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.
“But it dawned on me that a really important foundational piece of work that was published one-half century ago, 50 years ago, was Marty Wach’s paper on accessibility,” said Cervero during a Feb. 28 presentation in honor of his former urban planning mentor and colleague. “And why don’t I wrap my talk … around the theme of that paper and try to show how it really shaped my own research in this field and, I would suggest, generations of other people as well.”
Titled “Physical Accessibility as a Social Indicator,” the article by Wachs and T. Gordon Kumagai continues to influence planning policy, said Cervero, who earned his doctorate in urban planning at UCLA in 1980 and joined UC Berkeley’s city and regional planning faculty, where he remained until 2016.
“The article really highlights a number of different contexts of which accessibility should really be an overarching principle that guides what we do in this field of urban planning and transportation,” Cervero said.
During introductory remarks, UCLA Luskin Professor Brian Taylor mentioned that the lecture was the first in the series to be presented without Wachs himself in attendance. The longtime urban planning scholar taught at both UCLA and UC Berkeley before his death in 2021. Members of the Wachs family, including his wife, Helen, were in attendance.
Presented in conjunction with the Luskin Lecture Series, Cervero’s talk was titled, “Accessibility, Social Equity, and Contemporary Policy Debates,” and he spoke about how the concepts put forth 50 years before still have relevance today, especially in regard to how access to transportation contributes to the well-being of people living in cities.
“Marty made the point with his co-author that this sensibility happens at multiple scales. It’s regional access to jobs or medical facilities, but it’s also at the micro-scale of ‘Do you have access to, say, a bus?’” said Cervero, who said he built on this notion in his own research about socioeconomic matching in terms of the realities of transportation access. A person might live in a transit-rich area, for example, “but if you’re in a wheelchair, and the buses don’t have wheelchair ramps, then you don’t have great transit access.”
In the 1970s, few scholars prior to Wachs had written about these types of human components to transportation access. “To me, it was truly revolutionary,” Cervero said.
For example, Cervero found that people living in central city neighborhoods often bear disproportionately higher costs for transportation services. Because they make frequent off-peak trips for necessities like groceries, they end up paying a lot more than affluent suburbanites taking fewer trips over longer distances.
The disparity also was apparent when he and other researchers looked at why people who seemed to have public transit options readily available to them choose to rely primarily on their vehicles instead.
“A lot of these individuals were people like working moms who had very complex travel patterns,” Cervero said. “They have a child to drop off at the child care center and then go to their job. They were taking vocational courses at night and had to get there at a time when public transit service was bad. They had split-shift weekend jobs when transit services are notoriously lousy. So, they need a car.”
In looking at the concepts articulated by Wachs so many years before, Cervero also found lessons that can be applied to some of today’s planning and policy debates. One example is the idea of a “15-minute city,” a place designed by planners to ensure that most people have ready access not just to work but to the other necessities of daily life within 15 minutes of their homes.
The idea is laudable, but it has its critics.
“If you really insist on this, you potentially stifle economic competition. Companies don’t want to thinly distribute activities everywhere,” said Cervero, as some in the audience of UCLA faculty, staff, students and alumni nodded their heads in agreement. “So, this idea of a 15-minute city really runs in the face of what economists have long argued are important economic drivers towards the economic growth and performance of a city.”
In his career, Cervero has consulted on transportation and urban planning projects worldwide, including recently in Singapore. “They’ve come up with this idea of the 20-minute town and the 45-minute city. You can reach a lot of things within 20 minutes. But when it comes to employment, when it comes to going to see a sporting event or buying a car or going to a regional hospital with specialized medical care, that’s a 45-minute city. So, I think we’re getting a lot better articulation and sensible policy.”
During a Q&A session after his formal presentation, Cervero spoke with UCLA Professor Adam Millard-Ball and took questions from the audience. When asked to talk more about his global experience, he explained that much of the scholarly work to date has focused on urban life in the United States and Europe.
Some of today’s researchers focus on climate change impacts and how to find “a little more efficiency out of electric mobility or ridesharing or whatever. But in the grand scheme of things, over the next 20 or 30 years, 80% to 90% of urbanization is not going to happen in the Global North. It’s going to be in south Asia and Africa, and whatever happens there is going to swamp any and everything we do here, particularly in the rates of carbon emissions and so forth.”
In the developed world, the focus is often on how to get people from the central cores to jobs in suburbia. That’s less true in places like Mexico, South America, Indonesia and other parts of Asia.
“It’s a totally different landscape. Most of the poor are not in cities but in far-flung suburbs or towns. When you’re talking about lack of access, it’s a two- to three-hour, one-way daily commute,” Cervero said. “The amount of time and resources you have to invest is enormous just getting to and from where you need to be in order to have the earnings to cover basic needs.”
He was also asked about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting rise in remote work.
“Historically, we think of physical proximity,” said Cervero, noting that when workers have highly specialized skill sets they depend on interactions in teams of people with other specialized skills to thrive.
“The whole idea of access being tied to location is being somewhat thrown around by all these rapidly evolving, powerful kinds of technological advances,” he said. “Technology is transforming. The notion of physical proximity as we all know it has long driven the idea of cooperation. But maybe it happens less.”
Established by students, the Wachs Lecture Series features prominent and innovative scholars and policymakers in the field of transportation. The UCLA Luskin Lecture series brings together scholars with local and national leaders to discuss solutions to society’s most pressing problems. This event was organized by UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs and Institute of Transportation Studies, for which Taylor has served as the director and Millard-Ball the interim director. Cervero was the director of UC Berkeley’s counterpart to ITS for many years.
