Grading the Graders

As part of an attempt to reinvigorate the campus activism born during protests against Propositions 187 and 209, students around the Los Angeles area are being asked to grade their high schools in such seemingly mundane areas as the quantity of counseling and the quality of teaching.

The two-page survey was created by leaders of the Four Winds Student Movement--most of them college students--who gathered Tuesday in black berets at the entrance to Belmont High School near downtown to announce their efforts. Thousands of copies of the questionnaire are being handed out by high school activists on at least six campuses, they said, ranging from Belmont to Alhambra High School in the San Gabriel Valley.

The students are being asked to do such things as rate their teachers on preparation, respect for pupils and enthusiasm, using a 1 to 4 scale.

While the survey will never be considered scientific, its authors say perfection is not their goal. They call it a lesson in civil rights, an opportunity to encourage younger students to expose campus problems and press teachers, principals and school districts to make changes.

“The point is to empower the students because, as it is, they have no voice,” said Angel Cervantes, a substitute teacher who led some of the student walkouts against Proposition 187, the anti-illegal immigration measure, when he was a graduate student at Claremont College.

Similar groups that formed during those protests have also grappled with ways to keep activism alive, with limited success, particularly in the wake of the passage of both Proposition 187 and Proposition 209, the anti-affirmative action measure. At UC Berkeley in November, for instance, only a small band of students and community organizers turned out to march through campus classrooms, vowing to force administrators to defy the new law against racial and gender preferences.

And if the Four Winds Student Movement was looking for fuel for an uprising in the new high school survey, preliminary results have been disappointing.

Organizers acknowledged Tuesday that the first 1,000 high school students surveyed in Los Angeles County seemed to think their schools are pretty decent places. So far, they have noted only one consistent criticism: inadequate help preparing the high schoolers for college.

That, therefore, became the thrust of Tuesday’s news conference.

At giant high schools that teenagers attend year-round in cycles, “a lot of the students are being tracked, with the A track for the brains, the B track for the normal students and the C track for the jocks or so-called idiots,” said Ismael Chavez, a political science major at Occidental College who has helped distribute the surveys.

“College information is being given only to honor students,” he complained.

Chavez outlined plans for the Four Winds Student Movement’s future. He said that results of the Los Angeles-area survey will be released in a month or so and that the same questionnaire is being circulated at schools in Chicago, Atlanta and cities in North Carolina.

Students in still other areas are beginning to log on to a World Wide Web site Chavez created for the group last week, which urges students to join a “revolutionary era” by helping “abolish the current oppressive educational system” and exposing the “true nature of this corrupt capitalistic American society.”