka was one of just 162 teachers hired in Yokohama last year out of 2,055 applicants, a ratio of nearly 1 to 13.

He then was assigned to a class of 31 fourth-graders…and never allowed to flounder. Japanese teachers probablyreceive more supervision in their first year than their counterparts in any other country. Each is assigned to a senior teacher who serves as a mentor; Teraoka was taken under the wing of Miyoko Arakawa, a 22-year veteran.

''I consult her about everything,'' Teraoka said. ''For example, how should I teach the lesson in my third-period math class? Or, there are two kids fighting in my class and how can I get them to make up?''

Each first-year teacher receives 60 days of training in school. Twice a week, Teraoka observed one of Arakawa's classes. And twice a week, she watched him teach and offered suggestions. Once a week, they met to discuss his progress and problems.

''It was very hard, to tell you the truth,'' Teraoka said. ''You watch a class . . . and you think you're doing it the same way yourself, but in fact you're not.''

Each teacher also gets 30 days of training or enrichment programs outside school, in regional centers set up by local boards of education.

Teraoka attended a children's history course in a history museum and helped the staff answer questions from youngsters about the exhibits. He planted and harvested sweet potatoes and peanuts to prepare for agricultural lessons that are required for fourth- and fifth-graders. He spent two days in a school for disabled students.

He attended lectures and study sessions on such subjects as school bullying and human rights, including the treatment of the ethnic Korean minority in Japan. He took a nature observation class that taught him games to play with children on weekend field trips.

''Compared with other countries, Japanese teachers are expected to take more responsibility for their students' entire lives, not just for classroom teaching,'' said Yoko Fujie, assistant chief of teacher training at the Education Ministry.

For that work, Teraoka earns $33,000 per year, more than the average Japanese civil servant, but less than a newly minted businessman…and just about the same as a starting teacher in Los Angeles with no special training, just a college degree.

In the past, all the on-the-job training was not possible because there weren't enough substitutes to conduct classes while the teachers were being trained. But under a revamped national training program adopted in 1992, the Education Ministry provides school districts with subsidies and requires that one part-time substitute teacher be hired to supplement each first-year teacher.

All this isn't cheap.

Junichi Takahashi, a personnel administrator at the Yokohama Board of Education, estimates that it costs nearly $23,000 to train one teacher.

Of course, unlike in the United States, the investment is rarely wasted on recruits who quickly decide that another profession is more to their liking. Teachers here rarely quit.

Except for the female teachers who leave to raise children or relocate with their husbands, the vast majority of Japanese teachers stay on until the mandatory retirement age of 60.

Burnout is more of a problem than turnover.

''When people are first hired they are so positive and energetic, but after awhile they start to lose steam,'' said Hiroshi Fukushima of the Board of Education here.

The response? The Education Ministry has mandated short teacher training programs after five, 10 and 20 years of service.

Yet despite such extraordinary efforts, Japan's educational system has come under fire of late. Just as this nation's economy no longer inspires fear and envy around the world, so have delegations of foreign scholars stopped merely extolling the virtues of Japan's schools, as they did in the 1980s.

Nowadays, Japanese education is more often criticized as too stifling, dehumanizing and focused on rote memorization rather than problem-solving. At Teraoka's school, 20% to 30% of the fourth-graders already are attending juku, or cram schools, in order to gain entrance to good private schools, the first step in a competitive admissions system known as ''examination hell.''

Polls have found that an overwhelming majority of the Japanese public believes that more reforms are needed. In Yokohama, new training regimens thus aim to reinforce teachers' communication skills so they will be more apt to notice troubled children: Might those who hang around, but don't say much, really be asking for help?

Teraoka admitted that the most difficult challenge of his first year has been learning to understand hispupils.

''I have 31 of them,'' he said, ''and 31 different patterns.''

On a recent day, though, he was leading the 31 through an activity that was a reminder of how, for all its excesses, the Japanese system still offers much to admire. The fourth-graders were performing a play they had written themselves.

Instead of giving stage directions, Teraoka brought a camera to school and videotaped a rehearsalso the students spontaneously discovered such acting truths as ''face the front of the stage'' and ''speak loud and slowly.''

Asked what they thought of their teacher, Teraoka's wards were not shy.