Fernando Torres-Gil, professor of social welfare and public policy, spoke to the Sacramento Bee about the In-Home Support Services Employee-Employer Relations Act. This bill would allow in-home caregivers in California to unite under one statewide bargaining unit, negotiating with the Department of Health Care Services for better wages and conditions rather than with their individual counties. Currently, in-home caregivers make only within a dollar or two of the state minimum wage — meaning that they are struggling to make ends meet. “We have a crisis. We have a huge and growing unmet need. We have a workforce that has been disrespected, and there are fewer people willing to do this kind of work,” Torres-Gil said. The need for in-home care for low-income, disabled and aging Californians is expected to surge in the coming years.
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.
Media covering the swearing-in of Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass spoke to experts from UCLA Luskin about the historic leadership transition. “Los Angeles is a city at a crossroads,” Sonja Diaz, executive director of the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute, told the Washington Post, noting that Bass must deal with great increases in housing insecurity, food insecurity and economy inequality. Michael Lens, associate professor of urban planning and public policy, spoke to LAist about hurdles Bass is likely to face, including resistance to zoning changes that could ease construction of various types of housing. And Jim Newton, editor of UCLA’s Blueprint magazine, wrote a CalMatters commentary about Bass’ tenure as a test for Democrats in California and nationally. Newton also spoke to KPCC’s AirTalk about the historic arc of Los Angeles’ mayors, their scope of authority and leadership styles.
A Los Angeles Times story on the decision by local utility officials to halt shutoffs of water and power for low-income customers who can’t pay their bills cited Gregory Pierce, co-director of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation. The story cited research from the center showing that Los Angeles’ communities of color were disproportionately affected by utility debt and shutoffs during the COVID-19 pandemic. “Protection from utility shutoffs for those enrolled in low-income discount programs will help lessen the debt burden for [L.A. Department of Water and Power’s] most vulnerable customers,” said Pierce, who leads UCLA’s Human Right to Water Solutions Lab. Pierce comments frequently on issues of water access and equity, including in a USA Today fact-checking article on false claims that water scarcity is an illusion. Climate change has created weather extremes, he said, but excess water in one place doesn’t help another place that’s parched by drought.
UCLA Social Welfare scholars from around the country returned to campus this week to recognize milestones in teaching and research over the past 75 years, as well as the work still ahead to advance justice in both academia and the broader society. The gathering of Social Welfare PhD students, doctoral alumni, faculty and staff, held at the UCLA Luskin Conference Center on the evening of Nov. 14, kicked off a yearlong commemoration of the Social Welfare program’s diamond anniversary. Professor Emeritus Rosina Becerra shared insights from her three decades in leadership positions at the university, including as dean of the School of Social Welfare in the 1980s and ’90s and later as vice provost of faculty diversity and development. Guests also heard from Karina L. Walters PhD ’95 MSW ’90 BA ’87, a professor of social work at the University of Washington and member of the Choctaw Nation, and Darcey H. Merritt PhD ’06 MSW ’03, associate professor at New York University and co-editor-in-chief of the research journal Children and Youth Services Review. Merritt will soon join the University of Chicago faculty as a full professor. Becerra, Walters and Merritt are distinguished scholars and also women of color, and they spoke of progress yet to be made to achieve full equity in the academy. The celebration of UCLA Social Welfare’s 75th anniversary will continue throughout the academic year, culminating on Saturday, May 6, with an alumni reunion and the annual presentation of the Joseph A. Nunn Alumnus of the Year award.
Public Policy interim chair Mark Peterson spoke to the Los Angeles Times about controversies surrounding Proposition 29, which would require a licensed medical professional to be present while dialysis patients are receiving treatment at the state’s 600 dialysis centers. The measure would also require centers to disclose physician ownership interests and patient infection data. Peterson said voters are often skeptical about issues that they are not properly informed about — in this case, the “high levels of technical detail” about the treatment and care that dialysis patients need. That skepticism is heightened when private interests are involved, he said. “When there is a special interest from one side or the other that’s really pushing a particular ballot initiative, voters add on to their underlying suspicion this general skepticism of why is the ballot initiative process being used by a special interest?”
Paul Ong, research professor and director of the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge at UCLA Luskin, spoke to the Los Angeles Times about the lack of affordable and reliable internet access available to low-income communities within Los Angeles County. Data has shown that big internet providers like Spectrum, AT&T and Frontier often charge higher rates for identical internet services to high-poverty neighborhoods compared with non-high-poverty neighborhoods. “By the time our young people graduate from high school and either move to college or to the labor market, they’re severely disadvantaged because we have moved to a system where we believe access to the computer and internet and broadband is taken for granted by most people. People who don’t have that access, they are left behind,” Ong said.
A Los Angeles Times column about equity issues surrounding “congestion pricing” as a strategy to manage traffic and cut emissions cited Michael Manville, associate professor of urban planning. Discouraging driving while encouraging mass transit use is the right thing to do, the column noted, but it asked whether charging for access to the roads creates a burden on lower-income communities. Manville argues that it is possible to put a price on driving while also maintaining a commitment to economic fairness. “The fact that pricing could create equity problems doesn’t mean it must. Nor does it mean that, for the sake of equity, all roads should be free,” he wrote in Transfers magazine. “Few equity agendas in other areas of social policy, after all, demand that all goods be free. Almost no one, for example, suggests that all food be free because some people are poor. Society instead identifies poor people and helps them buy food.”
