TheBURDEN ofExcellence The struggle to establish the Preuss School UCSD and a call for urban Educational Field Stations Cecil Lytle Preuss School UCSD Ranked #6 in the Nation! —Newsweek’s 2008 Top U.S. High Schools The Burden of Excellence The Burden of Excellence The struggle to establish the Preuss School UCSD and a call for urban Educational Field Stations by Cecil Lytle Plowshare Media la jolla, california Copyright © 2008 by Cecil Lytle All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Control Number: 2010924042 Lytle, Cecil The Burden of Excellence ISBN: 978-0-615-20746-9 First Printing May 2008 Second Printing September 2010 Published by RELS Press, a non-profit imprint of: Plowshare Media P.O. Box 278 La Jolla, CA 92038 rels.ucsd.edu PUBLISHER’S NOTE Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the author. For information about permission to reproduce selections of this book, contact: Permissions, Plowshare Media, P.O. Box 278, La Jolla, CA 92038 or visit PLOWSHAREMEDIA.COM To all of the women, men, and children who believe that making change for the better is the reason we were put here on earth. Contents Preface...…ix I. Campus and Conscience……1 II. Anatomy of an Argument……13 III. Death by a Thousand Committees……37 IV. Enter the White House……63 V. Ashes, Ashes……83 VI. Preuss School UCSD……101 Acknowledgements...…137 vii Preface Like most trends, the national clash over affirmative action began in California. The epicenter was the race and gender con- sciousness in the admissions policy of the University of California (UC). The 1978 Regents of the University of California v. Bakke United States Supreme Court decision allowed the university to continue preferential admissions policies for African Ameri- cans and Latinos, but without quotas. It was a decision without a conclusion, a legal and semantic conundrum. Opposition to af- firmative action in UC admissions continued to mount in direct proportion to the competition for seats in the freshman class at the most selective UC campuses. A generation later in 2005, the clash came to pit two seemingly virtuous principles against one another: the liberal instincts of the faculty and administration for a well-educated, diverse populace and the conservative kidnapping of the jargon of fairness on behalf of beleaguered, affluent whites and Asians, sensing slippage in their paths to opportunity in a state once thought to be forever golden. An uneasy truce settled over the state as standardized test scores and high school grade point averages inexorably became the overarching criteria determining merit and admission to the University of California. The anti-affirmative action movement in California was led by African American businessman Ward Connerly, a UC regent appointed by Republican Governor Pete Wilson. Theirs was a two- step process: first in 1995, Wilson and Connerly led the University ix of California regents to narrowly pass a resolution, Special Provi- sion 1 (SP-1), that forbade the use of race or gender in the univer- sity’s admissions process. SP-1 was carefully crafted and aimed to unabashedly cut off any liberal-leaning contrivances that might include considerations of race or gender in the UC admissions process. Each word, line, paragraph, and section anticipated and choked off the future creation of any possible loopholes around the regulation. It passed by a relatively narrow 14-10 vote, with 1 abstention. This new university provision was coupled with Execu- tive Order W-124-95, signed by Governor Pete Wilson to, “End preferential treatment and to promote individual opportunity based on merit.” Here, for the first time, was clear evidence that the opponents of affirmative action were beginning to put in place contravening regulatory structures that would systematically do what the Bakke decision had failed to do, namely, eliminate affir- mative action from the UC admissions process. The following year, during the national election that saw Cal- ifornia turn to Bill Clinton by a 2-to-1 margin, Wilson and Con- nerly engineered the passage of statewide Proposition 209 which disallowed any consideration of race or gender in governmental matters. Their campaign aimed to vouchsafe opportunity and ad- vancement for citizens immediately positioned to exploit them. It did not, however, address how a sympathetic government or its universities might help equalize the doorways and playing fields available to youngsters not given a head start by their parents, schools, and race. As the University of California faced the twenty-first century, the institution stood mute regarding its capability and responsibil- ity to help the multitude of young people whose families could not overcome the historical disadvantages of their compromised socio-economic circumstances and race. Several of the campuses sought different methods to enroll students from groups that were historically