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Astor on ‘Contagion’ of School Shootings

Social Welfare Professor Ron Avi Astor, an authority on school violence, spoke to media outlets in the United States and abroad after a mass shooting at a Nashville school that left three 9-year-olds and three adults dead. Astor told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that the world is exhausted at what feels like a never-ending string of tragedies targeting children. Even as new research shows that day-to-day violence on school campuses has declined, mass shootings are on the rise. “I think what we’re experiencing right now, worldwide, is a contagion,” Astor said. People who tend to be suicidal and obsessed with firearms are “actually trying to break records and create a sense of terror in society and perhaps the world so that their names will be remembered.” Astor also spoke to Reuters, The 19th and Voice of America Eurasia (around minute 48) on topics including the Nashville shooter’s profile and the need to adopt safety measures without creating a militarized environment on campuses.


 

Zepeda-Millán on What’s Ahead for LAUSD

Chris Zepeda-Millán, associate professor of public policy, spoke to the Daily News about labor issues at the Los Angeles Unified School District and the road ahead for Superintendent Alberto Carvalho. After a three-day strike, LAUSD reached a contract with service workers including bus drivers, custodians, cafeteria workers and instructional aides. Now the district must negotiate a settlement with the teachers union, which has the upper hand, said Zepeda-Millán, chair of UCLA’s labor studies program. “The district knows [the unions] can shut [schools] down pretty easily,” he said. “That’s going to be in the back of both teams’ minds as they’re negotiating.” If successful,  the negotiations could strengthen the superintendent’s influence. “Carvalho has a chance to say, ‘I’m going to do things differently this time and let’s show the state and the country that if we have well-paid teachers, smaller class sizes — what all the research says works — we could have great public schools again,’” he said.


 

Astor on Reimagining School Safety

Ron Avi Astor, professor of social welfare, co-authored an article on reimagining school safety for the American Federation of Teachers. Adapted from a chapter in the book “Our Children Can’t Wait: The Urgency of Reimagining Education Policy in America,” the article focuses on the aftereffects of the COVID-19 pandemic and recent forms of racial activism within the K-12 education spectrum. Astor and co-author Heather Reynolds promote creating sustainable systems and infrastructure to combat inequities within higher education. Through implementing mental health and student outreach resources, schools can address ongoing issues with victimization across campuses. For change to happen, there must be “a shift of funding and support from policing, punishment and surveillance to long-term investments in holistic prevention and empowerment of schools and communities,” the authors write.


 

‘No Child Should Be Killed by Going to School’

Social Welfare Professor Ron Avi Astor spoke to the Santa Rosa Press Democrat after a 16-year-old student was stabbed to death during a classroom fight at a Sonoma County high school. While the nation has seen an increase in mass shootings on campuses, school violence more broadly has declined by more than 50% over the past two decades, Astor said. But he added, “Our norms are that this shouldn’t happen at all. No child should be killed by going to school.” Research on school violence often focuses on firearms, not knives and stabbings, he said. “It’s a concern because almost every child has access to a knife.” Tracking and analyzing data is key to understanding what interventions and policies work, said Astor, whose research has shown that providing schools with resources including school psychologists, restorative justice programs and more extracurricular opportunities for students has helped reduce day-to-day violence on campuses across California.


 

The Trials — and Triumphs — of Rosina Becerra For almost 50 years as a professor and academic leader, she has taken on whatever challenges UCLA has asked of her

By Les Dunseith

Dedicated. Self-sacrificing. Hard-working. Underappreciated.

These are words often used to describe America’s social workers — individuals who sacrifice of themselves to provide the safety net for people in need in places like schools, hospitals, mental health facilities and family services agencies.

People like Rosina Becerra.

For 48 of UCLA Social Welfare’s 75 years, she’s been conducting research, teaching and taking on a daunting series of sometimes-thankless administrative challenges in a relentless pursuit of making things better.

Becerra has overseen the field faculty. She’s been a department chair (for more than one department) and a dean. She was a vice provost and a vice chancellor. She has run academic centers and served as a chief financial officer. She’s been a personal mentor to hundreds.

Even after joining the ranks of emeriti professors in 2016, Becerra hasn’t stopped helping out at UCLA. She is a member of the Board of Governors with the Faculty Club. She is president of the executive board for the UCLA Emeriti Association. She served on the campuswide COVID-19 Task Force. She is a special assistant to the vice chancellor for academic personnel.  She’s also helping to plan Social Welfare’s 75th anniversary celebration.

If there’s a need, Becerra steps up.

