Young College Try

On a recent Saturday morning, a bus unloaded a gaggle of middle school students at UC Irvine for what would seem to be a 12-year-old’s nightmare: a weekend morning full of math.

The youngsters filled a large lecture hall, usually the province of students much bigger and older, with the squeals and romping typical of any field trip--and then hushed for an algebra test.

Then they scrambled to classrooms for still more math: word problems that challenged their logic, geometric puzzles that defied resolution.

A soccer ball sailing in the air during lunch break testified to other interests, but in the end, Alfonso Zepeda, a seventh-grader who gave up a Little League game to be here, spoke for many: “I like baseball better, but I like math too, so I don’t mind coming here to get better.”

Indeed, many of these students from Willard Intermediate in Santa Ana said they relished the extra help, and UCI is more than willing to oblige. These four-hour Saturday “academies” are a crucial component of a pilot program to raise the college eligibility rates of minority students in school districts in Costa Mesa, Garden Grove, Santa Ana, Artesia and Compton.

The districts face imposing hurdles in preparing students for college: youngsters with only a tenuous grasp of English, high rates of poverty, parents who never went to college and have little grasp of what is necessary for their children to get there.

At Willard, for example, fewer than 3% of the parents of the school’s 1,750 students attended college. About 97% of the students receive free or reduced-cost lunches. More than 65% are newcomers to the country who speak only limited English.

“The barriers we face I don’t want to say are insurmountable, but they are hard to beat,” said counselor Patrick D. Yrarrazazaval-Correa, whose campus is one of five middle schools participating in the Saturday sessions.

The academies offer small class size and individual attention for the students, whose parents also attend for computer training and other workshops. Last year, after the academy was offered in a more limited form, Willard added a second algebra section to meet increased student demand, the first such growth in recent memory.

UCI wants to replicate that success in the five participating school districts, all predominantly Latino or black, which were selected for their willingness to work with UCI to improve their poor records of sending students to the University of California. The task starts with pupils as young as 7.

Under the UCI program, dubbed Partnership to Accelerate College Eligibility, or PACE, the campus sends tutors, mentors and other help to local schools, and conducts SAT tutorials for high school students. The goals are to double the number of second-graders reading above grade level, add an algebra class at each participating middle school, and raise the average SAT score of juniors and seniors by 100 points to make prospective high school graduates more competitive for UC admission.

Such “measurable goals”--plus an evaluation planned next spring by outside experts--make UCI’s program unique among the nine UC campuses, observers say.

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The whole UC system is seeking to maintain diversity among its student population. Though the university’s Board of Regents and Proposition 209 have prohibited affirmative action in admissions, the regents have urged the campuses to find ways to increase enrollment from school districts that have sent relatively few students to the state’s most elite campuses.

UC has had various programs in place for more than 20 years. But eligibility rates for blacks and Latinos continue to lag markedly behind those of whites and Asian Americans. Just 2.8% of black high school graduates and 3.8% of Latinos qualified for UC admission in 1996, compared with 30% for Asian Americans and 12.7% for whites, according to a recent study.

“One problem you confront is that you can put a lot of work in on these programs and at the end of two or three years not be sure what you accomplished,” said Margaret Heisel, director of outreach for the UC system. She described UCI’s effort as unique and said the school is further along than the other campuses in reaching out to public schools.

Like the other campuses, UCI has offered “partnership” and “outreach” programs to local schools for years, garnering national recognition for its array of tutoring programs in Santa Ana.

“We have a great deal of admiration for our colleagues at UCI,” said James Vivian, executive director of the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute, a pioneer in the field.

But the main impetus in the past has been goodwill and a channel for community service by undergraduates. By contrast, the new UCI pilot program, which this year will reach 970 students who are neither the best nor the worst academically, is aiming directly at improving education in local schools.

“It is a Sisyphean endeavor; of that there’s no doubt. But given the set of narrow policy parameters existent in California, we have no choice,” said Manuel N. Gomez, UCI vice chancellor for student services.

Juan Lara, UCI’s assistant vice chancellor for enrollment and director of PACE, said the program aims to elevate the standards of the districts involved to the academic rigor of affluent areas, which Lara sees as virtual college-prep conservatories. Irvine Unified, UCI’s top feeder district, sent 131 students to the university in fall 1995, the most recent year for which data is available; Santa Ana Unified, by contrast, sent 29.

“You don’t get to the Joffrey by practicing ballet in your house in front of your mirror. You go to a conservatory, right?” he said.

