The Yearning for Learning : Summer Offers Primers in Making Grade

Richard Vega just completed five weeks of special summer English, math and physics courses at a rigorous academic camp at UC San Diego during which the Mar Vista High School sophomore spent an average of 20 hours a week doing homework.

Vega was joined by 37 other high school students from the San Diego and Sweetwater school districts--all of whom meet minority and/or low-income criteria--under a four-year program to improve the chances of students who show interest or academic potential to go to college.

“It’s been hard, but this is going to help us get into college and do better there,” said Vega, who wrote a biography on Albert Einstein as part of his science project this summer.

Also this summer, Lincoln High junior Tanya Fentress buckled

down to four hours of basic skills training in English and math every weekday at Gompers Secondary School, followed by three hours in a filing and typing job at the Naval Supply Center on Harbor Drive.

Fentress is among 150 minority and low-income teen-agers with reading and math skills from one to four grade levels below the average for their age who are taking part in an experimental nationwide program known as Project Step.

That effort is designed to stem the high dropout rate of minority students by combining fast-paced remedial classes with work experience.

‘Keeps Us Out of Trouble’

“It helps keep us out of trouble and has helped me with work and improved my grades,” Fentress said. “I think I do feel more confident now that I know I can do some things in my job, and I’m more positive about trying to finish high school.”

The two challenging programs were designed to address the twin problems of under-representation of minorities--black, Latinos and Southeast Asians--at universities, and their over-representation among those students who quit school or end up taking unskilled employment after graduation.

While their specifics are tailored for different student groups, both programs involve heavy doses of academic class work, motivational schemes to boost self-esteem, and unvarnished advice on social matters.

The five-week Upward Bound summer institute at UCSD stems from action taken in the late 1970s by University of California administrators to deal with declining numbers of minority students. The Early Outreach system was set up at UC campuses statewide to identify low-income college-potential students as early as the ninth grade, and encourage them to take necessary courses to qualify for college, whether at UC, at a California State University campus, or at a private university.

“We’re the most successful of any UC Early Outreach effort,” said Eustacio (Chato) Benitez, who runs the state-funded UCSD program for 12,000 students, representing almost every secondary school in San Diego and Imperial counties. “We try to identify 150 ninth-graders at each school, based on recommendations of counselors.”

Students Encouraged

Those students are then encouraged to take college-prep courses beginning with their freshmen year of high school in order that they are adequately prepared by their junior and senior years to apply for college. “There is no reason to begin recruiting kids for college in the 12th grade when the course requirements go back to the ninth or 10th grades,” Benitez said.

UCSD also provides study guides in English and Spanish for the students and their parents, special counseling throughout the year at individual schools by 70 UCSD students, and free tours of the UCSD campus where the students can meet individual professors who stress both the importance and enjoyment of education. Each summer, 300 students are selected on a random basis to attend an intensive one-week writing program at UCSD while living in dormitories and experiencing campus life.

“Of the students who stay with the program for the four-year period (about 70% of those who are signed up in the ninth grade), 71% (of those) end up at some college,” Benitez said.

The Upward Bound program that Vega participates in represents the “Cadillac version” of Early Outreach, Benitez said. Funded through the U.S. Department of Education, it provides 60 students after-school tutoring throughout the year, special Saturday academic sessions at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the five-week summer institute, as well as special events for them and their parents.

“We try to stress academics,” Upward Bound director Joe W. Conner said. “It’s a lot of commitment of student time, especially during the summer when they could otherwise be working. And remember that all of these kids are from low-income families whose parents have not gone to college, and who can use the money from summer work.

“We are requiring a lot from them academically.”

About one-third of the students who begin the Upward Bound program in the ninth grade stay through 12th-grade graduation. Of those who stick with the requirements, an average 90% have gone to college during the program’s seven-year existence.

Cousin Motivated

“My cousin was in Early Outreach, and it motivated him and he’s now going to college so I figured this would do a lot for me as well,” said Oscar Aguirre of Sweetwater High. “It helps to have a personal touch, to get more attention” than in regular school classes.

“It makes us take the initiative,” said Steve Harris of Hoover High. “Sure, we are having to work hard, but this helps us get discipline . . . and if we show others that education can be positive, that we can succeed, then maybe we’ll have positive peer influence on others.”

Both Dennis Childs of Hoover and Eddie Pahe of Mar Vista agreed. “We can rub off on our friends to perhaps have better study habits,” Pahe said, noting that a lot of classmates don’t really understand why the Upward Bound students have sacrificed part of their summer for such hard study.

Because of Upward Bound’s cost--$191,000 for the roughly 60 kids a year compared to $650,000 for the several thousand in Early Outreach--its scope is limited to six schools: Mar Vista and Sweetwater in the Sweetwater district; and Hoover, Lincoln, Kearny and San Diego in San Diego Unified.

