FOCUS: Orange County Focus is dedicated on Monday to analysis of community news, a look at what’s ahead and the voices of local people. : IN PERSON : Giving Due Credit to Teachers : Education Professor Finds Student Motivation Is Key

As a fresh-faced high school science teacher 16 years ago, Michael E. Martinez quickly learned a lesson about education: Even the most energetic, optimistic and well-trained teacher cannot help a student who is not motivated to learn, said Martinez, who now heads teacher training at UC Irvine.

“As an idealistic teacher, you can find yourself in a position where you really want to help kids and you are willing to give of yourself completely to make that happen. Then you find out they either don’t want it or they will fight you.

“Teaching three science classes, each with 40-plus students who really don’t want to be there, can be a discouraging thing,” said Martinez, 38, acting chair of UC Irvine’s department of education.

“I had a physics student who was a B student. He really didn’t strive to get an A, but he really wanted to understand the material. Often he would come in after school, carrying in his skateboard, asking me to go over something because he really wanted to comprehend it. Among the hundreds of kids I taught, there were very few who were intrinsically motivated in this way. That was very instructive to me, that there was a fundamental problem there.”

Yet, Martinez--who once worked for an educational testing firm that charts student performance--is confident that public education is making gains.

Despite sometimes flagging scores, public education in many ways is doing a better job of preparing kids for the future than ever before, Martinez said.

He did not join in the public tsk-tsking about national tests earlier this month that indicated more than half of the nation’s high school seniors have dismal knowledge of U.S. history. Those test results are nothing new and should be kept in perspective, said Martinez, who warns against reading too much into headline-grabbing reports of poor student performance.

“Often when you see people revealing the latest shocking findings about education, they are being selective and are not considering long-term trends,” said Martinez, a former researcher at the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the federal testing organization that issued the report on high school history skills. “If you looked at the performance of students in the past, you probably would have seen the same kind of shocking findings.”

Martinez says there is strong evidence that public school teachers are more competent, that public schools are more responsive and that students are better equipped to deal with a rapidly changing society.

And yet public education is a mixed bag of successes and failures, a work in progress that defies easy generalizations and becomes a convenient political grandstand, Martinez said.

“Too often, public education is used as sort of a political scapegoat. The problems that children face are more severe than ever before, but at the same time we’re not in some sort of educational crisis. If you look at minority students, what you see is a steady, gradual, upward shift in achievement over the years. There is progress and I think that’s hopeful.”

Politically, “it’s very easy to blame schools for the ills of society and it’s very easy to see schools as a way to change society. People take it too far, but to a large degree, that’s correct. Schools are unequal in the kinds of climate for learning and the resources that are available to students.”

But there are differences from student to student, classroom to classroom, school to school. “You have some schools in which there is a concentration of problems. Kids bring problems from home into the schools and what you end up with is an environment that is less than conducive to learning.”

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Martinez does not see the push by some for private school vouchers or the development of locally organized charter schools as a threat to public education.

“If someone wants to try franchises of schools, more power to them. I wouldn’t want to put a damper on innovation. We ought to try all kinds of new ways to educate. To equate education to traditional ways of schooling is a mistake. I’m all for experimentation and innovation.”

While the computer is rapidly becoming a mandatory educational tool, Martinez said it would be a mistake to believe technology can single-handedly revitalize schools.

“A wild card in all of this is technology,” Martinez said. “We don’t really know how computers are going to play out yet in education, although there are some exciting possibilities. We’re in an experimental mode right now. It would be a mistake to write off technology and it’s also a mistake to pin all hopes on the next technological advance. The technology itself is not the important thing, it’s how it’s used.”

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Profile: Michael E. Martinez

Age: 38

Residence: Irvine

Education: Ph.D. in educational psychology from Stanford University

Family: Wife, Stephanie, and four daughters, ages 4 to 16

Current position: Associate professor and acting chairman of the department of education at UC Irvine

Background: Taught science for five years at Merced County’s Los Banos High School before beginning graduate work; Fulbright Exchange Teacher at Samuel Whitbread Upper School in England; postdoctoral fellow at National Assessment of Educational Progress and research scientist for four years at Educational Testing Service; joined UCI in 1992 as assistant professor and vice chairman of the department of education; 1994-95 Fulbright Scholar in Educational Assessment

On Education: “In the 1990s and in the next century, we need to be problem solvers, and that’s why it’s vital for teachers to have a sense of what problem solving is and then pass on problem-solving skills to students. Knowledge is still very important, but it’s not sufficient. We need to be able to help children deal with novel situations.”

Source: Michael E. Martinez; Researched by RUSS LOAR / For The Times