Take 1998, for example. When then-Chancellor Albert Carnesale identified diversity as one of the areas demanding immediate attention in his “Strategy for a Great University,” an associate vice chancellor for faculty diversity was sought. Becerra, who came to UCLA in 1975 and was the first Latina at UCLA to be tenured in 1981, was selected.

For five years in that role and another three as vice provost of faculty diversity and development, she was responsible for promoting ethnic and gender equality in a place where many white male professors tended to stay on the job for decades.

“It’s not like running a company —  you can’t just fire people and hire new ones,” said Becerra, stressing that the key to success as an academic leader requires gaining the respect of faculty. “They have to feel like someone’s in charge, you know, and listening, and making sure that things are going to get done.”

Fostering diversity is not quite as difficult in a field like social work that tends to attract workers of color, and UCLA’s Social Welfare program has long been more diverse than UCLA as a whole. An emphasis on diversity was accelerated in recent years at the Luskin School, which today has a full-time and ladder faculty that is 50/50 women and men, and 50% faculty of color. The student body is the most diverse in the University of California system.

Still, change often comes slowly in academia, including within social work education.

“In the past, we were, in many ways, a very cloistered profession,” she said. “We had very strict rules about what the curriculum looked like.”

Society has changed, however, and the profession has been evolving. Social work education is changing, too.

Becerra said, “We still have an accrediting body that’s very strict, but it has loosened up in the sense of broadening what is needed in the profession: How do we begin to look at other types of services and what kinds of skills are needed?”

Today’s students do more research and take a more rigorous analytical approach, she said, and that means “more statistical analysis than we used to have.”

“Whether you’re in health or you’re working with children or you’re working with the elderly or you’re looking at race and ethnicity —  these are all areas of social welfare.”

What has not changed is UCLA’s emphasis not just on social work but on social welfare, which encompasses more of the human condition.

“Whether you’re in health or you’re working with children or you’re working with the elderly or you’re looking at race and ethnicity —  these are all areas of social welfare. We have a broader perspective, and that allows UCLA Social Welfare to attract faculty members with broader, interdisciplinary perspectives.”

Identifying and promoting new approaches served Becerra well in finding solutions to problems during her time as associate dean and then dean from 1986 to 1994 in what was then known as the UCLA School of Social Welfare.

She led the field training program through a time of conflict, she recalled, developing a point system that reassured ladder faculty that the field instructors were carrying a fair load of classroom instruction and other duties.

During her tenure as dean, Los Angeles was beset by racial tensions that erupted in violence. (Read more about Social Welfare’s role in helping the city cope during these difficult times.)

This was also a time of intense economic pressure in higher education.

“UCLA was, I think, $33 million in debt,” she recalled. To survive, it became clear that smaller schools like UCLA Social Welfare would be merged with other degree programs into new entities — a forced combination that few faculty members welcomed.

“I could see the writing on the wall. There was no way we were going to avoid this,” she said.

For social welfare education to continue at UCLA meant merging with urban planning and adding public policy to become the UCLA School of Public Policy and Social Research. But how does that work?

“The argument we laid out was that UCLA is the only department that taught social policy regularly. We taught social policy in child welfare, in mental health and in gerontology. And social policy knowledge was needed in our social service agencies,” she said.

Another thing the three degrees have in common, she thought, was their goal of improving the human condition through policy change.

“The people in public policy are the ones that develop policy. In urban planning, they begin to put some meat on the bones of the policy and figure out how it should be implemented,” Becerra said. “And in social welfare, we implement the policy, and we make it work within the communities and in the institutions.”

She helped the School take its difficult first steps on the path toward what UCLA Luskin is today, but Rosina Becerra knows from firsthand experience that being a university leader is never easy. It takes dedication, sacrifice, hard work, toughness — and perseverance.

Phillips on Benefits of Taking 12th-Grade Math

Meredith Phillips, director of the Los Angeles Education Research Institute at UCLA Luskin, spoke to EdSource about a study she co-authored on the benefits of taking math in the senior year of high school. Researchers who followed the educational journey of Los Angeles Unified School District students over several years found that those who took 12th-grade math were better positioned to enroll and stay in college than those who didn’t. “Some may be approaching senior year math as ‘I don’t enjoy math and I will take other things in my senior year.’ I can relate to that,” Phillips said. “But what the research suggests is that it probably makes sense to take that math class in senior year because it will be helpful in opening doors.” LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho told EdSource that the district plans to “explode the information” on social media and look closely at where to expand and diversify math courses among high schools.


