UCLA Center for Community Schooling: Creating Persistent Community
Victoria Amador is a college success story. In 2020, she graduated from California State University, Los Angeles with a bachelor’s degree in communications, four years after enrolling. She is also a bit of an anomaly, one of a small percentage of low-income minority students who manage to graduate from college within six years. Nationally, just a little over one-quarter (27%) of students from similar backgrounds do the same.
Before she attended college, Amador attended UCLA Community School in the Koreatown neighborhood of Los Angeles. The school was created a little over 10 years ago, with the idea of establishing a site of public scholarship truly rooted in and engaged with the students, families and residents of the community. Today, it is a highly recognized K-12 university-assisted community school whose innovations and practices not only serve its local community, but are helping to reshape primary and secondary education in California. It is also working to align those practices in ways that strengthen the pipeline and open the doors to fuller participation in the state’s system of higher education for students that have traditionally been less likely to attend and graduate from college. The UCLA Community School takes great pride in the learning opportunities it provides and the pervasive sense of caring, community and inclusion that is central to its character. Its efforts have yielded a strong college-going culture, with more than 80 percent of students immediately enrolling in college upon graduation from high school.
In addition to her close connection to her family, Amador credits the school and its tight knit community for her own sense of purpose and belonging saying, “it’s the reason I am who I am.”
But even among the graduates of UCLA Community School, Amador’s college degree remains an achievement that is all too rare. Creating Persistent Community, a new UCLA study examining the schools’ first cohort of graduates from the Class of 2014, finds that less than one-third (31%) of community school graduates, virtually all of whom are ethnic minorities from low- income backgrounds, graduated from college within six years of enrolling.
“Our research shows us the UCLA community school is preparing almost all of its students to leave school with a strong post-secondary plan. And most of them, more than 80%, enroll the fall immediately after graduation,” said Karen Hunter Quartz, director of the UCLA Center for Community Schooling and research director for UCLA Community School. “We also see higher than average persistence rates from the first to the second year of college.
“But it is also evident that they are not persisting through graduation at the levels we would hope to see. The rate of persistence isvery average, very similar to their peers across the country. While the school has prepared them to enter, once they get there, they are not finding the support necessary to persist,” Quartz adds
Despite the best efforts of UCLA Community School and others, the harsh reality remains that students like Amador and her peers in low-income neighborhoods across the country are confronted by economic hardships, institutional racism and other inequities and barriers that undermine their path to the successful completion of college.
The question is, what can be done about it? How can K-12 schools, colleges and universities increase and strengthen the capacity of students to persist? To begin the effort to understand how, the UCLA study examines longitudinal research regarding the preparation, enrollment and persistence of UCLA Community School students to attend and complete college. The researchers also conducted in-depth interviews with alumni and developed portraits of persistence highlighting the experiences and lessons learned of several students like Amador who found ways to graduate from college. The report also analyzes the role of K-12 alumni support programs and the capacity of secondary schools to offer and sustain these supports, and how schools can better broker access to college support programs such as the CSU’s Education Opportunity Program (EOP) Educational Opportunity Program.
“Our research shows that first-generation college going students need overlapping networks of support. We call it persistent community,” Quartz said.
The researchers define a persistent community as one that builds and sustains the relationships and resources that affirm students’ sense of belonging, community cultural wealth, and agency from kindergarten through college graduation. And family is key.
“We know the families of first-generation college students play an important role in supporting their college aspirations and enrollment,” Quartz said. “Yet so little attention has been given to the role of family in supporting these students once in college. We need to build and honor familial capital as the foundation that supports students to enter, persist, and complete college.”
Their research bears Quartz and her UCLA colleagues out. In surveys with UCLA Community School seniors, students pointed to affordability and problems with documentation of immigration status as concerns as they headed tocollege. But they also underscoredthe importance of family. The role of family and living close to home were important influences in students’ college choices, with 60% of seniors reporting that their parents wanting them to attend a particular college was somewhat or very important. Similarly, almost two-thirds (63%) of UCLA-CS seniors reported that living close to home was important to their collegechoice–much higher than the 25% of students nationally who report the same. UCLA-CS alumni also said their families (parents, siblings, and extended family members) play a variety of roles while they navigate higher education. This includes offering moral encouragement, motivational and inspirational support, economic support, and navigational guidance.
As more students from minoritized racial/ethnic, low-income, and immigrant-origin groups enter higher education, both K–12 and postsecondary schools must recognize and tap into their familial capital.
“Too often, I think in our individualistic culture, we push for students to be on their own and move away from home and break the ties with their parents and families,” Quartz said. “And that just isn’t the case with the students that we’re following. Their families are their bedrock. Their families get them through.”
Another piece of that persistent community needs to be colleges themselves. The researchers urge higher education leaders to celebrate and expand programs like the CSU’s EOP Program or the Academic Advancement Program at the University of California that do a really good job at holding on to kids until they graduate from college.K-12 systems and schools also need to work more closely with colleges to align their efforts to amplify and expand those supports in ways that better connect with and serve students.
The research report, “Creating Persistent Community: The Challenge of Aligning Supports for First-Generation College-going Students,” is a project of the UCLA Center for Community Schooling.
The report authors include Karen Hunter Quartz, Ariana Dimagiba, Sidronio Jacobo, Marco A. Murillo and Victoria Amador. The full report and recommendations can be found online at this link.
For the full story, visit the Sudikoff Public Forum website.
Above: Courtesy of the Alliance for Excellent Education