Archives

skip navigation      español

No Child Left Behind: See What it's all about!
Kid's Zone Get Involved Contact Us Español

Commission Home
West Wing Connections
• Executive Order 13230
• Members
• Meetings
• Transcripts
• What's New
• Publications
• Reports

Special Thanks

Privacy Policy

Back to Initiative   Home

  Click Here to Become a Partner

For Public Comments to the Commission, please click here


80
1 families.
2 And it's not just -- and this is where the
3 advocacy people come in. There's wonderful programs
4 that build on the advocacy piece, on the parent's
5 empowerment. This is really important as a next step.
6 So here are the correspondents rather
7 quickly. You can just look at this yourself, because I
8 just want to end with the last piece which I think is
9 the next steps, what we have to do here to go on with
10 this project.
11 On the web site we have this. We have
12 resources, a beginning list of resources. There's very
13 little that you can do in a nine-month planning project
14 to begin to pull this together, but there is such a need
15 for this that what's really important right now is three
16 things.
17 One is to connect all these wonderful
18 projects that have been going on and disseminate them
19 more widely, like you have in your report, make them all
20 accessible in both Spanish and English in a way that's
21 very successful on the web, but also to create tools so
22 you can go into the communities and customize.
23 And the pieces that are really missing here
24 are also a consciousness in terms of the professional
25 development of how to integrate this to the forefront,

81
1 not as an addendum, but to the forefront so that all
2 teachers and directors have this understanding.
3 That's why these connections and commitments
4 was created, and our next steps if all goes according to
5 plan even in this climate of funding, which is very,
6 very -- it's a difficult time for all of us in early
7 childhood, especially in early childhood, and risky
8 measures sometimes are not taken when it's a difficult
9 time, but we have to push on because it's urgent and we
10 need it, so going towards creating a participatory
11 process that brings in the field to help them define.
12 This doesn't stand for all Latinos. These
13 are only little pieces to begin a dialogue. So maybe in
14 Texas they have a totally different way of organizing
15 these values. Well, we need to hear that. We need to
16 hear what their developmentally responsive practices
17 are, their ideas are, and we need to have that as a
18 community dialogue and as a community action plan, too.
19 So we want to develop tools to be able to
20 customize this so agencies, trainers, communities can
21 bring this process that we went through to the
22 forefront.
23 Thank you very much for the opportunity to
24 tell you about this.
25 MS. MAZZUCA: That was wonderful.

82
1 Our next guest speaker is David Valladolid
2 and David has worked as a civil rights consultant and
3 senior deputy labor commissioner for the State of
4 California. He's worked for the California State
5 assembly as chief of staff and has been a legislative
6 consultant to Speaker Willie Brown.
7 As a community volunteer he chairs the
8 Chicano Federal Board of Directors, vice chair of the
9 Board of Directors of Operation Samahan Clinics and
10 served as a member of the San Diego State University
11 Alumni Association Board of Directors and currently a
12 member of the National Executive Board of the United
13 Domestic Workers of America, and finally he is the
14 co-founder and president of the San Diego Latino
15 Indigenous United Coalition and appointed to the
16 Advisory Board of the Reading and Literature Project.
17 It is with tremendous pride that we have you
18 here today to share your experiences with us.
19 MR. VALLADOLID: Thank you very much. I'm
20 venturing into the first time to try to be a high tech
21 Aztec. I'm hoping my power point does not blow up. I
22 did bring some backups, some slides.
23 It's certainly an honor to me presenting to
24 you, the President's Advisory Commission. I come here
25 today probably speaking to the choir that parental

83
1 involvement is one of the most important elements that
2 we are doing throughout the country.
3 Unfortunately, it gets a lot of lip service,
4 but it doesn't get a lot of financial support and,
5 therefore, we continue to see throughout at least
6 California and I assume other states that we're now
7 venturing into the reality is parental involvement is
8 given a side show at the school and yet we all know by
9 all the research available that parent involvement is 50
10 percent of the equation in terms of educational success.
11 I start kind of fast, but I want to try to
12 give you a whole picture of PIQE. It was a program
13 followed by a visionary who had been very active in the
14 L.A. area, came to San Diego in 1979 and began to work
15 with us to address the crisis that our children in the
16 Latino community were facing. Also the co-founder was
17 Dr. Hum Choy from the School of Education at San Diego
18 State University, another visionary who had been working
19 his whole career in terms of preparing teachers, and
20 these two individuals got together after we spent about
21 four years advising the new superintendent in San Diego
22 and not getting a whole great deal of change in the
23 school system finally asking him can we go talk to some
24 parents.
25 I'll make the story short. After about eight

84
1 weeks, after having two or three hour a day dialogue,
2 not each day, but one time a week, we put together on
3 the walls 54 issue areas that parents had given us in
4 terms of the issues they were addressing in their home,
5 in their community, and certainly the questions they had
6 about how the school system works.
7 From those dialogues came the mandate from
8 the parents, take this process to every school, every
9 parent needs to have this kind of information so that
10 they can begin parental involvement, which we all know
11 begins in the home, and take it into school and create
12 meaningful positive partnerships with education
13 organization and administrators so that our children
14 will have the equal chance and the option of attended a
15 university.
16 Our mission is simple, to bring schools and
17 parents and communities together as equal partners. Our
18 vision as a community in which parents and teachers
19 collaborate to transfer each child's educational
20 environment at home and school so every school can
21 achieve.
22 Our philosophy is all parents love their
23 children and want a better future for them, and I
24 understand people can give me some pretty good arguments
25 there are parents that are nightmares, that are harming