 

$1.4 Million Grant to Bolster ‘Powerful Collective’ Advocating for BIPOC Transgender Sex Workers

UCLA’s Hub for Health Intervention, Policy and Practice (HHIPP) has been awarded a $1.4 million grant to strengthen and support its efforts to unite sex workers and their advocates with academic investigators, health care providers and social services agencies. Over a four-year period, the grant will benefit research and community-based programming for Sex Work LEARN (Lived Experience Affirming Research Network), a multisector alliance that does not presume sex work is a problem to be solved. The project will focus on transgender women with sex work experience who identify as Black, indigenous or other persons of color. Principal investigator Ayako Miyashita Ochoa, an adjunct professor and co-director of HHIPP, said collaborators will include Social Welfare doctoral students Kimberly Fuentes and Vanessa Warri, and the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law. Miyashita Ochoa said she is “thrilled to be working with” co-principal investigators Sophia Zamudio-Haas of UC San Francisco and Bamby Salcedo, a leader in the transgender rights movement and president of TransLatin@ Coalition. Other community partners are the Unique Woman’s Coalition and Sex Workers Outreach Project Los Angeles (SWOP LA). “I couldn’t be more proud of our research group and am so appreciative that UCLA Luskin will now serve as a home for this powerful collective,” Miyashita Ochoa said. Funding is from the California HIV/AIDS Research Program, which is awarding similar grants this year to four other research projects in California that center the voices of people affected by HIV.


 

Taking 12th Grade Math Opens Doors to Higher Education, Research Finds UCLA-led study following nearly 27,000 L.A. Unified students yields insights that can help inform education policy

Students who take math in the 12th grade improve their chances of enrolling and continuing in higher education, according to a new report by the Los Angeles Education Research Institute at UCLA.

In partnership with the Los Angeles Unified School District, the institute’s researchers followed the educational journeys of nearly 27,000 students beginning in the 11th grade. Those who took a full year of math in the 12th grade were more likely to enroll in a four-year college and return for a second year, compared with academically similar peers who did not take math, the study found.

The report yields several findings that can inform current debates over education policy in California, said Meredith Phillips, co-founder of the institute known as LAERI, which is housed at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.

One key takeaway is the importance of a robust curriculum that allows all students to continue their math education into their senior year, said Phillips, whose research focuses on the causes and consequences of educational inequality.

“School staff, parents and other adults would be wise to encourage students to take these courses, which open up college opportunities and a path to longer-term social and economic mobility,” she said.

The University of California and Cal State systems recommend but do not require a fourth year of high school math for freshman applicants. However, those who take math in the 12th grade may have an advantage in a competitive admissions process, particularly on campuses that no longer consider SAT or ACT test scores, the researchers noted.

“Enrollment in 12th grade math may also expose students to a peer group that is more college-focused, motivating them to pursue higher education,” said Leonard Wainstein, a visiting assistant professor at Reed College who served as the report’s lead analyst.

About a quarter of the students in the study did not take math in 12th grade. To determine whether specific groups of students were less likely than their peers to enroll in these courses, the researchers examined differences by gender, ethnicity, English proficiency and socioeconomic status. The findings can be used to inform L.A. Unified staff about whether particular types of students need more encouragement to take math or more access to 12th grade math courses.

The study, which followed high school students who were academically similar at the end of their junior year, identified benefits from taking any kind of math class in 12th grade, including traditional offerings such as precalculus or alternatives such as statistics or data science.

Even though students who took 12th grade math experienced a very slight reduction in their overall grade point average, the researchers identified positive effects on college enrollment and persistence.

The study was funded by the Oakland-based nonprofit College Futures Foundation and conducted by researchers affiliated with LAERI, which has collaborated with L.A. Unified for more than 10 years to produce research that district decision-makers and educators use to improve educational quality and equity in Los Angeles.

The research team includes Wainstein, a former postdoctoral scholar at UCLA Luskin; Carrie Miller, LAERI’s associate director and a PhD candidate at the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies; Phillips, associate professor of public policy and sociology at UCLA and faculty director of LAERI; Kyo Yamashiro, an assistant professor of education at Loyola Marymount University who co-founded LAERI with Phillips and served as the founding executive director; and Tatiana Melguizo, professor at the USC Rossier School of Education and the Pullias Center for Higher Education.

The researchers will follow up with a second report this year that looks more closely at college performance among a subset of the former L.A. Unified students.

