UCLA Plan Clouds Future of 107-Year-Old Lab School

In post-World War II Los Angeles, with a Japanese-American mother and a white father, Heidi Brandt grew up with prejudice and cultural conflict. Deed restrictions kept her family from living north of Santa Monica Boulevard. There were the emotional scars of her mother’s internment and constant reminders that the girl was “not accepted in either community.”

All that faded when Brandt stepped onto the UCLA campus grounds of the Corinne A. Seeds University Elementary School. With its emphasis on respecting individual differences, the experimental research school for the Graduate School of Education “made me feel safe and cherished,” Brandt recalled. “I truly believe I had the perfect education . . . in a tremendously rich, positive environment.”

Today Brandt, who sends her 8-year-old daughter to Seeds, belongs to a group of parents, alumni and school officials who are fighting UCLA over a plan that they say will destroy California’s only remaining “laboratory” school.

Increasingly pressed for space, UCLA officials are considering giving the internationally renowned facility, now spread over nine idyllic acres, to the Santa Monica/Malibu Unified School District, where it would be staffed and run by the university under a long-term contract.

The UCLA proposal comes at a time when many around the country--from President Bush and corporate leaders to parents and educators--are trying to find ways to get better results from America’s schools. The debate over the 107-year-old school’s future raises the issue of whether the best way to train teachers and conduct educational research is in the rarefied atmosphere of a university campus, or in the “real world” of public schools.

Some take the Santa Monica proposal as a signal that UCLA cares more about other disciplines than it does about improving the education of the nation’s youngsters.

“If that were connected with the medical school or law school instead of the school of education, they would not dream of moving it off campus,” said UC Berkeley education professor James W. Guthrie.

Others, however, do not see the need for lab schools. Stanford University, for example, works closely with Bay Area schools to come up with ways to improve education. “The university is not the fount of all knowledge,” said Beverly Carter, director of the Stanford/Schools Collaborative. “What we’re doing is being fashioned with a lot more input from the teachers and administrators in the public schools.”

Lab schools, founded at the turn of the century by followers of philosopher John Dewey, flourished for years--conducting research, training teachers and experimenting with new teaching techniques and curricula.

Most were gone by the 1960s.

“They weren’t doing their job, and the benefit (of having a lab school) was not outweighing the financial burden,” said George Barker, an associate professor of elementary education at Cal State Northridge and a former member of the Seeds faculty. Unlike the Seeds school, most “stopped taking on roles of innovation and research and became country clubs for professors’ children,” Barker added.

Now lab schools are enjoying a resurgence. Across the country, there are about 100 institutions that consider themselves laboratory schools, according to Mina Bayne, professor of education at the University of Wyoming and president-elect of the National Assn. of Laboratory Schools.

“We’re seeing that linkage with the university is very important, in part because it protects us from having to please school boards and parents,” said Wendall McConnaha, principal of the University High School, associated with the University of Chicago and considered the granddaddy of laboratory schools.

Almost from its beginning, UCLA’s Seeds school, which takes its name from a noted education reform pioneer, has enjoyed the freedom to experiment with teaching techniques and philosophies. Unfettered by state education requirements and sheltered from the political vagaries of a local school board, it attracts innovative teachers who have been designing programs copied widely.

“This is a neat little school that has influence far beyond its 450 kids,” said Adrianne Bank, associate director of the Seeds school.

Students, chosen to reflect the racial and socioeconomic makeup of the U.S. school-age population, get state-of-the-art educations in exchange for becoming guinea pigs.

“What happens here affects children everywhere,” Brandt, a lawyer and president of the Family School Alliance--Seeds’ version of the PTA--told a school gathering one evening. “As lab school parents you have given the gift of your child to children everywhere.”

After announcing plans more than a year ago to build a new graduate school of management on part of Seeds’ tree-dotted grounds, university officials began talks with the Santa Monica district. The preliminary proposal calls for UCLA to build a campus on parkland in the ethnically and economically diverse Ocean Park section of the city. The university, which hopes to draw most of the new school’s students from the surrounding neighborhood, would have authority to staff and run the school and conduct research programs.

Word of the talks drew immediate anger and skepticism from Seeds parents and alumni, some of whom are veterans of other crises that have periodically dogged the sometimes-controversial school. The parents’ group began pushing university officials to consider other options, especially leaving the school on campus.

“Practically speaking, it just couldn’t be the same,” said Seeds parent Kathy Seal, who lives near the site proposed for the move but would gladly give up convenience to keep the school at UCLA.

“A school like this has got to be free of all outside influences. UCLA has not been able to guarantee to us that the new school would not fall prey to the political pressures that are a fact of life in a public school system,” Seal said, adding it infuriates her that the university is tampering with “a school that works.”

