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The June 2004 issue of the IU News leads with a farewell to the Oakland Unified School District's Urban Dreams Project. Since 1999, Urban Dreams has supported the work of Oakland's high school History and English teachers, providing access to appropriate technology tools and professional development opportunities, and most importantly, is credited with contributing to a measurable improvement in student performance in subject areas covered. The IU has been an OUSD partner throughout the life of Urban Dreams, participating in six projects over the five-year span. To see the scope of the IU/OUSD partnership, type "Urban Dreams" into the search box on the IU News homepage, and read a few of the more than three dozen stories that have featured this work. Other stories in the June issue of the news discuss: preparing for college and UC admission; recent developments in California's budget crisis, as it affects higher education; links to a series of editorials on California's crisis in higher education from the San Francisco Chronicle; and more. The lead story is introduced on the IU Main page and printed in full below. Stories featured in this issue are:
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Urban Dreams Farewell
On the afternoon of May 20, 2004 more than 75 people gathered on the UC Berkeley campus to celebrate the successful work of Oakland Unified’s Urban Dreams—a project designed to support the work of high school History and English teachers. Those attending included Oakland teachers and support staff, and IU staff and other campus participants.
As they gathered in the Lippman Room on the eighth floor of Barrows Hall, and took in a view of the Berkeley campus that stretched across to Oakland and the East Bay, celebrants enjoyed conversation and food prior to a short program introduced by Project Co-manager Ann Kruze.
Kruze began by reviewing some of the benefits and lauding some of the participants in the five year project. Among the benefits to the district and students, she noted that Urban Dreams grant money had brought more than $10 million to the OUSD. More importantly, project evaluation data show a district-wide measurable improvement in student outcomes for the subject areas covered.
Three Oakland teachers made brief remarks, testifying how the project had affected their teaching, their classrooms and their students; they were Maryanne Wolfe, Mary Scott and Steven Moreno. Other Oakland participants receiving special mention were Stan Pesick, Emily Filloy, Peter Hutcher, Jane Vanderbeck and Sophon Tauch.
David Greenbaum, IU Director, also addressed those present and lauded the project’s successes, lessons and value to the University’s campus/community partnerships. The IU arranged for the afternoon celebration to be held on campus and Oakland provided the refreshments and presentations for the program; IU’s Isaac Mankita worked with Oakland partners to organize the event.
Urban Dreams received its funding from a five-year Federal Technology Innovation Grant, awarded in 1999 by the U.S. Department of Education, and coordinated by OUSD’s Office of Instructional Technology.
The project supported the work of History and English teachers in grades 9-12, providing access to appropriate technology tools and professional development opportunities. Thematic content focused on teaching and learning about Human Rights and Civil Rights. Within this context, teachers and students worked to improve reading and writing skills—and as noted, evaluation data show measurable improvement.
Other aspects of the grant provided participant teachers with the equipment necessary to support Urban Dreams work in their classrooms. Summer Institutes also enabled teachers to participate in professional development events during the life of the grant. The Marcus A. Foster Educational Institute directed the Project's community access component. Urban Dreams teachers also worked with the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project at Stanford University to develop academically rigorous lesson plans that encourage critical inquiry.
The Interactive University was a participant in six Urban Dreams project activities that partnered Berkeley faculty, students and staff with OUSD teachers and students to provide teacher professional development, produce curriculum components, and foster the appropriate integration of instructional technologies into classroom activities:
The Urban Dreams website contains an archive of curriculum components created as part of the project: lesson plans, video projects and many other resources made possible by teachers and participants. However, as noted at the website, the current hosting will be terminated on June 30, 2004. Plans are underway to archive the materials from this site and migrate the content to a new location. Please check the OUSD website for the latest about the site of the newly archived information. For more pictures from the May 20 event (courtesy of Karen Swanson at OUSD), and more about the Urban Dreams Project, visit the site.
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Berkeley Helps High Schoolers Prepare for SAT
High school students planning to attend college almost always need to take the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), also sometimes referred to as the College Board Exam. Taking the test is an annual rite of passage for millions of young people as they complete various requirements to prepare for continued education after high school.
A new SAT is coming, and today's high school sophomores will be the first required to take a revised set of College Board exams. Recent articles in the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle report on confusion and anxiety for students, and parents. The Times article begins: "A revised College Board exam, incorporating a writing test and more advanced math, will not make its debut until next spring, but confusion about how to deal with the changes is already rampant." Read the entire NYT article here. Read the San Francisco Chronicle piece here. Here is the College Board website.
On the Berkeley campus, The People's Test Preparation Service (PTPS) offers advice and help for those preparing to take the SAT—now or in the near future. PTPS is a non-profit, student-run organization at UC Berkeley dedicated to providing standardized test taking skills to communities neglected by profit-oriented test preparation companies. Each semester PTPS offers free SAT classes to high school students throughout the East San Francisco Bay Area.
PTPS was founded in 1995; it recruits motivated college students to give SAT classes at local high schools. PTPS is funded by grants from Bridges, the UC Berkeley multicultural recruitment and retention center, Cal Corps, UC Berkeley’s public service center, and the ASUC.