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When UCI and public school educators designed PACE, they agreed that successful students have a solid critical thinking foundation laid in elementary school through reading. They knew mastery of middle school math--mainly algebra, a “gatekeeper” course that predicts future academic success--is key. And they recognized the heavy reliance on standardized tests such as the SAT as a make-or-break factor in who gets into UC.

That is why UCI students such as sophomore Adrianne Angeles tutor a few hours a week at elementary schools, painstakingly going over spelling, reading and pronunciation--in Spanish and English--with second-graders who have little if any concept of college.

Angeles spends about three hours a week at Costa Mesa’s Wilson Elementary School, whose students are mostly the sons and daughters of recent Mexican immigrants. The school has set a goal of reading 90,000 books collectively this year. With about 500 pupils, that would be about 180 volumes each. (Last year, the students read 60,000 books.)

She arrived last week at Rosy Dalton’s bilingual second-grade class, where only eight of 24 pupils are reading at or above grade level.

Word by word, line by line, she had two of the lowest-achieving pupils read from a Spanish children’s book, helping them with pronunciation and quizzing them on the meaning of the words. The pupils are taught in both languages; they do not move on to English-only instruction until literacy is achieved in their native language, usually after third grade.

“The teacher has so many kids, there are always one or two who are not at the same pace,” Angeles said. Those are the ones she helps.

Dalton said that little by little she is introducing the notion of college to her pupils. Lara recently brought over some UCI yearbooks so the children could see pictures of the campus. But she concedes that they do not understand the concept.

At the end of Angeles’ tutoring session, her two pupils stare blankly when asked what a college or a university is. “I do know my phone number,” one offered.

Students in UCI’s high school outreach program, by contrast, know all about college but may not have had the preparation to get there.

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Every Saturday, at three sites in Orange County, 130 high school seniors wrestle with word association exercises and the mysteries of trigonometry through sample tests and review materials to prepare for the SAT. The students pay a $35 deposit that is refundable at the end of the six-week course. That contrasts with the $700 charged by Kaplan, a private tutorial company that runs courses to prepare people for standardized college admission tests.

For six hours, they are tutored by UCI students.

“It’s really a great opportunity,” said Laura Torres, a senior at Santa Ana’s Valley High School who hopes to improve her SAT score when she takes the exam again Dec. 6.

In her two previous tries, “I just went in unprepared, basically,” Torres said. Her composite score of 1,013 is about the national average, but she figures she need at least 20 additional points to be a contender for admission to UCI or UC Riverside, her top choices.

Don Wise, principal of Santiago High School in Garden Grove, said many of his students used to see community college--where SATs are not required under open enrollment policies--as their best option after graduation. UCI’s prep course and tutoring have opened their eyes to broader possibilities, he said.

“Some of them were thinking, ‘I’ll go to a community college and then a state college, so I don’t see the need to prepare for the SAT,”’ Wise said. “This gives them an opportunity to set their sights higher.”

Based on results of next year’s evaluation of PACE, UCI will refine the program and possibly expand it. The campus will request another $240,000 grant for the program from the UC president’s office and seek supplemental funds from local school districts and perhaps private foundations.

Said Louis Miron, chairman of UCI’s department of education and coordinator for the PACE evaluation: “I would be very cautious in saying that at the end of a year we’re going to be able to say that with these dramatic results we will be able to repeat those dramatic results the following year.

“But I believe we have a responsibility to the community and to the taxpayer to learn from what works and be able to replicate it in other places. That’s a very difficult thing to do.”

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Setting the PACE

UC Irvine won a $240,000 grant last year to work with local schools to raise college eligibility rates among disadvantaged students. The pilot program is serving 970 elementary, middle and high school students in Artesia, Compton, Costa Mesa, Garden Grove and Santa Ana. An overview of the program, called Partnership to Accelerate College Eligibility:

* Elementary schools: UCI undergraduates from the federally funded America Reads program help classroom teachers in five schools to raise reading skills of second-graders by one grade level by the end of the school year. Students served: 500.

* Middle schools: On Saturdays, pupils at five schools attend sessions with tutors who prepare them for algebra--a key for college-bound youngsters. Students served: 340.

* High schools: Sophomores, juniors and seniors take a Kaplan SAT preparation course aimed to raise the average score by 100 points. Students pay a $35 “commitment” deposit that is refunded at the end of the course, which otherwise would cost $700. Students served: 130.

* Evaluation: Experts from USC, Pepperdine University and the UCI department of education will evaluate PACE to see whether goals were met and the program can be expanded.

Sources: UCI Center for Educational Partnerships, Times interviews