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Professional Development Academies

As a learning scientist, Professor Ananda Marin draws upon Indigenous ways of knowing and sociocultural theories to develop research on learning across everyday activities such as walking through a forest, and professional realms of knowledge such as teaching and musical performance.

Marin’s study “Reimagining Teaching/Learning Relations Alongside Improvisational and Ensemble Performers” is funded by a Spencer Foundation Large Grant. The study draws on co-design methodologies and how research collaborators (i.e., improvisational artists) play a central role in designing research activities. The study focused on jazz artists Hamid Drake, Michael Zerang, Lisa Alvarado, Joshua Abrams, and Zahra Baker. In addition, research activities have been conducted with the support of Brenda Lopez, research associate and media coordinator at the UCLA Center for Critical Race Studies in Education, Lindsay Lindberg, a doctoral student researcher in the Urban Schooling Division, and Shivani Davé, a doctoral student researcher in the Social Research Methodology Division. 

Last April at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), Lopez and Marin presented the team’s findings in a Vice-Presidential Session on “Consequential Futures: The Contested Pursuit of Truth in Freedom Dreaming.” Their presentation, “Freedom Dreams Nested Within the Small Stories of Improvisational Jazz Artists,” explored the ways that artists develop their expertise, how the arts are a nexus for social, political, and ethical discourses in regard to education, and how freedom dreams often germinate in collaborative and improvisational contexts.

Family dynamics play a significant part in this strand of Professor Marin’s research. Her father is Hamid Drake, a jazz drummer and percussionist who has worked in various ensembles with luminaries such as Fred Anderson, Don Cherry, Jim Pepper, Herbie Hancock, and Pharoah Sanders. Drake is widely regarded as a top percussionist in jazz and improvised music, incorporating his interest in Afro-Cuban, Indian, and African percussion instruments and influences. Marin leverages her unique connection to this community with a study that illustrates the intrinsic value of the arts, not only as a subject to be studied in schools but as a discipline with routine practices that can inform how the field of education understands humans’ diverse capabilities as well as relationships between humans and the more-than-human world.

Marin is an associate professor of Social Research Methodology in the UCLA Department of Education and a faculty member in UCLA American Indian Studies. Her research explores the cultural nature of development with an emphasis on how processes for knowing (e.g., attention, embodiment, collaboration, etc.) vary across multiple communities, generations, and knowledge systems, and how educators can draw upon that variation in the design of teaching/learning environments.

Professor Marin achieved her Ph.D. in learning sciences at Northwestern University; her M.P.P at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University; and her B.A. in sociology at Yale University. Her accolades include the University of California Humanities Research Institute Residential Research Group Fellowship, the International Society of the Learning Sciences Early Career Award, the Lena Astin Faculty Mentoring Award from UCLA, and the Mellon Distinguished Scholar at the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands from Arizona State University. Recent publications include the article “Ambulatory sequences: Ecologies of learning by attending and observing on the move” for the journal Cognition and Instruction, and the co-written chapter, “Enacting relationships of kinship and care in research and educational settings” (with UCLA’s Nikki Barry (McDaid) for the 2020 book, “Critical Youth Research in Education: Methodologies of Praxis and Care,” co-edited by UCLA professor of education Teresa McCarty and published by Routledge.

Ed&IS Magazine: What inspired your study of improvisational jazz artists?

Ananda Marin: I decided a long time ago that I wasn’t going to seek out a research site solely for the sake of doing research. As a qualitative methodologist, I believe that relationships are extremely important to doing research, and I usually begin a research project with people that I have relationships with or by asking myself who I want to develop relationships with. With that comes some accountability to how we share and engage in the work, how we talk about it, and write about it.

I’m studying the arts in order to better understand collaboration and improvisation, two processes that are central to teaching and learning. I grew up in a family of artists and educators. My dad is a jazz percussionist and for many years, my mom was a dancer. My sister was a dancer. My niece dances. My grandmother was a piano teacher. My other sister was an English, ELL, and Bilingual teacher. My husband was an early childhood educator, a rap artist, and now makes Native American horror movies.

I would go and watch my sister perform and my dad perform. I noticed that the communities they were in were very different from the way we organize teaching and learning in schools. My participation in those communities shaped this current project and how I approached previous work on the role of the body in teaching and learning.

Ed&IS: What qualities do some of these communities have that aren’t typically present in education?

Marin: This project is guided by a couple of questions. One, I was interested in how people’s histories of relations influence their development over time, and then at a micro level, because part of what I do is study core cognitive processes like attention and embodiment, I was interested in the moment-to-moment of performance, when people are improvising [and] how they attune to one another. 

I had spent a lot of time on the periphery of artistic communities. This led me to have a general sense that many of the folks I knew would probably say that even though they are viewed as experts and have contributed to and influenced their field, school was not a place where they developed that expertise. In addition, I would broadly argue that as a society we do not organize classroom environments to facilitate generative long-term relationships. In contrast, the artists who are involved in this project have long-term relationships with one another that span 10, 20, or 30 years, where they work together in different configurations [that] they’ve gone in and out of. How artists develop and sustain relationships and how relationships feed their own creative processes is of interest to me.

Ananda Marin, UCLA associate professor of education, leveraged the stature and relationships of her father, free jazz musician Hamid Drake, in order to conduct her research. Photo by Brenda Lopez

Ed&IS: How did your familial connection to this community impact your study?

Marin: My dad has been in the music performance world, what music critics call the jazz world, since he was 13 years old. I think the collaborating artists said yes to the project because they had a relationship with my dad. It’s not that they wouldn’t have said yes if I had asked them, but I think that relational connection was important. I think they saw the project as an opportunity to learn new things about each other, to get together, to perform together and have conversations that would move their own understanding of their craft in new ways.

Indigenous education scholars often ground their work in the 4 Rs and now the 5 Rs. These practices include respect, reciprocity, responsibility, relevance, and relationality. I knew [that] going in, if people were going to participate, relationality, reciprocity, and responsibility were going to be key factors. My father would also include reverence, which is related to respect, as a practice. He has pointed out to me that you have to have a certain reverence for what you do, and for what others before you did.

Ed&IS: How does this study address your interest in embodiment and physical space?

Marin: I would say that the majority of schools have been designed in ways that are about restraining our bodies versus tapping into the potential of freely using our whole bodies. This is particularly true when it comes to how the bodies of indigenous, Black, and Brown youth and youth from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are constructed in relation to schooling. However, when I have observed improvisational jazz performances, it was very clear to me that artists were using their whole bodies to support their own processes for learning and creativity. I want to understand how artists and musical performers are able to cultivate freedom spaces where they are able to engage in whole body movement and what this means for their own development as people and as artists.

I’m working with Ben Rydal Shapiro, a researcher at Georgia State University, who has developed data visualization tools to support teaching and learning. One of the things Ben researches is the movement of bodies in space. He’s taken clips of the performances I recorded with collaborating artists and looked at the movement of their bodies in relation to time and space. It is not surprising that as percussionists and bass players, they are going to be using their hands and their feet. But they’re often using them together in a coordinated way while their eyes are closed. This coordination is tied to their processes for attending to one another and collaborating to co-create music. This stands in contrast to how people are taught to organize attention in school. In schools, visual attention often holds primacy. However, in this particular performance space, artists are drawing on multiple senses in order to fully participate and collaborate. So, we might ask what are the possible consequences for learning when we create spaces for sensory freedom.