''It's scary when he gets mad!'' said one boy.

''He's too strict,'' complained another.

The girls were more charitable.

''He doesn't get too mad when we forget stuff at home,'' said one. And another offered a point of praise that would resonate with students anywhere: ''He doesn't give us too much homework.''

Copyright Los Angeles Times

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Tuesday, May 19, 1998

Not Good Enough - 10 Schools Were Targeted for Help…They're Better but Goal Is Elusive

By AMY PYLE and DOUG SMITH, Times Education Writers

It's been more than a decade since the Los Angeles Unified School District decided to give special attention to 10 mostly black inner-city elementary schools to show that ''all children can achieve their highest potential when the conditions for learning are at an optimum.''

Those optimal conditions were going to be created with an extra $1 million a year per campus: a top-notch staff, smaller classes, back-to-basics emphasis on the written and spoken word, even full-time nurses.

It was called the Ten Schools Program. And the measure of success was to be straightforward: bringing average scores on an annual standardized reading, math and language test up to the national median, the 50th percentile.

''The school district is on the line,'' declared thenadministrator Paul Possemato. ''Either it can teach poverty children, or it can't.''

Now Los Angeles has embarked, with fanfare, on yet another campaign to transform schools at the bottom of the academic heap. This time it's Supt. Ruben Zacarias' ''100 schools'' project. ''I will not make or accept excuses,'' he says.

But what happened to its predecessor, the Ten Schools Program? Did all that cash buy the promised improvement? And did anyone really monitor how well it worked?

This much is clear: By its own strict goal, the program has failed.

More than 10 years and $100 million later, the schools as a group have not come close to the 50th percentile. Last year, their students scored at the 34th percentile, barely above the district's average of the 33rd percentile.

At the same time, the schools are faring better than when they started, and outpacing neighboring campuses, suggesting that something good has occurred.

As with many touted educational programs, however, there has been little formal analysis to determine whether taxpayers have gotten their money's worth…and what can be learned from the experiment.

So The Times conducted its own review, including having a leading expert analyze a full decade of test scores from the Ten Schools.

What emerged is a textbook lesson in the false promise of exaggerated claims…and the astounding complexity of trying to improve the performance of California's most troubled schools.

* Beyond the rhetoric, the ''optimum'' conditions proved impossible to reach…particularly the part about hiring experienced teachers. All 450 teaching positions at the schools were thrown open, but initially only 330 people applied, most of whom were already working in the Ten Schools. Today, one in four teachers at those campuses lacks a full credential.

* Though there were substantial gains at most schools, they came after a population shift dramatically altered the experiment. The original idea was to help African American students, so the schools picked were at least 60% black. A decade later, all but one are predominantly Latino. The only school that still has a majority of black students…102nd Street…languishes on Zacarias' list of 100 lowest-performers.

* While test scores in the first and second grades have shown the biggest gains, scores slip significantly in the upper grades.

''I can't believe that the district should be persuaded that they have a model,'' concluded Robert Calfee, associate dean of Stanford University's School of Education, who analyzed the scores.

But the program's top administrator, Assistant Supt. Theodore Alexander, says there has really been only one flaw with Ten Schools:that district higher-ups set such an outlandish goal…the U.S. median.

Alexander asks that the schools be stacked instead against those facing similar challenges. Indeed, scores are far worse at nearby campuses, at the 22nd percentile.

''It's a constant battle, with people saying there's no significant difference,'' Alexander said. ''When I hear that argument, I want to tell people to go to hell.''

Academic Strategy Ahead of Its Time

The Ten Schools are places where a first-grader, when asked to make a sentence using the word ''which,'' offers: ''Which boy got killed?'' Or where a special bell signals a ''lock-down'' because of violence outside. Or where a principal keeps the business card of a child-abuse police detective in the corner of a photo frame.

These are words of Consuela, a fifth-grader at Flournoy Elementary:

I am a strong black child.

I wonder if I'll make it through life.

I hear the sound of gun shots and curse words.

I see homeless family's and drug addicts.

I want a better life.

Consuela was the sort of child for whom Ten Schools was created in the fall of 1987. For by every measure, African American students in Los Angeles…as a group…were failing.