PTPS provides a free, in-depth SAT Preparation Course. The eight week series of classes provides test-taking strategies and practice for sections of the SAT and gives students a chance to practice taking and scoring the actual exams. College admissions and financial aid information is another important component of the class. In these classes, pairs of PTPS teachers team-teach either verbal or math for two hours once a week to the high school students. Class sizes are usually limited to 25 to give each student personal attention.
PTPS also provides SAT Preparation Workshops for students (mainly focused on the SAT II) and strategy sessions to help other UC Berkeley service groups learn basic methods of teaching about the test so they can take PTPS materials to their clients and reach out to more low-income students.
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UC Tightens Admissions Standards
The UC Regents have raised the academic standards for undergraduate admission. A recently released study by the California Postsecondary Education Commission (CPEC), showed that 14.4% of graduates from public high schools qualified for UC admission last year. This is up from 11.1% in 1996. Eligibility rates for African American and Latino high school graduates have increased substantially since the 1996 study — even though admission of black students has dropped 30% at Berkeley. The new, more rigorous, standards are expected to drop the overall eligibility level to 12.5%. Read the CPEC study here. The story below is from the San Francisco Chronicle, May 20, 2004.
University of California officials agreed Wednesday to raise the academic standards for admission — just hours after the release of a state report showing that UC's standards allow too many students to qualify.
The study by the California Postsecondary Education Commission found that 14.4 percent of last year's public high school graduates were eligible for UC. The state's 1960 Master Plan for Education, which guides higher education in the state, calls for 12.5 percent to be eligible. That 1.9 percent difference translates into thousands of students, but UC officials said they couldn't say exactly how many.
UC Regent John Moores, who has come under fire from fellow regents and others for publicly challenging current eligibility standards, said the study appears to support his concerns that UC has admitted some students with grades and test scores that are too low.
"Kids with average grades and average test scores shouldn't be going to the University of California, and they are, no question,'' Moores said outside the UC Board of Regents meeting at UCSF's Laurel Heights campus. "These are kids who should be directed to the community colleges. It amounts to thousands of students and, in a time of fiscal austerity, I just don't get it. We need to raise the standards. They are too low."
The rest of the article and a chart depicting the UC and CSU requirements for admission are here.
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UC President Dynes Discusses Fee Hikes and Budget Compact
In a letter to University of California students and their parents, dated May 26, 2004, UC President Robert Dynes explains the student fee increases approved by the Board of Regents earlier this month, and details how the university's budget compact with Gov. Schwarzenegger should stabilize state support for higher education funding. The letter, addressed to California students and parents, begins:
Dear Friends:
I first wrote you in March to report on my progress in securing State funding for the University's operations. As you know, California has been grappling with a serious budget gap for 2004-05 and the University has been facing the likelihood of deep funding cuts for a fourth consecutive year.
I am pleased to report that the revised budget released by the Governor in mid-May includes no additional cuts to the University beyond those proposed in January. Nonetheless, those cuts remain significant—more than $350 million—and, as expected, will require higher student fees to help close the gap. However, there is some good news in the way fees will be set in coming years, which should provide more predictability to UC families.
You may read Dynes's entire letter here, posted on the UC Santa Barbara site, or download and read here, as a PDF file.
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UC Budget Crisis: Developments and Reactions
A number of significant, and sometimes controversial, developments have occurred regarding the state's budget problems and the University of California. The letter, above, from UC President Dynes about fee hikes and the recent "budget compact" with the governor, is complemented below in a series of links to related stories and additional coverage of the fee hike, the compact, and faculty, student and public opinion and reaction. Current and past press releases regarding the state budget, from the University of California's Office of the President, are located at this link.
Higher Education Compact Pairs Cuts and Promises
UC Regents Pass Fee Hike
High College Fees Blasted at Legislative Hearing
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SF Chronicle Editorials on Crisis in Higher Education
A series of editorials in the San Francisco Chronicle from May 19 to 21, might be summed up in a sentence that appears near the end of the final piece: "The budget crisis shouldn't force a simplistic response to a complex problem."
The Chronicle's editorial board uses the three editorial essays to address and weigh in on a number of issues, including the governor's "budget compact", the fee hike, and the tightening of admission standards—on this latter, observing that the qualification of more students should be treated as a success, not, as Regent Moores seems to think, some kind of failure; the Chronicle pointedly remarks: critics seem to disregard several other compelling explanations for why more students are eligible to attend UC than before. California's schools may be doing a better job of educating students. UC's outreach programs have been successful in helping and encouraging students to meet all the admissions requirements. High-school students may simply be working harder and getting better grades and test scores than before.
Read all three Chronicle editorial pieces here:
- May 19: Crisis in Higher Education: Pain and Promises at UC and CSU
- May 20: UC's Future Is Our Own
- May 21: Crowding at the Gate to UC
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Good Teachers + Small Classes = Quality Education
The following article, by Michael Winerip, appeared in the May 26 New York Times.