And so, this is a a leap, but I don’t think it’s too far of a leap. If we think about the progression of schooling from early childhood spaces to high school, we are increasingly asking people to sit in ways that constrain their bodies, to not move their hands or their feet or other parts of their body unless they’re engaging in “productive activity”— like reading or writing—and to look at the front of the classroom. For example, when we go into some of the Math Science buildings [at UCLA], some of the chairs are bolted to the floor, [constraining] the design of the learning environment. I’m not saying every classroom should be an empty space, but we could pay more attention to how our bodies move and feel in spaces. There’s so much more we can do and experience as humans when we don’t put these kinds of constraints on ourselves. 

Vocalist Zahra Baker worked with photographs of the artists’ ancestors to create quilt pieces for the group’s unique staging. Photo by Brenda Lopez

The improvisational artists who are participating in this project have a practice for setting up the performance, or teaching and learning, space. It is consequential for how the work that they’re about to do unfolds. Improvisation is not just about doing anything in the moment. They would say that they prepare for improvising, and they would probably say that it’s linked to their own spiritual development as people. When they get to a performance space, there’s a bunch of things they do, some of them very small, some of them larger. Some of it is about how they greet one another, but they are making decisions in that moment about how they’re going to set up the space and they are thinking about how these decisions might influence how the performance (or teaching and learning) unfolds.

I’m sharing this story because I’m involved in this other group with Indigenous scholars through Arizona State University. It’s a Mellon-funded project, and Natalie Diaz and Brian Brayboy are PIs on the project, looking at Indigenous forms of mentorship. I was sharing the experience of being with the musicians and observing them perform, and how they set up space.

Natalie suggested to me that the next time I teach, I invite students to first center themselves and then to move around the classroom and to sit wherever they felt comfortable–whether it was on a chair, on a floor, on top of the desks–and then to have a conversation about how that felt and what we wanted to do from there. I did this in a TEP class, and that was a really interesting day for me in the classroom. I think students appreciated it, and I also think they were kind of skeptical: “Okay, so we did this thing, and we get to collectively decide what we’re going to do. But is this for real? And will we continue to operate in this way?

I will say that this small practice that came from observing musicians, shifted the dynamics of my classroom space. What I’m looking for is not necessarily the big findings, but the small findings that can help us think about what we’re doing moment-to-moment, which is often a challenge when teaching because classrooms move so quickly. If we’re going to design something different, we have to be okay with what might come up with the unscripted, and that can be scary for teachers, for lots of reasons. It takes a lot of practice to slow down our own thinking and be reflective–not just to automatically respond to what’s going on, but to reflect in the moment and open up possibilities. I believe that one of the things we can learn from jazz artists who improvise is how to sit in/with dissonance while listening and watching for “light trails” that can take the group toward consonance.

Ed&IS: What about the dynamic of the artists’ interactions on and offstage?

Marin: These jazz musicians are creating something together as a group. We often ask people to teach on their own, with 20, 50, 100-plus students, depending on what grade level you’re at. It’s a very Western, individualistic kind of idea that a single educator will have all that knowledge to impart and that when unexpected things arise, we have the expertise to meet them.

Part of the preparation for [these] improvisers is getting out of their own way. It is about having the substantive knowledge and knowing enough. But there’s another level of preparation that is necessary, they would say, [to] be in the flow and open to possibilities as they arise. You’re open to being together and apart—you’re an individual, but you’re also a part of the group. You might lead, but then other times, you follow. 

Hamid Drake, a prominent drummer in the creative music movement, performing in the “Moment to Moment Concert” in September 2022. Photo by Brenda Lopez

In the performance space, a feedback system is created. They come in and do the work together, but every show will vary based upon who is with them that day, who is starting, and who is in the audience. They would talk about this as a circulation of energy. We can ask ourselves as educators, “I have my lesson plan. What is the material that I want to cover today?” We can also ask ourselves, “What is the energy that I want to build in this space with others today?” We can ask ourselves about how we learn to be better attuned to one another and to ourselves, how we can be present, and how that feeds the creative process.

For example, this past July we organized a public performance at Experimental Sound Studio. Toward the end of the performance, the volume and speed of the music decreased and the sound of the leaves rustling and birds chirping became center stage. Many people in the audience felt this transition. At the same time, there was some uncertainty about whether or not “we” had come to a closing/end for this particular journey. It wasn’t until an audience member, who is the partner of one of the performers, said “thank you” that people began to clap.

Ed&IS: How do you hope that the focus of Prop. 28 on K-12 arts education will impact school cultures?

Marin: I deeply believe that the arts are an integral part of society. I was trained in the field learning sciences, where oftentimes if we’re studying the arts, it’s in service of STEM learning. I think that we can and should study the arts for art’s sake. I still think there are questions of equity in the arts and there are questions about the relationship between culture, gender, and race in the arts.

The group that I’m working with aren’t “standard” jazz artists. They would say they’re more part of the creative music or improvising music community. When John Coltrane’s music started to deviate from his original sound there was this question, “Is this still music?” In one of our research meetings, my father pointed out that Coltrane received “a vast amount of criticism and many people called it [the music] discordant, because he wasn’t playing that … which seemed familiar.” He also noted that Coltrane discovered something more and in doing so helped others to feel comfortable with feeling uncomfortable. This practice of bringing multiple dimensions of sound together allowed for processes of remembrance as well as creating new paths that are linked to self-determination and freedom. UCLA Professor of History Robin D.G. Kelley has written about this in his book, “Africa Speaks, America Answers.” 

People still get pushed out of the arts because they’re doing something different or something that brings in a cultural perspective that is not appreciated or respected at the time. On the other hand, a lot of Indigenous artists are worried about how the visual arts, sound [arts], material arts–things that are closely linked to cultural practices and knowledge–can be misappropriated and used in ways that are not respectful. So, as a research community we need to be careful. We need to return to the 5 Rs.

Artists often use a different language around teaching and learning than many education researchers and learning scientists might. Recently, there’s been a focus around joy and education and Black joy. This focus is important and reminds us of the always present need to resist deficit orientations. Like scholars who attend to joy, these artists often talk about the power dreaming and spirit and love and wonder and beauty. All of these practices are important for our full development as humans.

Above: Professor Marin’s research included documenting the “Moment to Moment” concert, held in Chicago in September of 2022. As well as performing music, the collaborating artists created a specific environment through their set-up onstage, including the paintings of Lisa Alvarado, visual artist and harmonium player. L-R: Alvarado, Hamid Drake, drums; Joshua Abrams, bass; Michael Zerang, percussion; and Zahra Baker, vocals.

Ananda Marin, a UCLA associate professor of education and the daughter of a jazz musician, studies the ways that artists improvise and how collaboration and community can transform education.

