As students trickle into Room 11 at Corinne A. Seeds University
Elementary School, their faces light up.
They are starting their day at a unique school, though an
unassuming onlooker might not know it.
A foursome of girls sits purposefully at a table, drawing with
crayons and cutting paper hearts.
A group of boys run past their teacher en route to wooden
building blocks across the room.
Laurie Ramirez, chatting with parents and observing, takes it
all in.
Ramirez teaches 5 to 7-year olds at UCLA’s on-campus
elementary school, tucked away between the Anderson School of
Business and Sunset Boulevard, a blip on the campus map many
don’t even know exists.
It seems like any other elementary school, though its upscale
facilities, large campus and extensive staff distinguish it from
less fortunate schools in other parts of Los Angeles.
UES is different. It is a laboratory school ““ a mix of
elementary education and research, a teaching triangle of
sorts.
The researchers learn from the kids, the kids learn from their
teachers, and the teachers learn from and collaborate with the
researchers about how to better their practice in the
classroom.
It is a school where everyone teaches everyone else.
“The way I describe teaching here to people is it’s
like teaching in a fishbowl,” Ramirez said. “Although
it makes it different, it also requires us to always do our best.
There’s never a day off, which is tiring at times, but always
very rewarding.”
Ramirez grew up in Brentwood, and went to college at UC Santa
Barbara and Cal State Northridge before settling in West Los
Angeles. She has a son named Zeke, 4, and a daughter Mardell, 7,
who goes to UES.
As she gathers the students together to start class, they sit
down to sing a welcome song.
“Good morning, I’m feeling good today. And when I
feel this way it makes me want to say … hooray!” they
sing.
A bright-eyed, brown-haired girl joins the group, immediately
participating in an ensuing discussion.
“Can we all say good morning to Beth? She came in a little
late,” Ramirez asks.
“Good morning, Beth.”
The school was established in 1882 as a training institute for
the state’s public school teachers. It became part of the
University of California when the state Legislature established the
Southern Branch of the UC ““ which would eventually be UCLA
““ in 1919, and moved to its current site on UCLA’s
campus in 1947.
UES’s own campus is lush, with buildings arranged around
grassy hills, trees and ivy.
Today, it is a center of learning for more than just its
students as the official “demonstration school” of
UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information
Studies.
Ramirez, who had taught at two other schools before UES, said
she found the notion of being observed by researchers
appealing.
“To work here and to reflect on your practice and
constantly be growing, it’s a very rewarding place to
work,” she said.
Neither private nor public, the school’s costs are
partially subsidized by the university, and student tuition pays
for the rest, though 50-60 percent of students are on some sort of
financial aid.
CONNECT, an organization within the graduate school, acts as the
liaison between the research world and the elementary school.
It houses a handful of faculty and students who do research at
UES, investigating everything from playground relationships to the
effectiveness of computer programs in assisting learning.
Anyone who wants to research at UES has to go through
CONNECT.
Frederick Erickson, director of CONNECT, said the school is
designed as a model of what a good elementary school should be,
demonstrating to others the practices that make a school most
successful.
He rattles off a variety of statistics: 85 percent of students
who start at UES stay until they graduate and go to another school,
and 95 percent of students are in the top 25 percentile in math and
reading.
“That’s what every school ought to look like and
they don’t. You’ve got all these disaster stories …
(but) when you provide a school with adequate resources, they do
fine,” he said.
“It’s about being a lighthouse for good practice.
There are very few places like this in the country.”
Asking someone at UES about the reasons for such success yields
many answers.
Don Steiner, director of UES academic and administrative
affairs, said the school’s non-traditional approaches to
education are part of the school’s success.
The school has kids from ages 4-12, and separates them in age
groups instead of grades, combining students as far as two years
apart in age in the same classroom.
Steiner said you won’t see rows of desks in any UES
classrooms with teachers lecturing in front, and that the school is
not “textbook-driven.” Instead, they use a variety of
methods to “make the curricular piece of the school alive for
children.”
Ramirez sees the school’s greatest asset as its teachers
and the teaching methods which encourage students to think
critically at an early age and allow them to “choose their
own research questions.”
“As a teacher, the children have a love of learning. They
want to come to school in the morning. They feel this is their
environment, this is their community, and they get to excel
here,” she said.
Asked what “UES” stands for, one boy blurts out,
“UCLA!”
He may have a point.
In many ways, the school is a mini university within a
university. It has its own outreach coordinator and director of
admissions. It has psychological services, a communications office
and a campus with a maze of buildings surrounded by steel fences.
Each class has a full-time teaching assistant.
UES’s distinctiveness is especially apparent in the
students themselves.
Ramirez explains that UES’s diverse student population is
engineered so that the student body closely mirrors the population
of California in such areas as race and socioeconomic status, which
allows researchers to apply their findings to other California
schools.
“That’s the idea, to do something here and
generalize those results,” Ramirez said.
The school uses a specialized and specific admissions process,
during which parents submit applications for their children, who
are subsequently screened based on several factors, the two major
ones being annual household income and race.
“Many independent schools have issues of diversity. We
don’t have that problem here,” Steiner said.
Erickson also makes it very clear what the primary purpose of
UES is: research.
“All families understand that research is a primary
purpose of the school,” he said.
But the school’s roots in research and selective admission
practices have not been without controversy.
In the 1999 case Hunter v. The Regents of the University of
California, the parent of a student who was denied admittance to
UES sued the UC Regents, alleging UES’s race-based admissions
violated California Constitution, which states preferential
treatment based on race cannot be used in the “operation of
public education.”
The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the
university, arguing that the school’s admission policies
serve a “compelling governmental interest,” calling UES
a “research-oriented elementary school dedicated to improving
the quality of education in urban public schools.”
The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review a subsequent appeal of
the circuit court’s decision.
Ramirez said some parents have expressed concern when approached
with the notion of their children as research subjects, but assures
that care is taken to make sure any research is beneficial to both
the child and the teachers.
“It’s really done in a way that enhances
practice,” Ramirez said.
UES is also involved in a variety of outreach efforts,
organizing “institutes” where they share their research
findings and train teachers already in the field.
“We’re usually about 15 years ahead of the
game,” said Sharon Sutton, coordinator of outreach and
technology.
Ramirez said though she would idealistically like to end up in a
public school, the outreach justifies being at UES.
Despite its many distinguishing characteristics, shades of a
regular old elementary school are everywhere.
One girl in Ramirez’s class, a 7-year old named Iris, said
her favorite thing to do at school is ““ predictably ““
recess, accompanying her answer with a slight smile.
Julian, 6, echoing a similar sentiment, said his favorite
activity is “playing on the blacktop.”
As for his teacher?
“She’s really cool,” he said.