First came the statistics, exposed by a court desegregation lawsuit. Then came a list of demands to the school board by advocates for minorities. Then came the program singling out 10 elementary schools with test scores below the 30th percentile.

Seven were in, or within a few blocks of, Watts. One…102nd Street…stood across from the harsh world of the Jordan Downs housing project. Another…Flournoy…hugged the perimeter of the Nickerson Gardens apartments.

The program's academic strategy was ahead of its time. All 10 schools were to use a phonics reading program known as Open Court…years before the state mandated it. All began a mainstream English program specially tailored to black students…long before the Ebonics debate. All had smaller classes through second grade…a decade before Gov. Pete Wilson made that his cause celebre.

Teachers were to sign forms promising to be punctual, to have high expectations for students and to use grade-level materials, not the easier lessons often found in struggling schools. They even agreed to a dress code: ties for men and hose for women when they wear skirts.

Kids need role models? Even today, all but two of the principals are black. So is 57% of the teaching corps…almost four times the district's 15% average.

Kids need connection to the material? In an English class, a teacher highlights Black History Month with a book following a slave family's flight.

Teachers need training? Have them arrive a month before their students and spend that time not just fixing up their rooms, but learning from fellow Ten Schools teachers…to encourage consistency and cross-pollination. Then have teams of evaluators…from principals on down…visit every classroom every year to write helpful critiques.

But the idealistic game plan still did not make it easy to recruit teachers to schools like Flournoy, wheretwo-thirds of the students are on welfare.

''You have your husband drive you by your new school, and you just keep on driving,'' said Principal Albert Davis, rolling his eyes.

Davis was a reluctant recruit himself, brought in from Kester Avenue Elementary in Van Nuys when the program began. ''I didn't volunteer,'' he said. ''A friend asked me, "What are they going to give you for being there?' That really got to me. If I'm not willing to work in the black community,''…he's African American…''who is?''

Yet even the teachers he landed tended to stay no more than four years. Today, half of his staff has fewer than three years' experience. And three of his four instructors at the crucial third-grade level lack a full teaching credential.

Davis tries to take a positive view of having a green staff.''They're more open,'' he insists.

In recent years, he has focused on developing home-grown teachers, coaxing classroom aides to finish their college work. One shining example is Sandra DeLucas, a teacher now for four years. Though she grew up in neighboring Compton, working near the projects initially bothered even her.

''You hear shootings, you hear helicopters…it's a little bit intimidating,'' she said. ''But I've been here long enough, I'm over it.''

You see quickly that DeLucas is one of those super-creative teachers who makes lessons fun. On the 29th day of the month, that number is everywhere on the walls of her first-grade class…27+2 or 36-7 or a coin chart showing two dimes andnine pennies.

For a math lesson, children toil in pairs to chart M&Ms by color…then eat the candy. They move to the rug to play food bingo, a lesson in categorizing (fruit or vegetable?) and vocabulary.

''A lot of these kids are in foster homes, single-parent homes, so I know the education I give is the only education they get,'' DeLucas said. ''If they blossom, it's because of me.''

What does ''blossom'' mean at Flournoy? Given the locale, it is cause for celebration that overall standardized test scores last year hit the 33rd percentile, right on the district average.

Racial Changes Alter Experiment

That's par for the course for the Ten Schools these days: Three others are at the district average, three above it and three below.

But how do you make sense of such statistics in a California where standardized tests are changing all the time…and so are the students?

Nearly 20% of the kids who start a year at Ten Schools leave before it's over, replaced by students from other schools or, increasingly, from south of the border.

Schools chosen because they were at least 60% black have seen that number shrink to 44% as Latino immigrants have poured into the area.

The schools have found it hard to adjust. Only 21% of the teachers carry a bilingual credential, which signifies that holders are fully qualified to instruct students whose primary language is not English.

Former school board President Leticia Quezada said she tried in vain to raise concerns about how a staff picked specially to serve black students would handle the new ones, often recent arrivals to this country.

''You have monolingual English-speaking teachers and monolingual Spanish-speaking kids and parents,'' Quezada noted. ''But we were not supposed to raise that, because it would start a black-brown race problem.''

Today, because there are not enough bilingual teachers, limited-English students at the Ten Schools often find themselves segregated at the side of the classroom, taught by an aide.