UCLA Ed&IS Magazine: Reimagining Teaching/Learning Relations Alongside Improvisational and Ensemble Performers

The famed education philosopher John Dewey believed that education should be about something more than economic competitiveness.  In his lecture at the dedication of UCLA in 1930, he noted, “Its goal should be the creation of human beings in the fullness of their capacity.”

UCLA Presidential Professor Emerita Jeannie Oakes, was the embodiment of that goal. After a life and career that informed and inspired many, Oakes, 81, passed away on April 25, at her home in Berkeley. Her research, teaching and scholarship reached for the fullness of their capacity and set the direction for a UCLA School of Education and Information Studies intent on helping all students achieve their own. Oakes’ ideas and work at UCLA set a moral compass for a department of education committed to opportunity, equity, and justice, and established a research and teacher education program to develop educators to “change the world.”

At UCLA, Oakes was the Presidential Professor Emerita in Education Equity. In her time in the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies, she founded Center X, the UCLA Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access (IDEA), and founded and directed the University of California All Campus Consortium on Research for Diversity (UC ACCORD). Most recently, Oakes served as director of education and scholarship at the Ford Foundation, and in 2016, served as the 100th president of the American Educational Research Association (AERA).

“These details only scratch the surface of Jeannie’s professional accomplishments, and they do not even begin to reveal the personal impact she had on so many people,” says Wasserman Dean Christina Christie. “Always known for her kindness and warmth, Jeannie was a mentor and friend to everyone she met. Her husband, Martin Lipton, shared that she was, ‘proud to be part of a community that fought to make the world a better place,’ and that she hoped we would all carry on with this work.”

Professor Oakes earned her master’s degree in American Studies at California State University, Los Angeles,  her bachelor’s degree in English from San Diego State University, and achieved  her Ph.D. in education at UCLA in 1980. She remained on campus as a research associate working with noted scholar and UCLA Education Dean John Goodlad, conducting research for his groundbreaking book, “A Study of Schooling.” 

Oakes left UCLA in 1985, joining RAND as a senior social scientist in its education and human resources program, and built her reputation as an expert in educational indicator development. It was during this time that she penned her seminal work, “Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality.” Published that year by Yale University Press, the book shone a harsh light on the pernicious impact of student tracking, making clear its grounding in the racial and class inequalities of America and its role in helping to perpetuate them. “Keeping Track” would be published multiple times and was named one of 60 “Books of the Century” by the University of South Carolina Museum of Education for its influence on American education.

In 1989, Oakes returned to UCLA as a tenured professor in the school of education, conducting research on school reform and teaching urban school policy and history in the division of Urban Schooling. In a 2017 interview with UCLA Ed&IS magazine, she told the story of sitting in a 10th floor conference room in a high-rise tower on Wilshire Boulevard, with an expansive view of Los Angeles from a suite that served as the offices of the UCLA School of Education while Moore Hall was being refurbished. The day was April 29, 1992 and from this vantage point, Oakes said she and others watched the first wisps of black smoke that would become the fires of the uprising and destruction fueled by the Rodney King verdict. 

“We could see the fires and smoke erupt,” Oakes said. “It was tragic and frightening.”

Driving home in traffic, Oakes said she was struck by the notion that, “… something was very wrong. Here we were, this group of extraordinary scholars, working and known across the world, and almost none of us was doing anything meaningful about Los Angeles. And we needed to be doing something.”

In that moment, the seeds of UCLA Center X were planted. As its founder, Oakes would join with colleagues to lead the development of a new teacher education program at the University, dedicated to the recruitment, preparation, and support of caring, quality teachers committed to social justice for students in urban schools in Los Angeles. Center X transformed UCLA’s approach to teacher development.

“I remember very clearly being at the [UCLA] Lab School when we got started and the programs came together,” says Jo Ann Isken, a former teacher and interim executive director of Center X. “We shared a common vision that we would come together around a belief in social justice with a mission of really working to create transformational teachers. Jeannie has been one of my life’s guiding lights. I feel her presence and the tremendous responsibility of carrying on her legacy.”

The lessons learned at Center X would fuel the development of “Becoming Good American Schools: The Struggle for Civic Virtue in Education Reform,” co-authored by Oakes, Lipton, UCLA colleague Karen Hunter Quartz, and Steve Ryan, an assistant professor of secondary education at the University of Louisville. Published in 2000 by Wiley, the book was lauded by Jonathan Kozol as, "A convincing portrait of teachers actively engaged in educational reform...offering a hopeful yet realistic vision of revitalized democracy inspired by a passion for the public good.”

Hunter Quartz, who is now the director of the UCLA Center for Community Schooling, began working with Professor Oakes in 1990, when Oakes invited her to write a proposal to the Carnegie Corporation to study a national middle school reform initiative called Turning Points. 

"The next year, we began an ambitious five-year study of reform implementation in 16 schools across five states," says Hunter Quartz. "Jeannie helped me, as a Canadian, develop a deep and critical appreciation of American culture. I have very fond memories of traveling with Jeannie--exploring small towns, enjoying meals together, and visiting bookstores where she would share her love of American fiction.

Jeannie Oakes, UCLA Presidential Professor Emerita in Education Equity, and Karen Hunter Quartz, director of the UCLA Center for Community Schooling, began working together in the 1990s, conducting a study of a national middle school reform initiative called Turning Points. Pictured here, visiting the White House. Courtesy of Karen Hunter Quartz

"When we arrived at schools, I recall the thrill teachers and principals felt when they met Jeannie," says Hunter Quartz. "I felt so honored to be in her presence and learn from the deeply respectful ways she related to educators, listening intently to understand and lift up their voices. 'Becoming Good American Schools' is a testimony to the power of these voices, framed by four cultural struggles that define public education in this country. My own dissertation on the culture of school reform landed in Chapter 8 and I recall probing conversations about civic virtue and social change. These conversations have continued over the past 34 years. In 2006, Jeannie helped support the development of the UCLA Community School and most recently has led the national movement for community schools."

Oakes was the author of 17 scholarly books and monographs and more than 100 published research reports, chapters, and articles, several of which she co-authored with her UCLA colleagues. Major publications include, “Preparing Teachers for Deeper Learning,” co-authored with Linda Darling-Hammond (2019); “Learning Time: In Pursuit of Educational Equity,” co-authored with Jorge Ruiz de Velasco and Marisa Saunders, associate director for research, UCLA Center for Community Schooling (2017); and “Beyond Tracking: Multiple Pathways to College, Career, and Civic Participation,” co-edited with Saunders (2008). Oakes co-authored “Learning Power: Organizing for Education and Justice” (2006) with UCLA Professor of Education John Rogers.

“There is a painting in the Center X conference room that features the following quote from Jeannie Oakes: ‘My job is about casting issues in a different light. It is about the constant struggle of ordinary people to make schools better than the larger society in which they exist,’” says Rogers, who currently serves as director of IDEA and faculty director of Center X.

“Throughout her remarkable career, Jeannie authored groundbreaking research that illuminated why schools are the way they are and how they can become more just and democratic,” says Rogers. “Jeannie Oakes created powerful spaces where graduate students, teachers-in-training, civil rights lawyers, community leaders, and many others joined together in this beautiful struggle. She will be greatly missed.”