The secret to quality public education has never been a big mystery. You need good teachers and you need small enough classes so those teachers can do their work. Period. After that, everything seems to pale, including the testing accountability programs, technology, building conditions. Even curriculum seems secondary, as our best public colleges demonstrate. We have West Point and we have Berkeley, and the question isn't which has the correct curriculum; the question is which curriculum is the best fit for the student and teacher.
Parents get this. Joe Gipson, a black parent from Sacramento who feels that black students are too often shortchanged, told me the best thing that happened to his children's school was the California law capping class size at 20 through third grade. You can still have incompetent teachers, he said, but with small classes you can spot them faster and weed them out.
Good teachers and small classes. Those were the two main factors New York's highest court cited last year when it ruled that the state had financially shortchanged New York City schools.
Continue with the entire Winerip article here.
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What Adolescents Miss in Cyberspace
In this May 29 essay, New York Times Editorial Observer Brent Staples argues that "adolescents are drawn to cyberspace for different reasons than adults; . . . teenagers who spend much of their lives hunched over computer screens miss the socializing, the real-world experience that would allow them to leave adolescence behind and grow into adulthood." Staples cites a researcher who tells him "people allowed low-quality relationships developed in virtual reality to replace higher-quality relationships in the real world;" and claims no group has embraced this trade-off more than adolescents. Staples further offers:
Thanks to e-mail, online chat rooms and instant messages — which permit private, real-time conversations — adolescents have at last succeeded in shielding their social lives from adult scrutiny. But this comes at a cost: teenagers nowadays are both more connected to the world at large than ever, and more cut off from the social encounters that have historically prepared young people for the move into adulthood.
The Internet was billed as a revolutionary way to enrich our social lives and expand our civic connections. This seems to have worked well for elderly people and others who were isolated before they got access to the World Wide Web. But a growing body of research is showing that heavy use of the Net can actually isolate younger socially connected people who unwittingly allow time online to replace face-to-face interactions with their families and friends.
The entire Staples article is here.
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Webcasts of Interest
Educational Technology Services (ETS) promotes and supports the effective integration of technology in teaching, learning and communication at the University of California, Berkeley. As part of its mission, ETS provides live and on-demand webcasts of courses and events in streaming video and audio for the University community and beyond. Go here for information and a list of frequently asked questions about how webcasting works. Read more about ETS and webcast events in this IU News story from October 2003.
Two recently posted webcasts of interest are:
- The California Assembly Committee on Higher Education's May 21 forum in the International House, UC Berkeley. This event brought together legislators, Berkeley administrators and faculty, and the public to discuss proposed state budget cuts to higher education, and is covered in an IU News story above. The webcast includes the entire 2 hours, 47 minutes of the event, and can be viewed on streaming video here.
- Sponsored by the Bancroft Library, on May 8, Maxine Hong Kingston discussed her life as a poet and prose writer. This webcast contains the 1 hour, 17 minute discussion and interview.
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Upcoming Events
Summer 2004 Bay Area Writing Project (BAWP) courses for teachers. This summer join colleagues from throughout the Bay Area to learn in programs that are teacher-centered, interactive and collaborative. Explore and question, write and revise, read and discuss – recharge your batteries by learning with other teachers. All BAWP summer programs are led by BAWP Teacher-Consultants who are experienced classroom teachers with special expertise in the teaching of writing. Check out this summer's course listings and dates, and find a link to a PDF registration form here.
Also from BAWP this summer, Young Writers' Camps will offer students the time and opportunity to explore their writing interests, discover their strengths and learn more about the craft of writing. The camps provide in-depth writing instruction, structured writing workshop time, flexibility in writing assignments, and daily opportunities to share writing with peers.
Through the camps, students discover the conditions and habits needed to write their best and grow in their confidence and skill. Students are encouraged to continue as writers independently and apply these skills and habits to carve out time to write in and out of school.
This summer program offers a unique opportunity for students entering grades 4 to 8 to develop their writing talents. Under the guidance of experienced UC Berkeley/Bay Area Writing Project (BAWP) Teacher Consultants, students will have a chance to grow as writers. In an atmosphere that is optimal for young writers, students will become better writers in the process of practicing their craft.
For more information click here; to get a PDF registration form, click here.
The Office of Resources for International and Area Studies (ORIAS) now has summer offerings listed at its website. These include:
Check the links above for more information about these ORIAS related offerings..
A Bridge to the Future: Technologies to Connect the Campus. Syllabus2004 is a conference for administrators, IT professionals and faculty who want to explore the application of information technology in higher education institutions and discover how new media are best integrated into the teaching and learning process.
In its 11th year, the conference features a day on the campus of University of California, Berkeley. With ample opportunity for networking, attendees will be encouraged to exchange views on the issues and challenges pertinent to teaching and administration in today's technology-enhanced environments. Visit one of the links above for details and registration information.
This summer members of the IU team will be on the road. In early June, IU Director David Greenbaum will travel to Washington D.C. to participate in a Digital Library Federation Scholars' Advisory Panel. In July, Raymond Yee, IU's Technology Architect will present at the 2nd Alt-i-lab Symposium in San Francisco. More information about these events will appear in a future issue of the IU News
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