| IDEA’s Summer Seminars
Summer 2003 marked the fifth year that UCLA/IDEA has offered a research seminar to urban high school students, teachers, and parent advocates. These seminars have been directed by IDEA’s John Rogers and Michigan State Professor Ernest Morrell. TCLA has published work from each of the seminars since 2000. (The IDEA seminar has also received press from several other publications—CNN, La Opinion, Education Week.)
The Summer 2000 seminar explored youth democracy against the backdrop of the Democratic National Convention. The Summer 2001 seminar used the idea of a “Students Bill of Rights” to examine conditions in LA-area schools. In Summer 2002, the seminar studied how youth and parents can contribute to a ‘bottom-up’ accountability system by reporting on school conditions.
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This past summer, UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access (IDEA) convened urban youth, teachers, and parent activists to explore how Brown’s promise of education on “equal terms” has played out across greater Los Angeles. The students and parents came from communities in East, South, and South East Los Angeles as well as the suburbs of Lynwood and Santa Monica. Over five weeks, they became a community of critical public historians, studying the fifty-year struggle for educational access and equity in their communities. They reached out to people who attended schools in greater Los Angeles over the last half century—conducting interviews in malls, restaurants, union shops, and schools. They dusted off copies of old yearbooks, newspapers, and reports. They tapped into decades-old census reports and school data. Finally, they drew upon this extraordinary body of data to create powerful historical narratives of educational and social change in Los Angeles.
This issue of TCLA features the historical narratives created by students and parents in IDEA’s summer seminar. The students’ work is presented in five reports—one for each decade since Brown was decided in 1954. A sixth report, by the parent activists, addresses the relationship between racial politics and educational opportunity in the adjoining communities of Watts and South Gate. The reports use different tools to tell the story of the struggle for education on equal terms in Los Angeles. The student research teams present computer-generated maps to depict the transformation of social space and school conditions in greater Los Angeles. They also share statistical analyses that describe the changing student populations in many schools. The maps and charts speak to the profound transformation of Los Angeles during this period. But, the history of struggle comes most alive in a series of brief videos featuring former students reflecting back on their experiences in LA schools. This critical public history challenges us all to reexamine the ongoing inequalities in our schools and to re-commit ourselves to be agents for educational justice.
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