Bad Teachers: Putting the University on the Spot, Too

In 1969 I was one of a handful of Chicano students attending San Fernando Valley State College who persuaded a respected Mexican-American historian to give up his job at a private college in order to build a Chicano Studies department at our school.

We all believed that if anyone could make Valley State--or Cal State, Northridge, as it is now called--more sensitive to Latino students it was Rodolfo Acuna. After all, Acuna, who holds a Ph.D in Latin American history, was as well known for his political activism as for his academic research into the history of the Southwestern United States and the Mexican-Americans who helped build the region.

Fifteen years later I know that we made the right choice, but I am just as sure that university officials wish that we had picked someone else.

For, despite his academic credentials, Acuna also is a gadfly who freely criticizes the shortcomings of the system that nurtures him. Only his reputation as a teacher and the fact that he has tenure protect him when he gets into internal brouhahas with his academic peers and superiors. The latest round began when Acuna criticized Chancellor Anne Reynolds’ proposal to raise student admission standards for the state university system.

Reynolds believes that Latinos and other minority students will have a better chance of success in higher education if they are better prepared by the state’s high schools before they arrive at Cal State’s 19 campuses. She sold the idea to the university board of trustees, who decided that, starting in 1988, high-school students applying for admission must have completed at least four years of English, three years of mathematics and social sciences, two years of science and foreign languages and one year of fine arts.

“Improved high-school preparation is the single most important element in expanding minority access to and persistence in higher education,” Reynolds wrote recently.

But when they try to explain how their new admission requirements will get the state’s high schools to improve the quality of instruction that they offer, state university officials never seem to mention one important fact: The state university produces 50% to 70% of the teachers now working in California’s schools. If those schools are doing a less-than-satisfactory job, one wonders if part of the problem might be that the institution training most of our teachers also is doing a less-than-satisfactory job.

Acuna said as much in a recent letter to The Times. Warning that the new requirements might keep many otherwise-qualified Latino students from getting into the state university system, Acuna acerbically suggested that Reynolds “should pay more attention to improving conditions for students and professors within (her) system” before trying to improve schools that are someone else’s responsibility. Now he is getting flak from fellow faculty members and haughty letters from the chancellor’s office.

In one of those letters Associate Chancellor John W. Bedell cites some “decisive steps” that Reynolds has taken to improve the quality of teacher training in the Cal State system, “such as raising the requirements for completion of the programs, adding incentives for master teachers and strengthening the student teaching experience.”

I find it sadly revealing that Bedell’s letter does not mention other steps that would be just as useful in helping student teachers prepare to deal with minority students, who have now become a majority in Los Angeles’ public schools as well as in those of other large cities.

How about ethnic-studies classes to sensitize teachers to the hard realities of life in this nation’s barrios and ghettos? The Chicano Studies Department was set up at Cal State, Northridge, precisely because state colleges train so many teachers, and those future teachers must be prepared to work in Latino communities.

Or how about teaching them foreign languages? Perhaps it would lessen Anglo teachers’ hostility toward bilingual-education programs and for the bilingual teacher aides who work in many schools with large immigrant populations.

Acuna has been arguing for such remedial steps for years, and he’s still fighting the good fight despite pressure from his peers, and on high, to keep quiet.

When he was hired at Cal State, Northridge, the school had fewer than a dozen Chicano students. University officials cite the fact that 1,300 are now enrolled there as a sign that things have improved. But that represents less than 5% of a student body of 28,000.

Meanwhile, statistics released last week by the Los Angeles Unified School District indicate that Latinos represent 52% of the public-school students in Los Angeles and 63% of those in kindergarten. In light of those numbers, 5% is not good enough. And when Acuna raises the discomfiting question of whether new admission requirements will keep the number of Chicanos in the Cal State system low, he deserves more than icy, pro forma letters in response.

Cal State officials had better be sure that their own house is in order, as Acuna suggests, before shifting the responsibility for improving public education to the state’s high schools.