Professors Oakes and Rogers founded IDEA in 2000 with the goal of using UCLA’s research capacity to bring together diverse communities of Los Angeles in addressing the most critical issues in public education. IDEA faculty, postdoctoral scholars, staff and graduate students partner with students, parents, teachers and grassroots organizations to conduct research on the possibilities and challenges of educational change.

“Supporting an increasingly diverse democracy to be even more democratic – culturally democratic as well as politically democratic – is the challenge of our time,” Oakes said to UCLA Newsroom in 2016. “I would love the federal government to support work in that area. A lot of my UCLA colleagues are doing that kind of work, and those are my roots as well.”

Oakes co-authored two other books with her husband Lipton, including “Teaching to Change the World,” with Lauren Anderson and Jamy Stillman (5th ed, 2018); and “Making the Best of Schools: A Handbook for Parents, Teachers, and Policymakers” (1990). 

Oakes was a member of the National Academy of Education and a senior fellow-in-residence at the Learning Policy Institute. She has been honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award from the California Education Research Association; the Multicultural Research Award from the National Association for Multicultural Education; the Jose Vasconcellos World Award in Education; and a Distinguished Achievement Award from the Educational Press Association of America. In 2016, Professor Oakes was appointed by President Barack Obama to the National Board for Education Sciences.

Along with serving as president of the AERA in its centennial year, Oakes was honored with three major awards from the organization including the Early Career Award, recognition for an Outstanding Research Article, and the 2001 Outstanding Book Award for “Becoming Good American Schools: The Struggle for Civic Virtue in Education Reform.”

Oakes is survived by her husband Martin Lipton and her children Lisa Oakes, Steve Luck, Tracy Oakes Barnett, Ron Barnett, Lowell Lipton, Rene Huey Lipton, Ethan Lipton, Arin Arbus, and seven grandchildren. At this time, her family has no plans for a memorial.

Founder of UCLA’s Center X and Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access created the University's signature teacher education program, committed to creating social justice educators for urban schools.

Jeannie Oakes: 1943-2024

A motion, titled, “Blind Removals Moving Forward: Color Consciousness and Safeguarding Against Racial Bias,” was made on April 23 by L.A. County Supervisors Holly J. Mitchell and Lindsey P. Horvath, proposing that the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) consider and incorporate recommendations in a report by the UCLA Pritzker Center for Strengthening Children and Families titled, “Beyond Blind Removal: Color Consciousness and Anti-Racism in Los Angeles County Child Welfare.”

“Reevaluating the systems and practices the County employs to deliver services to families is one that requires regular reflection, evaluation, and evolution, to ensure that we are leaving families stronger than how we found them,” write Mitchell and Horvath in their motion. “Although the intent of assuring that a child is free of abuse and neglect is one that can be perceived as being well intended, all too often, the process to make such determination has proven to be more harmful than helpful.

“When dealing with the child welfare system, which has roots traced back to structural racism, the County must take accountability and acknowledge its role in normalizing and desensitization to the dangers that come with separating Black children from their families. Such desensitization often impacts the very professionals tasked with keeping our children safe and leads to the internalization of racial bias, which goes unchecked.”

The concept of blind removal dictates that the assigned social worker’s only interaction is to conduct an initial assessment, which helps contain the possibility of bias from influencing the investigation process, including the crucial period when the decision to remove a child from their home is made. Omitting knowledge of the child’s race or ethnicity was intended to safeguard against implicit bias.

“The County has continued to focus on prevention and promotion to both mitigate harm and system involvement, while promoting child and family wellbeing,” write Horvath and Mitchell. “Safety is the utmost priority in our County’s child welfare system. The blind removal pilot presented the County with an opportunity to incorporate safety considerations for all families, not just those who identify as Black. Staff shared that awareness of racial bias in their practice led to increased likelihood toward continued growth. It also increased their awareness of institutionalized racism, implicit bias, and even helped recognize biased beliefs in their own practice.”

The recommendations in the UCLA report are aimed at addressing the root cause of disproportionalities among Black families and children in the child welfare system, beginning with the implementation of the community-based approach of upstream enhancements, leveraging court resources, judicial leadership, child welfare, juvenile justice, mental health, and other partnerships to enhance state and local collaboration. In addition, Eliminating Racial Disproportionality and Disparity (ERDD) roundtables discussions will be required at all DCFS regional offices; the director of DCFS, or a designee for the L.A. County Office of Equity will identify and execute an agreement with an equity consultant to conduct racial bias training for DCFS University and new hire orientation, executive leadership, union representatives, management, hotline staff, social workers, and all applicable staff and administration.

LA County Supervisors Holly J. Mitchell (third from left, upper row) and Lindsey P. Horvath recently made a motion to incorporate recommendations made by the UCLA Pritzker Center for Strengthening Children and Families in removal decisions made by the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services that involve Black families. Full caption below.

This is a revision of an unanimously passed motion in 2021 by the L.A. Board of Supervisors to implement “Toward a Color-Blind Child Welfare System: Pilot Program for Safeguarding Against Racial Bias,” which was modeled after a program in Nassau County, New York, and conducted in partnership with the UCLA Pritzker Center. The pilot program was conducted in the West Los Angeles and Compton-Carson DCFS regional offices over two years, and called for the evaluation, training, and support from subject matter experts on racial bias and blind removals. This included a series of six report-backs from inception to conclusion, along with an academic report on the findings and recommendations for policy and practice reform. In 2023, the findings from the pilot were released, in the report titled, “Beyond Blind Removal: Color Consciousness and Anti-Racism in Los Angeles County Child Welfare.”

“The UCLA Pritzker Center congratulates Supervisors Mitchell and Horvath for bolding advancing a new vision for an anti-racist child welfare system," says Taylor Dudley, J.D., executive director of the Pritzker Center. "We are proud to support evaluation and creating meaningful change in partnership with the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services.”

The new motion by Supervisors Horvath and Mitchell calls for further efforts by DCFS to address the need for widespread and deepened training of all levels of its personnel, toward the agency’s ability to imbue its practices through an anti-racist lens, with a focus on Black children and families. ERDD goals will normalize regular discussions about race and disproportionality, seeking ways to build on equity practices, and create safe spaces for facilitators and/or coaches to support staff and address the elevated emotions that may arise from having discussions about race and culture.

In consultation with the county’s Anti-Racism, Diversity, & Inclusion Initiative, DCFS will  reimagine and transform the organizational culture of the workforce by conducting an equity audit on upcoming reform efforts, as well as direct practices and training, in order to identify gaps where current strategies are not being properly implemented or require improvement. In consultation with the LA County Office of Child Protection, there will be steps to ensure that all external support are engaged, including members of impacted communities, the Commission for Children and Families, the Alliance for Children’s Rights, community-based organizations, faith-based organizations, and trusted messengers for the ongoing development and evaluation of the DCFS’ Office of Equity. Supervisors Mitchell and Horvath have also called for sufficient funding in the DCFS budget to fund the agreement and any amendments.

