College Prep from Day One

If you were a parent in Santa Ana, Calif., you wouldn't necessarily dream big dreams for your kids. The town is poor, 91% Hispanic, out of the mainstream. With luck, the kids will get high school diplomas, maybe a couple of years in community college. University? Out of the question. But what if the university wanted your kids and reached out to make sure they got in?

Meet Angie Contreras and Leslie Morales. The seventh-graders are standing beside each other only because their counselor, Patrick Yrarrazaval-Correa, has pulled them out of the lunchtime crowd at Santa Ana's Willard Middle School, in the shadow of the University of California at Irvine. "They don't like each other," Yrarrazaval-Correa says. "You know how middle school is." But the girls are his example of a new era. They used to be C and D math students. Now, after months at the math academy run by U.C. Irvine students at Willard, they are getting A's and B's and are ready for eighth-grade algebra, a prerequisite for the high school math courses necessary for college.

In nonwhite, non-Asian minority communities across California, college prep is beginning younger and younger. It is a legacy of Proposition 209, which ended affirmative action in California, and a reaction to the prospect of Hispanics' and blacks' vanishing from state campuses.

Until 1996, U.C. Irvine relied on affirmative action to keep its conscience clear. The programmed trickle of acceptances helped 5% of local Hispanic students get into the U.C. campus. It was politically correct but mostly cosmetic. Stephen Carroll, a senior researcher at the Rand Corp., notes that percentages of blacks and Hispanics on California college campuses actually dropped under the old policy: "I am skeptical that affirmative action accomplished a heck of a lot for minorities." Even defenders concede its faults. "I think it was coming close to leading us to a quota system," says U.C. Irvine chancellor Ralph Cicerone.

There is nothing token about the new outreach programs. They are not remedial but creative, even difficult. Dick and Jane have been replaced by Antigone and Pericles. Middle-school math tutorials go on for hours and progress to higher algebra. SAT drills are constant, and college essays are rewritten many times. "Its a huge difference," says U.C. Irvine student tutor Sonia Velazquez. "Kids know when it's remedial and they're being talked down to, no matter how nice you put it." But to be in the outreach program means to be special, bright, even cool. When Willard held sign-ups for its math academy, a program that meant spending all Saturday morning at school, the library was swamped as 90 kids fought for 60 spots.

For their children to be part of the math academies, parents have to commit to 4-hr. Saturday-morning sessions of U.C. Irvine's Parent Academy. There they are coached in what classes their kids need to get into college, how to gauge SAT scores and how to apply for financial aid. "These programs help parents have self-esteem, feel proud," says Mel Pelayo, a computer-network administrator who left school in third grade. "I didn't go to college, but I'm not a loser. I can help my kids."

"We should have been doing this before," says Cicerone. "209 pushed us to go harder and faster." University and local school officials agree they're doing now what they should have done all along--honing verbal and math skills, preparing students to take advanced classes and tests like the SATs. "People can talk about tests being biased, but that's not going to fly anymore," says Santa Ana school superintendent Al Mijares. "No longer should we expect extra points for skin color and ZIP code."

Still, U.C. Irvine's major programs directly affect only a handful--about 3,500--of Santa Ana's 50,000 students; 80% of students still test below the mean in reading and 70% below in math. "You've got to be strategic and pick your classrooms," U.C. Irvine English professor Julia Lupton laments. "There are a lot of kids not getting reached." It would be difficult enough to get them to qualify under affirmative action, when schools could dip into lower test rungs to get promising students. With the end of those programs, however, the kids must slug it out in a highly competitive top-down system, with only the very best, across the board, getting into a U.C. campus. "We're talking about pushing kids to a 1200 SAT and 3.7. That's maybe three B's allowed," says Juan Lara, director of Irvine's Center for Educational Partnerships, which runs the outreach program. "209 has set up Harvard or Stanford admission standards for a public university."

It will be a decade before the success of outreach programs can be evaluated. And in the interim, there will be the sad stories of children caught too late or missed just as the system changed. But there will also be stories like that of Raynaldo Ramos. The nine-year-old immigrated a few years ago from Mexico. No English was spoken in his troubled and poor home, and his limited language skills made for low grades. But last fall, six student tutors from the U.C. Irvine English program came to his fourth-grade classroom. The teacher, Marisol Duarte, saw only subtle changes at first. But two months later, when the kids wrote their final poems of the term, Raynaldo's reading had jumped from first- to third-grade level. And his poem had the glow of a prayer: "...the beauty of the hand of God/ never let go of my mother and father/ of the silver night/ of the city so quiet and the birds singing like diamonds." "It's powerful," his teacher says. "Now it's not even college as a choice but as a given."