Yet…confirming studies touting the drive of new immigrants…the ''limited English'' students have helped lift the standing of the schools, in part by registering math scores around that ballyhooed 50th percentile.

Ethnicity is not the only way these schools are, in the popular phrase, diverse.

While all 10 are in poorer areas of L.A., their environments are hardly alike. Again echoing a pattern in education, the performance of students reflects the differences outside the classroom:

Two of the three schools that score above the district average are in stable neighborhoods of single-family homes west of the Coliseum. One, King Elementary, approached the project goal, hitting the 46th percentile on last year's Stanford Nine test of reading, language and math.

In contrast, the seven in the Watts area…many near public housing…had the lowest scores. And 102nd Street School, across from Jordan Downs, lagged at the 22nd percentile.

But not from lack of effort.

Visit the Ten Schools classrooms and, almost without exception, teachers are engaged with students. The lessons burst with images, words, ideas…and the basics.

Many believe that the emphasis on skills is the program's greatest strength. There are regular mini-tests to prepare students for the standardized exams that others use to judge them.

On this day, there's a phonics lesson in Carlette Johnson's first-grade class at 102nd Street.

''O, consonant, E,'' she tells the students, instilling the long vowel pattern in the word ''home.'' They repeat the pattern when she shows them the word ''cave.''

New today is the letter V. Johnson introduces it with an audio cassette on Vinnie the Vacuum. ''As Vinnie vacuums the velvet rug, a van of visitors rolls up.''

They end the lesson by writing V-letter sentences in workbooks.

Still, examples of the academically lost are easy to find.

Down the hall, a third-grade girl's writing about ''The Frog and the Toad,'' a popular story, is unintelligible: ''There rad to toat hoves frog and reading they chirt to.''

Her teacher marks up several other papers, pointing out grammatical mistakes, but bypasses hers.

The challenge can even get to teachers like Sharon Robinson at Flournoy Elementary. She started working at the campus on East 111th Street before the program began, left to teach in Europe, then returned in 1989.

Robinson, who is white, is dedicated to the inner city, convinced that children there can excel. But this is what she's up against in second grade: 7-year-olds who come to school drowsy from watching television half the night; 7-year-olds who have already been bounced out of several schools for discipline problems; 7-year-olds who challenge her…''Why?''…when she asks them to please sit down.

Of the 17 in her class recently, seven enrolled months after the school year began. Others appeared and disappeared.

During a phonics lesson, her students tried to use the word ''shrug'' in a sentence. Their vocabulary is so limited that none could get it right.

''My mom shrugged the wall?'' tried a girl, one of six limited-English students in the class.

''My sister when she washed made my T-shirt shrug?'' attempted another student.

During a break, Robinson confided, ''They come into kindergarten already two years behind. All you're doing is playing catch up.''

Some Benefits Quite Tangible

Even if Ten Schools has not performed miracles for its students, some benefits are quite tangible.

Each school is provided a part-time nurse, psychologist and attendance counselor, which most campuses turn into full-time positions with other funds.

The average L.A. Unified elementary school has a nurse only one day a week, meaning that teachers may be left with ''a box of Band-Aids and cotton balls,'' as one put it, and serve as ''mother, doctor, counselor, everything.''

But at 93rd Street School, Carrie Harrison clocks in every day for full-time duty.

On Monday morning, a steady stream of children with injuries and maladies suffered over the weekend line up at her door, sent by concerned teachers.

First comes a boy with a welt under an eye; another child threw a wrench at him Saturday.

Then a boy with a black and blue cheekbone. His story changes twice, but he finally settles on saying his sister tripped him.

In comes a second-grader complaining of a headache. She has no fever, so Harrison gently prods:

''Did you eat breakfast?''

''No,'' the girl replies.

''Do you want something to eat or do you want to go home?''

''Eat,'' the girl says, tears welling. The nurse pulls saltines and orange juice from her private stash.

Between interruptions, Harrison calls in third-graders for eye tests, as mandated by state law. Two girls need glasses so badly they can only see the top line of the chart. She tells them to have their teachers seat them close to the board until their moms buy glasses and, if the family cannot afford them, to contact her for help.

The Ten Schools had long received more money than the average public school because their students were poor and their classrooms not integrated. The extra $1 million each campus gets also is drawn, in part, from state funds intended to reduce the inequity of racial segregation.