“The removal of a child from a parent often results in the breakdown of families and disrupts a familiar environment that can impose unintentional, yet lasting harm,” state Supervisors Mitchell and Horvath. “To fundamentally transform the systems that serve residents in our unfinished communities within the County, we must reimagine the foundations of systems that perpetuate harm among families. The County has the power to redesign systems that often hurts families when the intention is to help and support them.”

Above: (L-R, upper row) D’Artagnan Scorza (’13, Ph.D., Urban Schooling), executive director of Racial Equity, LA County; Mitchell, Taylor Dudley, JD, executive director, Pritzker Center; Brandon Nichols, director, LA County Department of Child and Family Services; and Tyrone Howard, co-director, Pritzker Center and UCLA professor of education.

Also pictured: Audra Langley, co-director, Pritzker Center (fifth from left, upper row); and Wasserman Dean Christina Christie, UCLA School of Education and Information Studies (second from right, upper row).

Courtesy of the Office of LA County Supervisor Holly J. Mitchell

The center’s report on the shortfalls of blind removal propels countywide recognition of the importance of considering race in removal decisions impacting Black families.

UCLA Pritzker Center Research Fuels New Motion by LA County Board of Supervisors

In his presidential address, Tyrone C. Howard highlighted the main points behind his chosen theme for this year’s Annual Meeting of the American Education Research Association (AERA), “Examining Our Past to Imagine a Better Future: Recognition and Redress of Racial Injustice in Education.”

“It is time for this association – the American Educational Research Association – to grapple with racial injustice in our work, our research, our policy… domestically and globally,” said the UCLA professor of education, who wrapped up his year as AERA President for 2023-2024 in Philadelphia earlier this month, April 11-14. In his remarks, Professor Howard underscored the fact that education and race are inextricably linked.

“For anyone who is studying education, you are studying race,” he said. “Schools are ground zero in our quest for racial justice. Issues tied to race, racial injustice, should be explicitly studied in teacher education; should be studied in history; should certainly be studied in measurement and evaluation; curriculum and administration; leadership and development; human development and psychology; and the list goes on. Ours is a field where … impact should be our goal.”

Hundreds of AERA participants attended the Annual Meeting's opening plenary, which featured AERA President Tyrone Howard in conversation with Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, UCLA professor of law. Photo by Joanie Harmon 

Presentations by UCLA Education community were evidence of this impact, given by faculty members, graduate and undergraduate students, and UCLA alumni who are doing innovative work at institutions across the nation. The Annual Meeting was launched with an opening plenary on April 11 titled, “Fighting Back to Move Forward: Defending the Freedom to Learn In the War Against Woke,” with Professor Howard in conversation with his colleague, Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, UCLA professor of law, who is also the founder and director of the Center for Intersectionality & Social Policy Studies and a professor of law at Columbia University.

The following is a sampling of the ways that UCLA scholars explored  questions of race and education at AERA:

Marisa Saunders, associate director for research at the UCLA Center for Community Schooling, chaired a symposium titled, “Community Schools: A Strategy for Supporting and Sustaining (BIPOC) Teachers,”exploring the role and potential of community schools to support and sustain Black, Indigenous and other people of color as teachers. The symposium considered educational research on the community schools’ strategy and the experiences of teachers working within these school settings to address longstanding injustices and inequities in education.

Marisa Saunders, associate director for research at the UCLA Center for Community Schooling. Photo by John McDonald

Saunders was joined in the symposium by UCLA Ed&IS doctoral students Tomoko Nakajima, Jeffrey Yo, and Natalie Fensterstock who presented papers exploring the themes, patterns, and emerging areas of inquiry about the role, experiences, and career trajectories of community school teachers with an emphasis on Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) teachers. Together, the papers explore how community schools can provide the structural, organizational and cultural supports necessary that encourage teacher longevity.

UCLA Professor of Education Eddie Cole (at center) presented his paper, “W. E. B. Du Bois and New Directions in Future Research on Black Higher Education.” Photo by John McDonald

Professor of Education Eddie Cole lit up the room in the session, “W. E. B. Du Bois in Our Times: Toward Racial Justice in Education in the 21st Century.” Commenting on his paper, “W. E. B. Du Bois and New Directions in Future Research on Black Higher Education,”  he contended that  the 2024 AERA Annual Meeting was the ideal moment to reflect on Du Bois and his contemporaries’ scholarship while assessing new directions saying, ” Du Bois would challenge us to speak up and speak out against the very real attack on public education.  We can’t sit idle in this moment – there is much work to be done and much hell to raise.”

An AERA Presidential Session honored the work of the late UCLA Professor of Education Mike Rose, titled, "Scholarship That Befits a Democracy: Disrupting Educational Inequality Through the Scholarship of Mike Rose." Wasserman Dean Christina Christie summed up the work of her former colleague, a prolific writer whose 11 books and numerous articles chronicled the challenges of marginalized students across the nation throughout K-12, community colleges, universities, and vocational training.

“An overarching goal of Mike’s work was to show and explain how and why the ways in which education is a complex human endeavor,” said Dean Christie. “He used these observations to address some of the most pressing issues in education. He accomplished this by studying what was extraordinary about the ordinary. Through considerate narratives, he brought you close to the person, the student, the teacher in the classroom, the intimate look that helped us understand the complexity of contemporary social issues, because we were seeing these issues through a story of human experience.

An AERA Presidential Session featured Wasserman Dean Christina Christie summing up the work of the late Mike Rose, UCLA professor of education, a prolific writer whose 11 books and numerous articles chronicled the challenges of marginalized students across the nation. Photo by Joanie Harmon

"Mike was concerned about how the discussion of education in our country has for so many decades now, turned away from understanding education as cognition and pedagogy fundamentally as a human experience, and instead, as focused on, as he wrote, 'education as a means to secure individual advantage and maintain global economic prominence,'" Dean Christie said. "He was a champion of the promise of high quality education for all and he noted the ways in which education matters for health, for quality of life, for democracy, and for a civil society.”

In an invited AERA Roundtable session promoting “AERA Promising Scholarship in Education Research: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research,” doctoral candidate Demeturie Toso-Lafele Gogue presented his poster, “The Undercurrents of Institutionalization: How AANAPISIs Navigate a Racialized Process to Promote Pacific Islander Student Success.”  His study documents the strategies that administrators, faculty, and staff at AANAPISIs employ to institutionalize aspects of their grant-funded programs. 

“I really look at how college campuses in the Pacific and in the United States invest in sustaining efforts beyond their five-year grant funding from the federal government. I’m looking at how institutions are investing in diversity initiatives,” Toso-Lafele Gogue says. He contends there is a need to examine the process of institutionalization through a racialized lens.

Demeturie Toso-Lafele Gogue presented his poster based on the strategies that administrators, faculty, and staff at AANAPISIs employ to institutionalize aspects of their grant-funded programs. Photo by John McDonald

“Institutionalization as a bureaucratic process is not race-neutral,” he said. “It is laced with racial tensions and dynamics that we need to uncover and talk about and think about what institutionalization is so hard to achieve.”

