Science News

Reynaldo Baca
Bilingual Ed Plows Ahead

Nine years after its creation and three years after Prop. 227, USC’s Latino Teacher Project thrives, and so do the teachers it trains.
WHEN CALIFORNIA'S English-only law passed in 1998, many school principals dumped their bilingual textbooks in the trash. They warned teachers not to speak Spanish in the classroom and adopted an all-English curriculum. Advocates feared bilingual education would die – along with such award-winning programs as the Latino Teacher Project of the USC Rossier School of Education.
A state shortage of bilingual teachers means credentialed people are recruited “like football players.”
Neither has happened.
Several schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District and elsewhere quietly kept their bilingual programs for children whose parents had signed waivers. And the Latino Teacher Project has not only survived, it has grown.
Now in its ninth year, the nationally respected USC program has a proven track record of recruiting bilingual teaching assistants and encouraging them to enter the teaching profession.
“When Proposition 227 passed, we were certainly worried,” says education professor and Latino Teacher Project director Reynaldo Baca. “We had to make modifications to our program, but I think we’ve
gotten stronger.”
Bilingual education, too, has scored some victories. For example, Spanish-language students enrolled in bilingual classrooms fared better than their peers in English-only classes, according to a recent study conducted by the Sacramento-based coalition Californians Together.
Both kinds of schools made real progress on the California Academic Performance Index of 1999-2000, says USC Rossier School researcher Michael Genzuk, “but the bilingual schools exceeded their growth targets for students by almost five times, while the comparison schools exceeded their targets by only four times.”
The Latino Teacher Project has been selected by the U.S. Department of Education as an exemplary model for other universities to follow. The project extends beyond USC, preparing educators at seven Cal State campuses, as well as Loyola Marymount University, Azusa Pacific University and Occidental College.

DESPITE PROP. 227, the demand for bilingual teachers in California and Los Angeles remains strong. Currently the state suffers from a shortage of about 30,000 teachers with credentials to instruct second-language students, says Baca.
Bilingual teachers are recruited “like football players,” says Genzuk, the project’s principal investigator. “There’s a chronic shortage of people of color in education. About 85 percent of those preparing to become teachers in the United States are white and female.”
This year, the Latino Teacher Project fed school districts in Los Angeles, Montebello, Lennox, Little Lake and Baldwin Park with 33 credentialed bilingual and Latino teachers. That’s up from just six teachers in 1992.
Two hundred teaching assistants are now enrolled in the project, compared to just 50 in 1992.
“It takes between four and seven years for students to complete the project,” says Genzuk, “but most students do finish. Our completion rate is more than 95 percent.”
Elida Cossio ’01 wrapped up her training last spring at Humphreys Avenue Elementary, an East L.A. school that is 98 percent Latino. “I can relate to the kids because I was put in school not knowing English that well,” Cossio says. “If I had had bilingual education, I would have known more.”
Cossio believes she had to work twice as hard as other youngsters because of her limited English. Through the Latino Teacher Project, she says, “I have been able to see how effective bilingual education is.”
Rossier School dean Karen Gallagher considers the project one of USC’s hallmarks. “It demonstrates our commitment to solving the pressing needs of Los Angeles schools, students and their families,” Gallagher says. “This program is effective because it combines theory and research-based knowledge with practical application in real schools.”

– Gilien Silsby

ALL SPRAWLED OUT
Suburbia at a Standstill
Call off the bulldozers. Sprawl in the Los Angeles region has reached its limits, says USC geographer Michael Dear. That is among the findings of a two-year study released in March by USC’s SouthernCalifornia Studies Center.
The 54-page report, titled Sprawl Hits the Wall: Confronting the Realities of Metropolitan Los Angeles, is “a wake-up call, not only for Southern California but for the rest of urban America,” says Dear, SC2 director and the study’s principal investigator.
As the nation’s second-largest urban region, Los Angeles has 16.7 million residents in 177 cities spread over 14,000 square miles. There isn’t enough developable land to adequately accommodate the 6 million new residents who are expected to arrive in Southern California in the next 20 years, the report finds. (The majority of this inevitable population growth will be through natural increase, not immigration.)
Neither the limited growth policies of the 1970s nor the ’50s suburban model of outward growth will solve the problem, the authors say. Most of the remaining real estate is government owned, protected by land and species conservation measures or physically unsuitable for development.
Shortages of affordable housing, jobs and quality education and a failed governance structure that often pits the region’s cities against one another compounds the problem.
“The region’s poverty rate rose from 13.1 percent in 1990 to 16.5 percent in 1998,” says Jennifer Wolch, a professor of geography, urban planning and development who led the 22-member research team. “As in most American metropolitan areas, the divide between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ in metropolitan Los Angeles is widening.” The widening socioeconomic divide strongly correlates with race, the report added. For instance, in the last decade the median income of Anglos ($47,000) and Asians ($42,000) was much higher than the median household income of Latinos ($27,000) and African Americans ($28,000).
 The report offered four suggestions to civic leaders to meet the multiple challenges facing Southern California:

Grow smarter – Start making conscious choices about water, land and transportation so that future urban growth patterns reinforce existing communities instead of undoing them.

Grow together – Halt the increasing economic and spatial gap between rich and poor, which threatens the prosperity and peace of the region.

Grow greener – Manage sprawl in ways that are consistent with environmental needs.

Grow civic-minded – Work toward a new regional civic and governance structure.

 The study, was co-authored by the Brookings Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy with funding from the James Irvine Foundation.
State of Change

For the first time in the modern era, whites are officially a minority in California, amounting to less than half the population, according to the 2000 census. Hispanics, meanwhile, now make up nearly a third of Californians. USC historian Kevin Starr sees nothing strange in that. “The Anglo hegemony was only an intermittent phase in California’s arc of identity, extending from the arrival of the Spanish,” Starr observed in the Los Angeles Times. The new census figures, he believes, reflect “a reassertion of the intrinsic demographic DNA of the longer pattern, which is part of a California-Mexico continuum.”
Photograph by Michele A.H. Smith/ Suburbia illustration by Michael Klein / Population illustration by A.J. Garces