Seen & Heard

In June 2022, graduating students from the UCLA Luskin Ph.D., master’s and undergraduate degree programs were asked to complete this sentence: “My UCLA Luskin degree means to me …”

young man in cap and gown… a pathway to achieve social justice.” —Jason A. Plummer, PhD in Social Welfare

 

young woman in cap and gown… investing back into myself so that I can help support my community.” —Samantha Guerrero, Urban Planning

 

young woman in cap and gown… I can really go out in the community and make the change that I came to this degree to make.” Maureen Alam, Public Policy

 

young woman in cap and gown… that I will have the opportunity to help others in our community and be able to work in different settings and help various populations.” —Louisa Cascione, Social Welfare

 

young woman in cap and gown… an opportunity to change the world.” —Anette Ramirez Valenzuela, Public Policy

 

young woman in cap and gown… make a real impact on the world.” —Sarah Perez, Public Affairs

 

young woman in cap and gown

… that I have the tools to go out into communities in Los Angeles and learn from community members themselves in order to create change.” —Delaney Ivey, Public Affairs

 

young woman in cap and gown

… empowerment, for me and my family. I am a first-generation student, so it’s really valuable.” —Margarita Palafox, Social Welfare

 

young woman in cap and gown

… liberation, hope and freedom for my people.” —Taylor Reed, PhD in Social Welfare

 

young woman in cap and gown

… working together to tackle issues and, hopefully, solve them.” —Camille Schaefer, Public Affairs

 

young man in cap and gown

… a pathway to more opportunities.” —Noe Garcia, Public Affairs

 

young man in cap and gown

… being of service to others.” —Carlos Hollopeter, Social Welfare

 

young man in cap and gown… the ability to just help people. That’s the reason I got into public service in the first place.” —Rasik Hussain, Public Policy

 

All images derived from video recorded by Michael Troxell

Alumni Accolades

Chanell Lajoi Gore BA ’06 MPP ’11 is now senior operations manager at Possibility Labs, a social change platform that envisions an economy where historically marginalized communities have the wealth, power and resources to produce clean air, water and energy for everyone.

Ashley Mashian MURP ’15 is the new planning deputy at the city of Los Angeles. She is responsible for serving the greater Western San Fernando Valley.

Ricardo Ferreira MPP ’21 is now an associate sustainability advisor at ISS Corporate Solutions, which helps companies design and manage their environmental, social and governance programs to reduce risk and address the needs of diverse stakeholders.

Jonathan Kosaka MPP ’20 is the new controller at Robert Walters in Tokyo, Japan. Based in Great Britain, the company is a worldwide specialist in professional recruitment.

Samantha Brown Olivieri MPP ’09 is now the chief executive officer at Step Up Tutoring. Olivieri has extensive experience in education policy and is one of many MPP alums working in education management, services and policy.

McKenna Morgan Christensen MPP ’20 started a new position as a policy analyst at the Utah Department of Health and Human Services with the Tobacco Prevention and Control Program.

Caitlin Thompson BA’15 MPP ’20 is the new project director at UCLA Health.

Noreen Ahmed MPP ’20 is Imagine LA’s new family team manager. She serves as a clinical case manager for families who recently exited homelessness.

Dulce Vasquez MPP ’20 is now assistant vice president at Arizona State University. She oversees strategic advancement in the Los Angeles region and reports to the Office of the President.


portrait photos of six alumni

From left, Alex Michel, Nelson Guevara (top), Khanh Phu (below), Daniela Garcia Martinez (top), Kristen Gas (below), Samantha Joanna (Sam) Guerrero.

Fresh From Luskin

Ever wonder what kind of employment opportunities new UCLA Luskin alums secure post-graduation? Look no further. In this Alumni Accolades section, we highlight a handful of ’22 grads and their current positions.

Daniela Garcia Martinez MPP ’22 is a program manager at America On Tech, which creates pathways into degrees and careers in technology to decrease the economic and racial wealth gap in underserved communities.

Nelson Guevara MURP ’22 is a transportation planning associate in the city of Los Angeles’ Department of Transportation.

Samantha Joanna (Sam) Guerrero MURP ’22 is an associate at Estolano Advisors, an award-winning and Latina-owned urban planning and public policy firm in downtown Los Angeles that currently employs several UCLA MURP alumni.

Alex Michel MSW ’22 MPP ’22 is the new senior policy analyst at the nonprofit Homebase/The Center for Common Concerns. 

Kristen Gast MSW ’22 is a youth advocate at First Place for Youth, an organization founded in 1998 to prevent poverty and homelessness among youth who age out of foster care.

Khanh Phu MSW ’22 is a clinical case manager at Angels Foster Family Network
in San Diego.

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