Parents Try to Help Students Enter ‘Front Door’ of Colleges : Blacks’ Education Window Open on Saturdays

Rick Turner loves Saturdays.

Saturdays, Turner knows why he struggled through college on a basketball scholarship, earned a Ph.D from Stanford and carved a comfortable life for himself and his family in Irvine.

“This is why,” Turner said on a recent Saturday, striding bareheaded in the rain toward trailers on the UC Irvine campus where two dozen children and their parents were attending the Saturday Academy--a school Turner co-founded on his own time for Orange County black children and their parents.

Supplements Education

The point is to prepare black children to “walk in the front door of the top colleges and universities in the country” by supplementing their education with academic, cultural and ethnic studies, said Turner, who Monday through Friday directs UCI’s tutorial assistance program.

Like other black advocates, Turner worries about declining numbers of black students in the nation’s colleges and universities as well as the shaky future of affirmative action in a conservative political atmosphere.

While blacks make up 12% of the population, only 8% are in college, and the numbers have been dropping, the American Council on Education reports.

In 1976, about 34% of black high school graduates went to college compared to 26% in 1985. (Anglo rates have remained stable, while the numbers of Latinos, though increasing, still have not kept pace with their growth in the general population.)

Contributing to the decline in black enrollment are fewer financial grants and a lackluster commitment to minority recruitment, Turner said.

Too Little, Too Late

Institutional outreach programs usually offer too little, too late, and affirmative action is too short-lived, he said.

“Someone has to realize you can’t supplement in high school and expect them to be prepared in college,” Turner said. “If you’re going to do it right, you have to do it yourself.”

Most of the Saturday Academy’s students come from the predominantly white, middle-class suburbs of Orange County.

For them, the Saturday Academy is “probably one of the only settings in their educational history where they won’t be intimidated,” said Charles Register, an air traffic controller from Santa Ana whose son Jason, 13, attends Saturday Academy.

Dejuan Matthews, 12, has been the only black student in his Irvine classroom the last six years, said his father, Al Matthews, an employment service specialist for Orange County.

Nearly all students who filled out a five-week evaluation form about the Saturday Academy said they liked it. “It is fun to be with my own race,” wrote one.

Marcus Canady, 9, a fourth-grader from Cypress, said he enjoys gaining a competitive edge with extra study. “It’s like, I get ahead of my class, we do fifth-grade stuff like times and two digits.”

“They tell you things they don’t tell you in school,” said Preston Beckley, 12, a seventh-grader from Yorba Linda. “It’s kind of hard, but it’s fun and not as boring.”

Students in the Saturday Academy take a 10-week course that includes weekly classes in math, drama, science and black history, taught mostly by volunteer students and staff from UCI and some parents. Saturday students also receive training in note taking, test taking, time management, nutrition, essay writing and how to keep a checkbook.

The cost is $50 a quarter per child.

Inflexible on Rules

Any child in third to eighth grade whose parents are motivated enough to turn off Saturday morning cartoons and drive over to the campus is accepted, Turner said. But those who are chronically late, don’t show up or misbehave are out. Turner said he is not flexible about the rules because “it’s too important, too critical.”

The most important feature of the Saturday Academy, he said, is involved parents. Parents must attend at least five of the 10 sessions.

“We’re a family here,” Turner told a dozen parents sipping coffee in the Cross Cultural Center on a damp Saturday morning while their children were marching across campus to the computer lab. “If any parent has a question or concern, go right to the instructor.” He urged them to sit in, tutor or teach classes.

Children benefit psychologically from knowing parents care enough to come to class, said Turner, who holds a master’s degree in psychiatric social work from the University of Connecticut. Unfortunately, most working parents have no time during school hours to participate in the public school system, he said.

One parent, James McCarty, a police officer from Lakewood, took over the algebra class that day because the instructor, a student from South Africa, was absent; another parent, Preston Beckley, a regional sales manager, had previously lectured students in the black history class about the self-destructive effects of hatred.

Black History Discussion

In one class, a half-dozen parents and 17 students listened attentively to Alvin B. (Wasi) Young, a second-year graduate student in fine arts, as he discussed black history--what they called “Our Story.”

Young told them that blacks sailed with the Vikings “even though you don’t see them on TV.”

“One was friends with Eric the Red. His name was Thorhall. Those guys hung out together. . . . So the next time you hear about Eric the Red, you ask about the brother who was there.”

Black students in white classrooms can feel alienated from history, Young said. “They say, ‘I didn’t have anything to do with that.’ They may be the only black person in the class, but it doesn’t mean they were excluded from world events.”

Said Beckley: “We’re no longer a melting pot. We now have a mosaic. Every single ethnic group out there is doing what we’re doing.”

Charlie Knight, president of the California Alliance of Black School Educators, said black organizations across the country have begun supplemental schooling for children because of the “dismal performance of black youngsters since integration.”

“Competition is the name of the game, and we have to compete,” she said.

More Than Integration

“At one time, it was thought integration was the panacea for black youngsters who were performing poorly,” she said. “The latest results we are receiving show just the opposite.”

In co-founding the academy, Turner said he was inspired by the supplemental education programs in Jewish and Asian communities as well as the Westside Preparatory School in Chicago run by Marva Collins.

Collins’ program has been credited with turning inner-city students into high achievers through a high degree of teacher involvement and by aiming to raise students’ self-esteem and expectations. Collins plans to open a similar school in Compton next year.

While such grass-roots efforts are commendable, they are not enough to solve the national problem, said Rep. Augustus F. Hawkins (D-Los Angeles), whose staff is investigating public schools which serve disadvantaged minority children.

“A lot of kids are not that fortunate. These other kids we must also be concerned about. Everybody is not middle-class,” he said.

U.S. Support Lags

One-third of all schoolchildren are disadvantaged educationally and economically, he said. The past six years, he said, federal support has not kept pace with inflation, eroding programs such as Head Start, a preschool enrichment program. Now only 18% of the children who could qualify for the program are admitted due to lack of federal funds, he said.

Like other black advocates, Hawkins does not believe affirmative action is the issue. “Black kids are not getting into college because they are not graduating from high school with the necessary skills. Even those who graduate are possibly reading on an eighth-grade level. So they graduate, then the colleges and universities soon find out they are handicapped and need remedial classes.”

Turner said he struggled academically at Linfield College, a predominantly white college in McMinnville, Ore., after winning a basketball scholarship.

“I was always a proud man,” he said. “But I was courageous enough to know if I was going to survive, I was going to have to get some help. I didn’t want to wait until it was too late.”

In the family atmosphere of the small college, he was able to find sympathetic professors who helped him master the system. He believes that he would not have survived at a large research institution such as UC Irvine.