Professor of Education Daniel Solórzano was the discussant in a great session chaired by PhD student JC Lugo titled, “Liberation as Political Imperative: Toward the Conceptualization of Ethnic Studies Education.” Amid intensifying state amid national debates over Ethnic Studies, long-time advocates discussed “Ethnic Studies Education” as a strategic intervention to embolden education scholars to pursue critical, life-affirming work that guides and supports contemporary Ethnic Studies activism. Panelists addressed how Ethnic Studies Education can better achieve the emancipatory potential of education, what Ethnic Studies educators teach, how we prepare and support Ethnic Studies teachers and students, and the role of activism and research.

Professor of Education Daniel Solórzano served as discussant in for the session, “Liberation as Political Imperative: Toward the Conceptualization of Ethnic Studies Education.” Photo by John McDonald

Telling those in attendance of his early experiences in ethnic studies, or as he pointed out, “Mexican studies or Black studies,” Solórzano said, “I brought a story, we all have stories, we all came to ethnic studies from various pathways. These experiences, these early experiences were absolutely critical to my coming to critical consciousness, which I am still coming to  -- it never ends.”

In a packed roundtable session, UCLA Teacher Education Program advisor Darlene Lee and her colleague, Josephine Pham, assistant professor at UC Santa Cruz, made the case for Culturally Sustaining Teacher Educator Pedagogy as a framework for supporting the preparation of K-12 teachers committed to social justice, with their paper, “Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies of Teacher Education: Centering the Well-Being of Teacher Candidates of Color.”

“How do we model and enact the culturally sustaining strategies that we hope teacher candidates will also be able to enact in their classrooms as they work with students of color, and what are the ways that we can perpetuate and foster the linguistic, literate, and cultural assets of communities of color within our roles in teacher education?” Lee asked session participants. The discussion explored how curriculum, critical literacies, practices, actions, and context shape teacher educator pedagogy and K-12 teacher learning.

UCLA Teacher Education Program advisor Darlene Lee made the case for Culturally Sustaining Teacher Educator Pedagogy as a framework for supporting the preparation of K-12 teachers committed to social justice. Photo by John McDonald

Lauren Arzaga Daus, a second-year graduate student in Urban Schooling, co-presented “PEP PODS: Pin@y Educational Partnerships’ Praxis-Oriented Development Series,” with Jocyl Sacramento of CSU East Bay, during a session titled “Offerings of Love and Accountability: Cultivating Empathy Through Loss and Grief.” UCLA Education alumnae Sharim Hannegan-Martinez and Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales also participated in this session.

In their paper, Arzaga Daus and Sacramento focused on the response of Pinay scholar-activists to national and local movements in the summer of 2020, and their creation of “third spaces” called PEP PODS. School and community practitioners took part in virtual discussions called kuwentuhan, a Filipinx cultural practice/method of exchanging dialogue, reflections, and analysis to make meaning of their relational experiences. The PEP PODS also collectively read a book a month that focused on anti-Black racism, ableism, or sexism, including “Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination” by UCLA Distinguished Professor of History Robin D.G. Kelley; “Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor,” by Layla Saad; and “Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha.”

UCLA graduate student Lauren Arzaga Daus (second from right) and UCLA alumnae Sharim Hannegan-Martinez (far left) Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales (at center) participated in a session on "“Offerings of Love and Accountability: Cultivating Empathy Through Loss and Grief.” Pictured with Arlene S. Daus-Magbual, San Francisco State University;   and Jocyl Sacramento, CSU East Bay. Photo by Joanie Harmon

The co-authors also examined how third spaces allow school and community practitioners to inform their praxis and pedagogies and allowed for imagining and strengthening of solidarities and empathy across racial groups during the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic. Currently, PEP PODS continues to meet.

“We created PEP PODS to respond to the need for school and community practitioners to have a collective space where they could make sense of their identities and commitments in the midst of community grief during the summer 2020 uprisings,” Arzaga Daus and Sacramento wrote. “PEP PODS as a third space has been instrumental in welcoming and centering our humanity as we continue to endure oppressive and unconducive working environments… we continue to engage in this third space because it serves as a reminder of the many possibilities that can exist outside of educational spaces and workplaces.”

Julieta Rico presented “Navigating Fronteras: How Physical and Symbolic Borders Manifest for Latinx Teachers in Schools,” during a session on “BIPOC Teacher Resistance and Solidarity.” A doctoral student in the Urban Schooling division, her research on bilingual education, funding, tracking, and English learner student success in the context of the Rio Grande Valley, stems from her experience of teaching English language arts to 7th graders in Harlingen, Texas.

In her presentation at AERA, Rico shared maps and illustrations created by Latinx teachers during pláticas around invisible but undeniable “borders” at schools, where certain teachers are seemingly “allowed” while others are not. Three main themes of Rico’s work were the shifting of teachers’ identity, the importance of their classrooms, and meaning making through mapping. The pláticas created a space to talk about teachers’ experiences in and around their classrooms and the isolation that they felt at times. The drawings by the teachers depicted their perceptions of themselves on their campuses, both locationally and emotionally. Rico described a drawing by a California teacher, who depicted her school from the outside entrance.

“I asked her, ‘Why did you draw the front of the school?’ She goes (sic), ‘I don’t feel like I belong inside the school, so I didn’t feel comfortable sharing how I walk around it. I showed you the front of the school because that’s the best place I belong.’”

Rico highlighted the difference in candor between the California teachers and her Texas colleagues.

“It was interesting to see the difference in the way the teachers spoke about their spaces,” she said. “California teachers were much more open: ‘It’s systematic oppression this is what we’re seeing.’ They were very vocal and had the language and vocabulary to speak about it. The Texas teachers were silent and hesitant. We were all first-year teachers together, and it wasn’t until I shared a very vulnerable story [about myself], then it started that conversation.”

Two AERA Presidential Sessions provided stunning support of the conference theme by addressing the issues in race and education from the viewpoint of students’ formations of identity and truth. AERA President Tyrone Howard chaired “Lessons and Reflections From Ghana: Toward Justice and Freedom in the U.S. Education System,” which featured work by UCLA Education graduate student researchers, and UCLA alumni who are in academic positions nationwide, including Keara Williams, Jaleel Howard, Earl Edwards, Tr’Vel Lyons, Gene McAdoo, Demontea Thompson, and Kenyon Lee Whitman. Cynthia B. Dillard, dean of the College of Education at Seattle University and a longtime mentor of Professor Howard, served as discussant.

The research presented in this session was based on recent visits to Ghana made by Professor Howard and his cadre of students in order to examine the cultural practices of Africa that few African Americans have knowledge of, and the history of the slave trade that is commemorated at sites in Africa.

One of the papers in this session titled, “Finding Your Brother: Exploring Black male counterspaces as a pathway to resilient identity and healthy expressions of masculinity,” was presented by Lyons, a UCLA alumnus who is now a postdoctoral research associate in the USC Rossier School of Education, and McAdoo, a second-year doctoral student in the division of Urban Schooling. Their paper was inspired by the work of Saidiya Hartman and her book, “Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route,” which they read in preparation for the journey to Ghana, for its perspective on creating personal memoirs combined with historical exploration.   

