We Have the Power to Change the Lives of Students

Several of these columns last year focused on my thoughts regarding academic standards and the reasons why I believe we needed to have a serious discussion on this topic. At the end of the last academic year, the Joint Development Group, charged with jointly developing recommendations to the Board of Trustees on district policies and procedures concerning certain academic and professional matters, agreed that the focus of the college Academic Senates' activities for this year would be academic standards and the success of our students.

For this reason I asked Dr. Uri Treisman, professor of Mathematics and Director of the Charles A. Dana Center at the University of Texas at Austin, to be the District Opening Day (September 17^th) keynote speaker. Dr. Treisman was asked to "kick off" an anticipated yearlong discussion around the topics of academic standards, student performance, and what we need to do in order to improve our students' learning, especially that of our minority students. While I know that many of you were present for his address, for those who were not, I want to briefly summarize what he had to say, and to remind all of you of our tasks ahead.

In a moving story of how a single teacher can affect a life, Dr. Treisman told of being a groundsman at a Los Angeles community college, speding his lunch hour sitting outside a pre-calculus class listening and taking notes, until the teacher noticed him and asked him to come inside to participate in the class. That same teacher helped him find his way to CSU Northridge and then UCLA. It was during his doctoral program at UC Berkeley some 20 years ago that Dr. Treisman began the program and the research that was the primary subject of his address.

His study's subjects were 20 African-American students and 20 Cantonese-speaking Chinese students who were all freshmen at Berkeley. For the study the researchers had formulated several hypotheses generated by faculty surveys, all of which were proven false. These included the belief that there existed between these two racial groups of students certain "motivational gaps", a belief based on a number of stereotypes about education, income, lack of basic skills, etc. The researchers virtually lived with the students, collecting more than 700 hours of videotape. They did discover two important things about the students: Asian students formed themselves into informal groups, while African-American students attempted to separate their social lives from their academic lives.

The lessons learned from that study and his other work, Treisman said, are that :

• we must question the assumptions of remedial programs and see if those students who succeed are really helped by the programs;
• support groups will not work when the curriculum is inappropriate ("sucks" is actually the expression he used);
• we need scholarly, academic analysis to determine what works, and that studying the best students will often tell us;
• so-called "anti-remedial" programs are effective - they can triple the probability that a student will receive a grade of B or better in the course;
• teachers must not just teach a subject area, but must teach students that they have options for their lives that they may not have considered;
• programs that work must be anchored in data, and "the faces of your students" must be in the data;
• programmatic solutions to hard problems cannot be solved outside of the course curriculum;
• individuals do not change courses, the department faculty do. The work of chaging curriculum must be the work of a leadership group that works for the department as a whole;
• academic systems are different and how we choose to operate within them matters.

Treisman ended his presentation whith his core message: even on our worst days, we have enormous power to change the lives of our students, and we must work together on this endeavor.

In my closing remarks that day, I reminded you that this was an extraordinarily complex topic, without a clearly identifiable solution. This year's discussions regarding academic standards will not be easy, and it must be a very deliberative process. We will need to be careful with, and tolerant of one another in these discussions. We will not seet timelines for this process; it has taken us years to get here and it might take us years to develop solutions. We must remember in our discussions that we are a community of scholars, teachers, and learners, and we all seek the same goal for our students: that they succeed and have the opportunity, the chance, to be whatever they want to become.

Our goal is extremely ambitious. In the past we have at times anguished over our commitment to "be the best." We worry if we can always be the best, especially in solving a problem like this which has not been successfully addressed anywhere. At times like this that commitment becomes an overwhelming burden. However, we are an enormously talented and dedicated group, thus it is only necessary that we do our best. I eagerly await the discussion and its outcome.

The videotape of the District Opening Day presentation is available from the Chancellor's Office.

Leo E. Chavez

FOR INTERNAL DISTRIBUTION ONLY