This paper briefly reviews the various efforts undertaken by the University of California to maintain diversity in the institution, and especially at its highly competitive flagship campuses, UCLA and Berkeley, in the face of the loss of affirmative action during the mid-1990s.  It demonstrates the continuing decline in representation of underrepresented minorities (URMs) in spite of these efforts, even as URMs have become the majority of all students in the state.  Although applications to the flagship campuses have doubled since 1995, and all groups have seen reductions in the percent of applicants offered admission, African American and Latino admittees have been reduced by 70 to 75 percent at UCLA and UC Berkeley, compared to just 35 and 40 percent for Asian and white applicants.  This disproportionate decline reflects the inequalities in the California educational system that fails to prepare African American, Native American and Latino students for highly competitive selection processes irrespective of their intellectual ability or likelihood of succeeding in their studies.  The consequences of continuing down the same path will likely result in the solidification of educational inequality and economic dislocations for the state.

Also available at: http://civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/

The following report was written at the request of the Latino Caucus of the California Legislature and was completed in April of 1997 as the debate surrounding Proposition 227 was getting underway. The impetus for the report was the concern of the caucus that much of the rhetoric in the press and on the street was that "bilingual education had failed." The Caucus asked the question, "Is there research evidence that bilingual education works?" Hence, the task that was put to us was "not" to provide an accounting of studies and essays on all sides of the issue, but to essentially "present the case" for bilingual education.

We called upon many of the most distinguished researchers in the field and asked them to provide guidance in answering the question that had been posed to us. (Their names are listed at the end of the report). This report represents a synthesis of their recommendations along with some analysis of basic education data. Our essential conclusion is that while no single program is best for all children under all circumstances, a well-implemented bilingual program can provide outcomes "at least" as positive as a well- implemented English only program, and has the added advantage of potentially providing students with a second language --a considerable asset. It is only fair to note that had we been challenged to provide all sides of the debate, our conclusions would not have differed greatly, given that they are based on a considered analysis of the best empirical data we have been able to locate in the literature.

This report is the first in a series called "The CSU Crisis and California’s Future." These reports are designed to analyze the impact of the fiscal cutbacks on opportunity for higher education in the California State University system, the huge network of 23 universities that provide the greatest amount of BA level of education in the state. The CSU has a much larger undergraduate student body than the University of California system and educates a much larger group of Latino and African American students. Many CSU students are first generation college students struggling to get an education in difficult times. This first report looks at how students are impacted by the fiscal crisis and budget cuts to CSUs. When the state of California adopted the Master Plan for Higher Education in 1960 it made a social contract with the young people of the state to provide them with a higher education. But the state has broken that social contract for many of its students. California has great wealth, but it also has many millions living in poverty with very low levels of education.

Also available at: http://civilrightsproject.ucla.edu

Gandara and Rumberger investigate the extent to which California’s English Learners—one-fourth of the state’s public school population—have access to the teachers, instructional materials, and facilities that will enable them to succeed in an English-only, standards-based policy system in which they must learn and compete for grade-to-grade promotion and high school graduation along side (and on the same terms as) their English speaking peers. Gandara and Rumberger conclude that that these students receive a substantially inequitable education vis-à-vis their English-speaking peers, even when those peers are similarly economically disadvantaged. They demonstrate that California has failed in its duty to guarantee that EL students have the teachers, the curriculum, the instruction, the assessment, and the support services they need to achieve meaningful access to the same academic content as native English speaking students. Furthermore, when the state has become aware of specific substandard learning conditions for English Learners it has failed to act effectively to correct these problems. Furthermore, with an ill planned class size reduction program and the poorly articulated implementation of Proposition 227, the state has worsened the learning conditions for these students.

This paper reviews the research on the impact of segregation on Latino and English learner students, including new empirical research conducted in Arizona. It also reviews court decisions regarding students' rights to be integrated with their mainstream peers, and provides data on the increasing segregation of Arizona's Latino and English learner students. Given that the great majority (over 80%) of Arizona's English language learners are Spanish speakers, there is considerable overlap between ELL and Latino students. The paper also reviews the extant literature on the impact of segregation at both the school and classroom levels and pays special attention to the particularly deleterious effects of linguistic isolation for English learners. The paper concludes that the excessive segregation of Arizona's Latino and EL students is most probably harmful to these students' achievement and social and emotional development and that there are alternative strategies that the state could use to ameliorate these harms and provide a more effective education for these students.

Also available at http://civilrightsproject.ucla.edu

An increasing number of students entering California’s schools come from non-English speaking backgrounds. Although some of these language minority students enter school already proficient in English, the majority do not. These students are now referred to as English learners.

There are several reasons why Californians need to pay careful attention to the schooling of language minority students in their public schools. First, language minority students now constitute more than one-third of all students in California’s schools—a proportion that will grow even higher in the future. Clearly, the success of California’s students and schools will increasingly depend on the state’s ability to successfully educate language minority students.

Second, English learners require a specialized curriculum and properly trained teachers to support their development of English literacy. Complicating matters is the fact that these students, even as they learn English, must also have access to the rest of the required academic curriculum if they are to keep pace with their English-speaking cohorts.

Third, the education of English learners has been highly politicized. Controversy centers around the use of native language instruction—whether it is better to first develop the native language literacy of English learners and provide initial academic content through bilingual education or, on the other hand, to simply immerse them in English and provide initial academic content through simplified English instruction. While existing evidence generally supports the bilingual approach, the research is hotly debated and far from conclusive regarding which general approach makes more sense for which students and under what conditions. At the same time, there is a growing political movement in many states to mandate, through voter initiatives, English-only instruction. In June 1998, California voters approved Proposition 227, an initiative that greatly restricted the use of bilingual education.

This dissertation study is about the scale-up of programs intended to promote retention and transfer for underserved groups of students at community colleges. For over thirty years, the Puente program is one such program that has focused on increasing retention and transfer rates for Latino community college students in California. In 2012, with growing dissatisfaction of student outcomes, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board and Catch the Next (CTN)—a national non-profit organization dedicated to promoting college success for at-risk students—facilitated the implementation of the Puente program in three Texas community colleges. This dissertation study uses multiple case study methods to examine the organizational change process and its effects on the scale-up of the externally developed Puente program in three Texas colleges. The engaging research questions ask if and how programs developed in one setting can be successfully scaled-up to new state and campus contexts.

The trends presented in these case studies suggest that efforts to scale-up the externally developed Puente program depended on a flexible but focused approach, which combined an adherence to central design principles with accommodations to the state and local contexts. On a theoretical level, these results confirm and advance Levine’s institutionalization-termination theory by clarifying, expanding, and extending the body of knowledge derived from a contextual change perspective. To the extent that this study establishes a better understanding of strategies that facilitate the scale-up of a Latino focused transfer program, especially with regard to Puente’s approach to professional development, the results of this analysis can also enable more comprehensive educational planning.