UCLA alumni Tr’Vel Lyons (at podium) and Earl Edwards, along with Gene McAdoo, doctoral candidate, presented their research and personal reflections in an AERA Presidential Session on “Lessons and Reflections From Ghana: Toward Justice and Freedom in the U.S. Education System.” Photo by Joanie Harmon

“During this trip, we found ourselves grieving the lives we may have lived, the cultural practices we may have had, if not stolen away,” said Lyons. “We felt our privilege should be put to good use, but how? As educators, we didn’t just traverse geographic locations, but we embarked on an introspective journey into the past, connected deeply with…slavery, colonialism, which is inextricably connected to our understanding of the essence of Black masculinity and identity.”

Williams is a UCLA alumna (BA, American Literature, M.Ed, Teacher Education Program) and is currently a doctoral student in the division of Urban Schooling and a former LAUSD English teacher. She presented, “(Re) Membering and (Re) Claiming Who We Are to Conduct Purposeful Research: A Black Woman’s Inner Journey,” inspired by her travels with the group in Ghana and the opportunity to share community and fellowship with Black women there. She also drew from her experience as a Black teacher, and addressed the lack of representation throughout the teaching fields.

“Black teachers are significantly underrepresented and in many places, serving as the only one in their school or district,” said Williams. “While Black students comprise 14.9% of students enrolled in public schools, Black teachers make up just 7% of K-12 teachers nationally.”

Another AERA Presidential Session brought home the focus of the Annual Meeting, utilizing the voices of those affected the earliest by racism in education: elementary school students. UCLA alumnus Laurence Tan led his 5th grade class at Oakland Academy of Knowledge in a presentation on, “Researching the Reparations in Schools: Urban Youth as Researchers of School Quality,” highlighting a project that was researched and presented by the students themselves. Their study was based on Oakland Unified School District’s Black Reparations Initiative, and explored the students’ findings on the implementation and quality of impact of the initiative in their school, which is located in East Oakland, an area that has been beleaguered by gentrification and corporate chartering of schools.

“Conducting this project with my 5th graders for AERA 2024 in Philly was a transformative experience not only for them, but me as well,” said Tan, who recently appeared with his students on KTVU-FOX to speak about the experience. “Students were able to engage and tackle college level reading and research in the most meaningful ways. I have presented at many AERA sessions, and have also shared space with youth, but this is the first time I have done it with all current 5th graders. This experience was definitely a phenomenal experience and proud moment as we left it all out there for Oakland. What kept them going through all the major moments was the fact that they knew their work and presentation would matter and help make changes for their community of Oakland, and beyond.”

Theme chosen by AERA 2023-2024 President Tyrone C. Howard leads annual meeting, featuring a spotlight on UCLA innovative research on issues of race in education.

AERA 24: UCLA Scholars Address Racial Injustice, New Opportunities for Equality

 As a former school counselor, Ifeanyi Onyejiji understands and supports the push for students to learn core academic subjects, such as English, mathematics, and science.  He believes educational equity requires an intense focus on academic learning for low-income students of color, and student success in core content areas is critical to college readiness and career opportunities.  

But as he worked with students, Onyejiji came to wonder if maybe for them, understanding and believing in the ‘why’ of studying specific academic subjects was as important as what they were learning.  

“Sometimes the connection to why this stuff is relevant is very important to students. It can help if students believe, ‘I'm going to use this to go to college, or maybe to one day have this career.’ The belief that ‘I need this subject to do that,’ can be a great connection to the materials and also increase intrinsic motivation,” Onyejiji says.  

As a student in the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies Educational Leadership Program, Onyejiji drew on his thinking about the importance of ‘why’ to forge his dissertation and earn his doctoral degree. His research, summarized in a recent Educational Leadership Program dissertation brief, posits that career confidence is linked to academic performance for low-income students of color.

Onyejiji’s research examined the relationship between career self-efficacy, career aspirations, and school performance for high school students from low-income communities of color. Researchers define self-efficacy as an individual's belief in their capacity to act in the ways necessary to reach specific goals.

For the study, Onyejiji surveyed 145 ninth and tenth-grade students attending a charter high school in Southern California. Two staff members at the school also participated in semi-structured interviews.

The results showed positive associations between career self-efficacy and academic performance for high school students from low-income communities of color—particularly for boys. And, in certain cases, students’ career aspirations can be connected to academic performance.

Students’ career confidence and aspirations are linked to their academic performance: Confidence in their ability to find occupational information is positively correlated with their GPA. There is more evidence of a connection between career self-efficacy and academic performance for boys, and there is a connection between career aspirations and academic performance.

School staff believe that career exploration provides students with purpose: In interviews, staff said they saw a clear purpose and rationale for career exploration programming and believed instruction in core academic content alone is not sufficient to address the challenges facing their students.

“My study focused on career self-efficacy. I believe it's an important element of school. The research shows that students who are intrinsically motivated, perform better,” Onyejiji says. “We as educators need not separate the idea of academic preparation from the things that motivate students to care about academic preparation. Instead, they should be emphasized, just as we emphasize core content.”

Onyejiji believes students need help building those connections and developing that intrinsic motivation, especially Black and Brown students from low-income backgrounds.

“We know there are disparities in achievement, and there are disparities in communities.  For example, some students don’t know any engineers and have no reason to know how or why to become an engineer. They're not getting that information at home or in their community, so the school should be helping them with that.

“And so, I would ask every school, every educator, every school district, what are you doing to help students become intrinsically motivated?” 

Onyejiji’s research brief offers educators recommendations to help make that happen. He urges education leaders to support career self-efficacy and soft-skill development, implement specific programming for boys, and incorporate career counseling and encouragement into graduation requirements.

Onyejiji also believes that programming that promotes career self-efficacy should be required, and he suggests policymakers establish career self-efficacy as a standard for K–12 schooling.

Since earning his doctorate from the UCLA Educational Leadership Program in 2023, Onyejiji has worked as an educational consultant delivering workshops that help students of color from low-income backgrounds prepare for college and that train teachers in the use of inclusive student-centered teaching practices. He has also started a new company developing curriculum promoting college readiness—this work draws on his research on the need to motivate students and expands on the ideas to include career exploration.

“The UCLA Educational Leadership Program was a great opportunity for me to expand my knowledge, expertise, and capabilities so I can be a better advocate for this issue. It gave me a spark and helped me to sharpen my toolbox for what I want to do.“ 

“Everything I'm doing now, it's all about inclusivity, it’s all about engaging and motivating students.  Once a student has that intrinsic motivation, they're different, they require less touch. Even if they don't know something, they'll figure it out because they have that confidence.”

In his ELP Dissertation Brief, Ifeanyi Onyejiji underscores how career confidence linked to academic performance for students of color.

ELP Brief: The "Why" of Schooling

Amid a persistent and growing teacher shortage crisis in California, a new study from the UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools (CTS) makes clear the state’s rural border counties face significant challenges to teacher development, recruitment, and retention, illuminating the profound impact that geographic, social, economic, and educational factors have on the teacher supply in rural parts of the state.  Among recommendations for addressing the challenges, the report recommends California’s community colleges play an expanded role in teacher education in rural counties.

