Anything for a Buck at UCLA

George Bush wants to be “the education President.” Businesses large and small establish “adopt-a-school” programs. The American public clamors for reform of public education. In short, education is on the front burner of domestic concerns.

Everywhere, it seems, except at UCLA.

There, the university administration is determined to close one of the nation’s oldest and most distinguished laboratory schools--the Corinne A. Seeds University Elementary School--and transform it into a neighborhood school in the Ocean Park section of Santa Monica. Why?

“The school sits on nine acres of highly valuable real estate,” explained Chancellor Charles Young in a recent interview, “and eventually people are going to say the work being done there is not worth it.”

More to the point, Los Angeles attorney and businessman John E. Anderson has given the university $15 million for construction of a new Graduate School of Management. Anderson reportedly insists on the Seeds site because of its “choice location on Sunset Boulevard.”

No wonder our education system is in such desperate straits. Even the UCLA administration does not consider the academic quality of one of its most highly respected schools to be more important than the land on which it sits.

Seeds has been at the forefront of educational innovation and reform for decades. Since its founding in 1882, pioneers in teaching techniques, curriculum and child development have taught and studied at the school. The social studies-oriented curriculum was introduced there, as well as team teaching and individualized instruction, now widely accepted practices.

Today, an elementary-school health promotion program, the first of its kind, is being tested at Seeds. More than 30 other research projects under way at the school, among them studies on how children handle stress, how writing and reasoning skills develop and on how computers can be used to assist instruction. Other planned research topics include devising ways to teach math and science at an early age.

Ironic that the UCLA administration poses the greatest threat to the future of such a school.

Ironic also that the administration’s efforts to close Seeds fly in the face of findings by UC Berkeley researchers who concluded that the school is vital to the excellent national reputation of the university’s Graduate School of Education.

This is not merely an internal squabble. It is a battle over priorities--and about the responsibility of UCLA and its Graduate School of Education to continue to support a laboratory school that has made numerous contributions to American education.

A public school district--especially one like Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District that is financially strapped and politically volatile--is hardly the environment in which Seeds can continue making these kinds of contributions to education. Seeds would be competing with other schools for scarce resources, subject to the conflicting influences of a wide range of special interests and governed by myriad state and federal regulations. The autonomy of its faculty and staff, so crucial to researching and developing new teaching methods and curriculum, would be lost, as would the school’s diversity, an equally important factor in its effectiveness. Currently, Seeds’ 450 students--nearly half of whom are minority youngsters--come from every nook-and-cranny in the Los Angeles area.

At a time when public support for school reform is at its highest level in more than a generation, it makes little sense to close down a shining example of “a school that works.”