At 93rd Street School, the money also helps employ Carol Haro, who enforces a Ten Schools tenet: If the students are not in school, they can't learn.

''Attendance counselor'' only begins to describe her work. She also keeps an updated file on food pantries for needy families and once a month takes the poorest children to a clothes giveaway in North Hollywood.

This Monday, she has a more complicated mission. A student sent home with head lice has been out almost two months. The School Review Board downtown has gotten involved.

''They want me to call the social welfare department, the health department,'' she says. ''But if they go out, they'll take her away. That would rip that family apart.''

Haro decides to take a field trip. The girl lives blocks from the school in a one-bedroom shack squeezed behind another house. Five people live there, and it's difficult to see how. The place is filthy and cluttered.

The girl's mother comes to the door, apologetic about the lice. The girl cries, the mother explains, when she tries to comb the dead nits out of her hair. The girl also doesn't want to get up in the morning.

Haro asks to see the youngster, at which point the girl peeks from the top of a bunk bed set up in the living room, from where she has been half-watching soap operas. She climbs down, wearing a soiled, torn nightgown.

''You have to get her in school,'' Haro tells the mother. ''If you don't, they'll take you to jail and then where will you be?''

Then Haro tries another tack: ''She's so smart, you know, she could be a doctor or a lawyer. But she has to come to school.''

The mother smiles, nods, strokes her daughter's hair. Haro fixes on the girl. ''Do you want to come to school?''

''Oh, yes,'' the girl says.

And, yes, she did return to school. For two weeks. Then she disappeared again. The school district now plans to take the mother to court.

Smaller Classes Seem to Help

Ten Schools was intended to be a five-year pilot. Then it had its one public review.

It already was clear in 1992that the schools would not reach the 50th percentile. But they were outperforming other poor schools, and the timing made it unthinkable that the experiment would be ended. The review fell shortlyafter the Los Angeles riots.

In a city trying to mend the ragged wounds of racial strife, the school board could not turn its back on a program aimed at helping African American youth.

The author of the five-year review, UCLA Vice ChancellorWinston Doby, gave decision makers an out. Rather than ask, ''Did the program achieve its initial purpose?'' he said the board might pose another question: ''What has the district learned?''

One major lesson? It ''might not be possible to create the optimum conditions in the Ten Schools.''

No outside study of the schools was done after that until The Times, with Calfee's help, analyzed test scores for the entire 10 years. Among the findings:

* The smaller classes and personal attention seem to have helped. Compare scores from the Ten Schools with those from the 22 elementary schools within a mile of them…last year, students in the Ten Schools came out 12 points higher.

* But some numbers remain bleak…on tests given only to English-speakers in 1996, ''these kids are still . . . in the 25th percentile in reading,'' Calfee found.

* Then there was the slippage.

Calfee followed an early wave of Ten Schools students, entering in 1987, and a later group, entering in 1991, to see how they progressed from first through fifth grades.

From the start, the second group scored higher than the earlier one on national scales…13 points higher in first-grade reading.

But explaining that is not easy. Was it because the schools learned to work better? Or was it the changing population?

One thing similar about both groups: Each did worse as they got older. Indeed, the recent group, which started out ahead, had a sharper drop over time.

''If I were to be asked what's important, I would say: How are the kids doing in the late elementary grades?'' Calfee said. ''That's not a whole lot of payoff.''

But, again, why? Are the schools doing something wrong? Or does the drop simply reflect the influence of the inner city over time?

Calfee criticized school officials for failing to track Ten Schools students through middle and high school, leaving unknown whatever became of these kids.

To the man who counts most, though, Ten Schools has proved its worth. In fact, Supt. Zacarias wants to ''start providing other schools with the resources that these schools are receiving.''

Zacarias notes that some of the Ten Schools innovations…extra teacher training, staff selection committees and uniform reading programs…were later adopted by other school reform efforts, such as LEARN. At the same time, he seems to have taken care to avoid one problem of the Ten Schools program in crafting his campaign for the district's 100 lowest-performing schools, most below the 25th percentile.

After originally vowing to bring the 100 schools up to the national average, Zacarias had second thoughts a few months ago.