“Teacher education deserts are a barren landscape for teacher recruitment and retention,” said Kai Mathews, UCLA CTS California Educator Diversity Project Director and lead author of the report. “By isolating rural communities from a qualified educator pipeline, these deserts cultivate an unending cycle of teacher turnover, underprepared instructors, and ultimately, stunted student potential. This educational disparity is a physical barrier that shines a light on the inequity inherent in our infrastructure. We have an opportunity and a duty here to creatively collaborate to level the odds and ensure that all students, regardless of zip code, have access to the qualified teachers they deserve.”

The report, “California’s Teacher Education Deserts: An Overlooked & Growing Equity Challenge,” profiles nine counties in which the office of education is over 60 miles away from the nearest teacher education program: ​​Alpine, Del Norte, Imperial, Inyo, Lassen, Modoc, Mono, Sierra, and Siskiyou. Indicating a shortage of teachers and the difficulties schools have in hiring and retaining fully prepared teachers, eight of nine of the counties have rates of underprepared teachers that exceed the average in California and higher rates of those teaching outside of their authorized subject field. The report highlights geographic location, numbers of teachers with substandard teaching credentials, poverty rates, academic test scores, school stability rates, and education attainment rates to suggest their cumulative impacts on teacher recruitment and retention.

Accompanying the report, an interactive map provides K-12 data for each of California’s 58 counties, statewide underprepared teacher rates, and the locations of teacher education programs and community colleges statewide. The map demonstrates the impact of community colleges being permitted to provide teaching credentials to non-teacher residents already possessing a bachelor’s degree, which would benefit five out of the nine desert counties. 

 “This report delineates the importance of a better understanding of the geography of opportunity—the ways in which the physical location and spatial distribution of resources and services affect individuals’ social and economic prospects—in the preparation of teachers in California,” said Cecilia Rios-Aguilar, Professor of Education and Department Chair at UCLA’s School of Education & Information Studies, and a research affiliate of Wheelhouse: The Center for the Community College Leadership and Research at UC Davis.

 “Without careful consideration, attention, and intention directed toward these locations, California may inadvertently perpetuate inequities within the educational system. The report offers concrete and significant recommendations to bridge the gaps between teacher supply and demand in the state. The authors’ recommendations focus on the role of resources, relationships, collaboration, and communication among various sectors and their actors, including the potential for the state’s community colleges to play a larger role in teacher preparation. Teachers play a crucial role in shaping students’ learning trajectories. Now is the time to reaffirm our commitment to communities that have traditionally been overlooked in policy efforts and reforms.”

Nearly all of the counties have rates exceeding the state average of teachers with substandard or uncleared credentials or those who are teaching out of their authorized subject field, indicating that districts in these areas are facing challenges in hiring fully credentialed and prepared teachers to fill vacancies. 

All nine counties share part of their border with either another state or with Mexico and experience higher teacher vacancy rates. Teacher candidates are more likely to leave rural counties for more urban or suburban counties–potentially even crossing state borders–in search of more opportunities for upward mobility. Rural counties also tend to be more politically polarized, creating stressful work environments for teachers. A 2022 statewide survey of teachers commissioned by UCLA’s Center for the Transformation of Schools found that “political and ideological attacks” are one of the top three reasons that teachers would consider leaving the profession.

Two-thirds of the counties have higher than state average high school completion rates, but lower than average bachelor’s degree completion rates, suggesting that the majority of local teacher candidates are not returning to teach in their county of origin after leaving to pursue postsecondary education and credentialing.

Nearly all of the counties have poverty rates exceeding the state average of 12%, some nearing 20%. Schools in communities experiencing high rates of poverty tend to provide lower salaries and fewer benefits for educators. Research shows that college graduates who come from low-income families are less likely to return to their community to work. 

All nine counties are performing below the state average on English Language Arts and Mathematics standardized test scores, with the exception of Mono County in Mathematics. Low-performing schools require increased workloads for teachers, and are less likely to attract and retain high-quality teachers.

Stability Rates and Numbers of Foster Students

All nine counties have lower school stability rates and higher rates of foster students compared to state averages. The impermanence of foster care combined with the seasonal nature of migrant farm work in these highly agricultural regions are potential causes of school instability. 

School instability can result in poor academic performance and negative school climates, which can impact teacher recruitment and retention. 

The report concludes with recommendations for addressing teacher supply issues in these regions including: financial support for underprepared and under-credentialed teachers to complete coursework and credentials; mentorship, training and professional development for educators; community college credentialing; increasing DEI efforts in teacher recruitment; and marketing efforts to support recruitment. 

“This research offers the state’s policymakers and education leaders new insight into the challenges confronting California’s teaching supply and the harmful impact the persistent shortage of teachers has on rural communities and the students they serve,” said, Annamarie Francois, Associate Dean of Public Engagement at the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies.

“California needs to act now to make the state’s teaching deserts bloom."

The report and interactive map will be available online on April 23 on the UCLA CTS website at https://transformschools.ucla.edu/research/californias-teacher-education-deserts/and https://transformschools.ucla.edu/teacher-education-desert-map/. 

The authors will present the report at a panel discussion with invited speakers in a webinar on April 23 at 12 p.m PT. To attend, RSVP at https://ucla.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_sBtV1HdVRSuVFjlTqC7yKw#/registration. 

Funding for the research has been provided by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the William + Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Teacher Education “Deserts” Have a Profound Impact on Teacher Development, Recruitment and Retention in California’s Rural Counties

New study by the UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools Identifies
Nine Rural California Counties as Teacher Education “Deserts”

Four students from the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies (SEIS) have been honored by the UCLA Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) with the UCLA EDI Student Leadership Award, in recognition of exceptional leadership in work that aligns with and contributes to the EDI Office’s mission and priorities. Among seven winners from across UCLA disciplines are SEIS PhD candidates Sonya Brooks and Cameron Burris-Greene; EdD candidate Hernando Sevilla-Garcia; and Education and Social Transformation major Satema Lopez.

Brooks is a UCLA alumna (’19, BA, History), on her way to becoming a triple Bruin. She is on track to earn her master’s in public health in 2025 and plans to defend her doctoral dissertation in the Urban Schooling in 2026. She also holds her master’s of science degree in education policy from Brown University. Brooks currently serves as vice president of the Graduate Student Association, and as a member on the boards of the UC Graduate and Professional Students’ Council, the UCLA Alumni Association, the UCLA Black Alumni Association, and the Coordinating Committee on Graduate Affairs from the Office of the President. In addition, Brooks is currently president of the Black Graduate Student Association.

UCLA alumna Sonya Brooks ('19, BA, History) is on track to become a triple Bruin, with her MPH and PhD in Urban Schooling.

“I knew that to pursue my desire to change systems for the betterment of all, UCLA was the avenue in which to do it,” she says. “Diversity is the reason why UCLA is the best university in the world, and because I began my academic journey here, I wanted to conclude it here as well. Even after graduating from an Ivy League school, the education and opportunities UCLA has provided me are bar none! Thus, my commitment to ensuring and building upon the excellence in diversity at SEIS and UCLA is unyielding.”

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