Benitez said that Early Outreach is more effective on a dollar-per-student basis, given the college-acceptance rate of both programs, but that the federal dollars for Upward Bound cannot be transfered into Early Outreach.

But Benitez and Conner do try to make certain services of Upward Bound, such as the tutoring and special programs for parents, available to others.

Conner said, “I know that friends of some participants come into the (school-year) tutoring sessions and we try not to turn any of those kids away if they’re motivated enough to show up” for help.

The issues of motivation and basic skills are at the heart of Project Step, a five-city, multiyear experimental project to try to show students at risk of dropping out that better math and language skills will result in successful completion of high school, followed by better and more satisfying jobs.

In Third Year

Now in its third year in San Diego, Project Step each year identifies 300 students between 14 and 16 years old who are both economically disadvantaged and performing below their grade level academically based on age.

Of those students, 150 are provided jobs for two consecutive summers through the San Diego Youth Project, which receives federal funds to find teen-agers summertime work. The other 150 receive jobs but spend only three hours at the job site. The remaining four hours of their weekday involves intensive classroom instruction in basic math and reading. The students are paid for their classroom attendance as if they were on the job. They also receive regular counseling during the school year.

“We know that traditionally summer jobs have been used to keep kids off the streets, almost as riot insurance,” said Michael A. Bailin, president of Public/Private Ventures of Philadelphia, which designed the program under a Ford Foundation grant. “But we also know from a lot of studies and data that such (summer) work experience has no long-term effects” on improved school performance or future careers of these teen-agers.

Important Elements

“So we are trying to bridge two important elements here, putting jobs and schools together, trying to show that if we combine jobs and study, that the kids will get a better start in school in September, that they will attend school with better regularity, and that they will graduate and maybe come out with better jobs.

“The job is a carrot for them. We’re not pretending that these (minimum wage) jobs are an intellectual exercise. But these kids come from poor families and they do like to have loose change. Besides, school in general has not been a pleasant experience for them.”

So far, short-term results are promising in terms of student gains in basic skills. But the ability of project designers to sell the program to other cities will depend on showing that the tutored students will have stronger skills and receive better jobs after graduation than those students who only receive summer jobs and no other help. The San Diego Unified School District successfully applied to participate in the experiment.

“In essence, what we have found so far is that the kids who complete studies both summers are functioning more than a grade level above the (job-only) kids in reading and at almost two grade levels above them in math,” San Diego project director Karen Ruby said.

“We’re not aiming them at college, because for some it is unrealistic, and for others it is unwanted. There are good job alternatives, but we want them to understand that you have to have good skills to make good job choices, that even if you want to be a mechanic, for example, the skills of reading and math are vital to support yourself and feel good.”

sh Heroic Efforts Results come only with heroic efforts on the part of teachers, however, especially since educators across the United States continue to wrestle with how best to turn around such students.

“Eight out of the 10 who are here know why they are here, that they’ve got to have someone looking over their shoulders,” Mario Nido said. “They need a lot of motivation and encouragement. And they haven’t gotten it from their peers and they haven’t gotten it from home so the only place left is here with us.”

Class time is organized into fast-paced hour sessions of reading and math, followed by additional time on specific topics--ranging from drug abuse to literature to self-identity--where improved reading and math skills can be applied. If students fail to study and instead goof off, the teachers can dock their daily pay, all or in part.

“They have begun to read books and to write where they never would have before,” said Sally Owen, a teacher at Correia Junior High School who volunteered to work in Project Step this summer. Owen had students put out The Steps News, a special newspaper, in which the students showed both their potential for doing better in school and their frustrations built up over years of failure or poor performance.

In an article titled “Students Face Low Wages,” the group complained that jobs this summer are no better than those last year, even though they expected more interesting work than janitorial or filing positions, and at higher than minimum wages. The students also complained that curriculum materials differ little from the last summer.

Difficult for Many

But as Owen pointed out, the students are expressing themselves on paper in logical fashion--many for the first time--using techniques picked up in the classes.

“It’s difficult for many of them just to read, and they often have little discipline,” said Robert Velasquez, who last year taught Latino students who bused to Correia. “You’ve got to do so many things to get them interested, like (disguising) grammar lessons on the computers as games.”

The students in most cases only grudgingly credit the program for improvement in their academic performance.

“It’s the same thing as regular school,” maintained George Denny from Morse High School. “Only here they can dock you on pay if you don’t do things.”

But John Climax said, “I think this makes you want to learn more.” Added Climax, a student at the O’Farrell School of Creative and Performing Arts: “You’ve got to have a diploma to get anywhere, even to get into the Army.”