His goal now: eight points.

Copyright Los Angeles Times

One School District Grows Its Own Teachers

Elk Grove set up its own program with San Francisco State in which novices actually pay to be interns. The innovative program is being called a model for success.

By RICHARD LEE COLVIN, Times Education Writer

ELK GROVE--Gil Tisnado doesn't look the part of a rookie teacher.

First, there's the gray hair, which tips you to his 46 years. More startling, though, are his moves in the classroom.

''OK, who can summarize the book in one sentence?'' he asks his fourth-graders, checking to make sure they are on the same page…literally and figuratively…before launching into a reading session.

The former advertising executive darts among them, pausing only to whisper ''perk up'' in the ear of a sleepy-eyed boy who is using his desk for a pillow.

Tisnado asks: How are the two main characters alike? Different?

''April?''

''It's about a little boy and a butler who go to California,'' offers the smiling, pink-sweatered girl.

Down comes the world map and for five minutes Tisnado orchestrates a mini-lesson in geography. He calls students up to trace how the story's fictional ship traveled around the Cape of Good Hope during the Gold Rush. Later, a social studies quiz will probe the students' knowledge of the same period.

Although he has spent only seven months as a teacher, Tisnado is clearly gifted. But don't think for a moment that it's sheer instinct that enables him to guide 32 students through a fast-paced morning of reading, writing and quizzes…even calisthenics.

Tisnado credits an innovative teacher-preparation program operated by the Elk Grove Unified School District that many believe could serve as a model for the state. ''It terrifies me to think schools are hiring people who haven't gone through something like the Teacher Education Institute,'' he said.

Elk Grove Supt. David W. Gordon calls it ''growing your own.'' And it's the sort of innovation that helped the district, on Sacramento's fast-growing southern fringe, attract 2,700 applicants for 300 teaching positions last year.

Gordon simply was not satisfied with how education schools were turning out teachers…and how teachers could not seem to teach students to read well enough.

So the district set up its own training program in conjunction with San Francisco State. Would-be teachers now could earn their state certificate right at the district, taught mostly by its teachers and administrators and spending much of the time in its classrooms.

The goal? To produce teachers ''able to hit the ground running.''

With California facing a huge shortage, other school districts have tried producing their own teachers. But it's usually on-the-job training: college graduates with temporary teaching permits are hired to handle classrooms while taking their own classes after school and on weekends.

In Elk Grove, those who enroll in the 11-month institute certainly spend a lot of time in the classroom. But they are there to learn, not teach. Instead of doing double-duty as teachers, they spend their time taking courses in how to instruct math, science, the U.S. Constitution and especially reading, with an emphasis on phonics. Each trainee also is assigned a personal coach.

Of course, that means they don't receive a salary. They actually pay $7,200…roughly twice what it would cost to get the courses for a teaching credential through a regular state university program.

Even so, Elk Grove's program last year had 400 applicants for 100 slots. Some were fresh out of college, while others, like Tisnado, were seeking a career change.

One attraction is that enrollees get a leg up…but no guarantee…of a job in Elk Grove, which has become a magnet for teachers despite the challenges posed by its increasing percentage of minority and low-income students. Some of the reasons: aggressive recruiting, salaries that are among the highest in the area, lifetime health benefits, and stable, inspiring leadership.

Gordon is just the fourth superintendent since the district was created 40 years ago.

It's a place where the teachers union, school board and administrators attendplanning retreats together. And where a new fourth-grade teacher is a former ad man.

During the training program, Tisnado had some frightening moments. Like the time he ''lost'' half his class during a bathroom break. (His directions were unclear.)

Or the flash of insight during lunchroom duty when it dawned on him that his new career would not be entirely ''high concept.'' At that moment, wearing his designer tie, he realized that the difference between success or failure would be measured this way: Could he cut open packages of catsup fast enough to keep the hungry first-graders happy?

Nearing the end of his first year in class, he has lots to learn. But he's grateful for the start the program gave him, especially in maintaining classroom discipline and knowing what to expect of his students academically.

''I hear so many new teachers say they are so discouraged, and they start looking at the want ads and they want to quit,'' he said. ''For me, there wasn't one moment this year that I wanted to go back to my old life.''

Copyright Los Angeles Times

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