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Photos courtesy of Martin Lipton Liz Vasques, a high school student participating in a summer seminar at UCLA, hands out a survey to students at Central High School as part of her research on equity and access in public schools.

By Kelly Rayburn

Daily Bruin Senior Staff

Last week at the UCLA Faculty Center, the students were the teachers.

High schoolers took center stage on July 27 to tell a group of formally dressed professors and administrators about the current state of public schools.

Students challenged them to think critically about the public school system.

During her presentation, Daisy Moreno, who will be a senior at John Marshall Fundamental Secondary School this year, stood in front of a UCLA faculty panel and asked them and other attendees to close their eyes and picture themselves in a different place and time.

Moreno asked everyone to picture his or her second grade classrooms and teacher.

“What is (the teacher’s) purpose?” Moreno asked the audience. “What is her role? Is she an authority figure? Is she your friend? Does she inspire you?”

Photos courtesy of Martin Lipton Daisy Moreno, a senior from John Marshall Fundamental Secondary School, sets up a laptop that students were given to use for the seminar.

Moreno was one of 21 high school students who, after a rigorous application process, was invited to UCLA for a four-week seminar combining social science research with legal advocacy regarding a California Educational Bill of Rights.

John Rogers, a professor at the UCLA Law School, and Ernest Morrell, a visiting professor from Michigan State University, taught the seminar, which was co-sponsored by the Institute for Democracy, Education and Access, the Los Angeles Basis Institute and the Los Angeles Alliance.

Before the seminar began, members of IDEA, faculty from the law school, legal advocates from the American Civil Liberties Union and community leaders drafted an educational bill of rights, outlining student rights regarding access, equity and resources they say all students should have.

Members from IDEA and the ACLU are working with California legislators to eventually pass an educational bill of rights, Rogers said.

As a step toward an eventual bill of rights, students who participated in the seminar extensively researched access and equity – or lack thereof – in L.A. urban schools.

Rogers said their research would provide some factual backing for the proposed bill.

“The broad goal – which has some loose backing – needs some specific support in the form of concrete ideas,” he said.

Photos courtesy of Martin Lipton Los Angeles high schoolers (l-r) Jarret Moore, Chau Nguyen, Jasmine Arenivar and Adrianna Simental listen to American Civil Liberties Union attorney Rosio Cardoba.

Last week the students divided into five groups, and each addressed a different issue and presented their findings.

Moreno and classmates Sochin Lee and Cynthia Cassillas presented their final project on what it means to be a good teacher and whether children have access to quality teachers.

Many schools have teachers who are not fully qualified, educational bill of rights supporters point out.

But Moreno, Lee and Cassillas said teachers need to have more than just a credential. After much research, which included surveying and interviewing students and L.A.-area high schools, the three found that students are just as interested in how influential teachers are in students’ everyday lives as in formal qualifications.

Too few students have access to teachers who have such important qualities as courage, tolerance, coherence and openness, the group said.

And presenters from all five groups expressed a desire for teachers to provide a more personal and open education.

“It means a lot for me to be here because I feel I can speak freely about things,” said Denicia Cormier, who attends school in Oakland and was the only Northern Californian to take part in the seminar.

“Here, it’s much more open and it’s pertaining to topics I actually relate to ... in school I feel obligated to be in the mind-set they’re interested in,” Cormier said.

Cormier later read a poem she wrote about her high school – a place she said is troubled by racial separation and an enclosing jail-like fence.

“What a horrendous sight to see / How can this possibly be meant for me?” she read.

Though the students largely enjoyed their time at UCLA, the summer seminar was academically strenuous.

The seminar met each day, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Students wrote daily journal entries, took notes on lectures and participated in school mapping projects.

They also studied the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Brown v. the Board of Education and read excerpts from Cornell West’s “Race Matters,” Jay MacLeod’s “Ain’t no Makin’ It” and other educational and social writings.

To conclude their seminar, the students completed written and oral final research projects.

“It is essential to listen to the voices of the students,” said Rogers, just before the students gave their presentations. “I’m very excited to hear what the students have to say. They have been up all hours.”

The students researched five different areas, including access to fair and authentic assessment, technology, primary language instruction, a safe and supportive school environment and quality teachers.

All groups studied two area high schools: Central High and Pacific High.

Generally, the seminar’s participants found that students from Central High, which is almost entirely African American and Latino, had less access to a quality education than students from Pacific High, which has higher numbers of whites and Asian Americans.

The group which spoke about access to fair and authentic assessment, for example, found that Central High had many students whose first language was not English. Those students, the group found, often perform poorly on standardized tests such as the Stanford 9 test, which are only given in English. Pacific High, in comparison, has few non-English speakers.

When it comes time for the state to allocate funds based on how well a school is performing, schools like Central High are disadvantaged because they do not have access to fair and authentic evaluation, the group said.

Students presenting on access to primary language instruction found other problems regarding non-English speakers.

“We were talking to bilingual students who said they were ashamed to speak in Spanish,” said Chau Nguyen, who attends Pomona High School in Los Angeles, after one day of class.

Besides the 21 students in the seminar, five who took a similar seminar last year returned this year as research assistants.

Alejandro Nuno, one of the returners who will be starting college at the University of San Francisco next year, said: “The most important thing I got out of the seminar is good friends.”

With reports from Michaele Turnage, Daily Bruin Senior Staff.