The school was founded in 1882 for teacher training, affiliated with the university in 1919 and moved onto campus in 1947. Its low-slung, wide-windowed buildings include several by architect Richard Neutra (three of which will be torn down for the management school building).

Grounded in the methods of the progressive movement, the school disdains tests and traditional textbooks. Report cards are eschewed in favor of detailed evaluations and frequent parent conferences.

The school’s 4- through 12-year-old students are not grouped by traditional grade levels. Classes are team-taught by faculty members who are given generous blocks of time to write their own curriculum. University students and visitors are often on campus conducting studies, trying out new ideas or merely observing. For their young subjects there are concerts at Royce Hall, visits to laboratories and scores of other advantages that come with being part of a major university campus.

The roughly $1 million the University of California pays to run the school is supplemented with tuition of $1,700 a year (although about one-third of the students are on full or partial scholarships). The school strives for a mix of ability levels, ethnicity and income levels, but there are not enough places for all applicants. Siblings of current students get preference, and the chancellor gets a number of slots to designate as he sees fit.

As a result, the children of movie stars, politicians and other prominent people can often be found on the school’s roster.

Among them is Los Angeles County Supervisor Ed Edelman, whose two daughters spent all their elementary school years at Seeds.

“I think they both got a great background and education and a love for learning there,” said Edelman, who wrote to Chancellor Charles E. Young because he fears Seeds would lose “a lot of its uniqueness and sensitivity” if it becomes part of a public school system.

But Lewis C. Solmon, dean of the Graduate School of Education, believes the “rarefied atmosphere” at the Seeds school may inhibit, rather than help, its research and demonstration function.

“Even if it is representative of the nation’s (population distribution), it is not a public school, and it is not a community school,” Solmon said. “It is in many ways atypical of the circumstances found in most public schools today, and therefore its student population is of limited interest to most of those doing research today.”

Solmon acknowledges that Seeds is indeed “a wonderful school . . . but that is not the issue.”

“We are not in the business of running schools. This is a laboratory school; its purpose is to conduct research, develop educational policy . . . and it doesn’t do a good job of that now.”

Solmon said he finds the Santa Monica move “an interesting possibility”--if ways can be found to guarantee the school’s autonomy.

His faculty, however, was asked its opinion on six options, including a move to Santa Monica, and keeping Seeds on campus but adding research or other Graduate School of Education facilities to the site. A majority of faculty members chose the latter; the Santa Monica proposal came in fourth.

Chancellor Young will make the decision on the move, probably early next year. He has made it clear he believes the move to Santa Monica may be the best way of ensuring the school’s future.

Although he acknowledged Seeds facilities can be redesigned and even expanded--for about $3 million to $4 million--to allow it to share the site with the new management school, “the likelihood of its being there by the year 2000 is minimal,” Young said.

“Whether I make a decision to move the school or not, one of my successors is going to be put in the position where he will find it no longer possible to maintain that much land on this land-short campus,” Young said.

Young added that the elementary school might “better serve its function by having an intimate relationship with a school system (that operates in) the real world rather than in an academic setting.” The chancellor sent his children to Seeds, and three of his granddaughters are students there now, while his daughter is active in the parents’ group that is trying to keep the school on campus.

He noted that entering into such a relationship with a public school system would require the state’s blessing, a willingness on the part of the Santa Monica school board to give up control over one of its schools for at least two decades and a contract that would ensure the laboratory school has the autonomy it needs to try new methods.

“I don’t know whether all that is possible. I’d say the chances are probably about 50-50 now in either direction,”

UCLA has hired an attorney to help determine whether “to really take a shot at” moving the school to Santa Monica, Young said. It has also begun making plans to keep the school on campus and add at least research facilities if the public school plans don’t work out.

Santa Monica district Supt. Eugene Tucker, whose three grown children are Seeds alumni, said his school board is excited about the “opportunities that would be available to our youngsters and teachers” under a partnership with UCLA.

The district is waiting for UCLA’s decision before holding formal hearings and a school board vote. “First the university needs to decide whether it is in its best interest to move the school, then we decide whether it is in our best interest to take it,” Tucker said.

But he said he sees “no significant issues” that could not be resolved and added he wants to work together with the present Seeds parents “to make it the best school we can.”

Meanwhile, parents of Seeds students draw inspiration from the school’s longtime pattern of beating adversity.

Heidi Brandt has been digging in the UCLA archives, trying to glean guidance for the present battle from records of past skirmishes.

During World War II, the school weathered criticism when its students sent materials to Japanese-American children interned in relocation camps. A few years later it beat back attempts to change its progressive program. And in 1969 and 1970, when the state tried to eliminate funding for the school, parents and alumni inundated legislators with telephone calls, telegrams and letters.

Brandt recently found a 1970 letter that read in part:

“For God’s sake, let us preserve the treasure we now have, which is unique. It has been called the finest school in the United States. It must be allowed to remain. Without experimentation there can be no change.”