underrepresented in the freshman class. Richard Atkinson, newly elected president of the University of California after the passage of SP-1, in 1995, x suffered a very public spanking from Governor Wilson after men- tioning that he thought that the anti-affirmative action provision was only advisory. Most initial attempts by the campuses sought to circumvent the new exclusionary policy by asserting a “compre- hensive review” of UC applications in the hope of adding extra ad- mission points for personal attributes characterizing disadvantage in order to help tilt the admissions game enough to make more disadvantaged youngsters eligible for admission. Despite this “thumb on the scale” approach, the effort failed to enroll a significant number of high school graduates from disadvantaged backgrounds. UC campuses with less rigorous academic requirements and reputations took in most of the few African American and Latino students admitted under the “com- prehensive review” scheme. It remained the case, however, that the more rigorous academic admissions requirements for Berkeley, UCLA, and UC San Diego prohibited enrollment of sizeable num- bers of students of color deemed eligible even after “comprehen- sive review.” During the years immediately following SP-1, enrollment of Latino and African American students dropped by one-third to one-half, depending on the campus. Reasons for the decline centered on three theories. First, many felt that minority students were put off by the affirmative action debate and simply chose not to apply. A second notion claimed that even after minority stu- dents were accepted, the actual yield rate among these students fell away due to attractive admit offers from selective private universi- ties. Yet others believed that the elimination of affirmative action simply made fewer low-income minority students eligible. There is some truth in each of these explanations for the decline in minor- ity enrollments. UC San Diego was in the most precarious position of all the ten general campuses regarding diversity. The absence of big-time football and basketball, as well as the urban attractions of the Bay Area and Los Angeles, made the scenic La Jolla campus less attrac- tive and less relevant to low-income urban high school graduates. xi Those precious few competitively eligible minority students from the inner city were heavily recruited by the elite private universi- ties. If these students preferred one of the highly selective state universities, they would most often choose the urban settings of UCLA or Berkeley over San Diego. The establishment of the Preuss School UCSD, a college pre- paratory charter school on the UCSD campus, was the beginning of the fulfillment of a commitment to the preservation of the twin virtues of academic excellence and social responsibility. The model school we wished to build would serve as an example of what the future of urban education could be. This initiative aimed to prop- erly identify and attack the root causes of disparity in educational outcomes. Despite enthusiastic support from the targeted communi- ties, the effort met with surprisingly stiff opposition from the UCSD faculty. That opposition centered on three concerns: Was the running of such an on-campus charter school within the mis- sion of the university? Were children from poor disadvantaged backgrounds capable of overcoming educational deficits to achieve academic excellence? And, were the costs too high? The very public argument over eliminating affirmative ac- tion in California was an ugly debate that pitted one race against another. Despite the high-minded rhetoric about racial neutrality, whites and Asians felt, with good reason, that the admission of underqualified blacks and Latinos would occur at the expense of their group’s opportunities. The effort to establish an on-campus secondary charter school dedicated to preparing low-income students of color for college took place amid the idyllic and poly- syllabic polite parlance of a public research university. This local debate is an aspect of the broader national debate over race, class, and privilege. Underneath the superb speeches and numerous faculty votes, however, raged the ancient struggle between the “haves” and “have nots.” This is the story of that struggle. xii Chapter One Campus and Conscience The Land-Grant Gift From their start in the early 1960s, the undergraduate colleg- es at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) grew along the path of Gilman Drive, a serpentine tree-lined road hugging the cliffs of La Jolla with stunning Pacific overlooks. As the campus developed over the next four decades, Gilman came to divide the gray stone monolithic buildings of the School of Medicine from the remnant Quonset huts and barracks of Camp Matthews, an old military base hastily erected by the United States Marines right after the attack on Pearl Harbor.