85
1 their children, but we believe those parents love their
2 children and want to see better life for them.
3 Every child deserves the opportunity to
4 attend an university. Parents and teachers must work
5 together to ensure that. And for children learning is a
6 natural process that parents and teachers facilitate.
7 Our objectives are to encourage and support
8 low-income and ethnically-diverse parents of elementary,
9 middle and high school to take participatory roles in
10 assisting their children, to create a supporting
11 learning environment at home, to navigate the school
12 system, to collaborate with principals and teachers, to
13 encourage college attendance and to support their
14 child's motional development.
15 The four elements that make it work: We are,
16 one, invited and they turn over their entire parent list
17 with us, and that's a very unique relationship we've
18 been able to establish and maintain. We have a very
19 detailed implementation of program stages.
20 We're a labor intensive program where we have
21 to find people that are willing to work 50 and 60 hours
22 a week to make it work, and we have a very committed
23 staff, and we are a community model versus the
24 institutional approach.
25 Our results over the last 15 years, we

86
1 graduated 250,000 parents from 1200 schools in
2 California and the program has been taught in 14
3 languages. We have actually translated our curriculum
4 into eight languages and we've actually taught it to
5 communities like the Mystic Minks and the Mink
6 communities in Sacramento, California, where they don't
7 even have a written dialect.
8 PIQE offices now expanded throughout
9 California. We have nine offices that serve
10 approximately 16 counties. As I mentioned, we get
11 invited in from the school after we develop a level of
12 trust with school leaders. We commit to them the only
13 purpose is to give parents information about how the
14 school system works, programs that are available to
15 them, and how they must become involved in order to help
16 their children.
17 PIQE establishes a relationship with
18 institutions of higher ed. I want to say hello to
19 Alexander Gonzalez. We're now lobbying him to come on
20 one of our cabinets in San Diego. We establish local
21 advisory groups in each area in order to help us access
22 funding and access marketing in those areas of the
23 program.
24 The benefit is we prepare you to become
25 contributing members of society. We promote self

87
1 reliance in families. We increase the tax base of our
2 communities. We decrease the marginalization of low
3 income families. We improve the quality of life,
4 economic and well-being of families and communities, and
5 we increase civic participation in the democratic
6 process.
7 PIQE offers our program to every parent in
8 the school free of charge. We recruit and graduate
9 approximately 30 percent. Our goal is at least on the
10 first go around reach 30 percent of the parents. We
11 have about a 90 to 95 percent success of every parent
12 that starts with PIQE.
13 We provide information on the importance of
14 home and school collaboration. We contact parents
15 extensively by phone. We provide parents with
16 information on how to access social service agencies
17 within their community.
18 The PIQE model is the -- first we have
19 parents calling the parents. We use parents as
20 recruiters who have had success with applying principals
21 and techniques.
22 At the planning session our curriculum is
23 flexible enough. We will take in all the information
24 and questions that are related and incorporate them into
25 the six core classes that follow the planning session.

88
1 Again, the core classes are 90 minutes long.
2 They review objectives. They use a star approach. We
3 practice exercises. Our classes are very participatory.
4 We tell every facilitator that works for PIQE
5 there's five criteria once you meet the minimum. We try
6 to get people with at least a BA from any country in the
7 world so they model to the parents the ability to
8 succeed in terms of education.
9 And then we ask those parents to do five
10 things. One, that they have no known poverty at some
11 point in their life so they never look down at an
12 individual. The minute someone looks down at you, you
13 will never learn anything from them.
14 The other, they be able to explain the
15 education system in simple ordinary language, because we
16 all know it is full with acronyms that nobody can
17 understand. And, third, we ask our facilitators to be
18 able to shut up because teaching is learning and
19 learning is teaching. If they're lecturing, people are
20 going to lose about 85 percent in their meeting. If
21 they're there in an interactive way, again as Costanza
22 said, focusing on the social, family and all conditions
23 that these children are in, they will be able to be more
24 successful.
25 We have a principals dialogue on the eighth

89
1 session, invite counselors and teachers of the school
2 and they will have a dialogue the week before, basically
3 make a list of questions that they would like the
4 principal to address, and the principal will come in
5 prepared with some answers and have a dialogue with the
6 parents.
7 We have graduation. Every nine weeks we
8 graduate parents throughout California. Last night I
9 flew in on a 10:40 flight from L.A. I was at a
10 graduation with 300 parents graduating from an
11 elementary school.
12 In our planning sessions -- and we've been
13 accused of using scare tactics, but I think the reality
14 is we must raise the level of concern with parents.
15 They must understand that 70 percent of our children are
16 below grade level by the third grade. They must
17 understand that in many school districts throughout
18 California 57 percent drop out is even lower. And for
19 high income families, 48 percent graduate from college,
20 and low income, 7 percent, and Latino college
21 eligibility rates in California, 1996, 3.8 percent were
22 UC ready, and 13.4 were California State University
23 ready.
24 So your planning session focuses on raising
25 the level of concern, giving parents relevant

90
1 information and ultimately moving parents into action.
2 This is one of the most disheartening reverse
3 pyramids that we put together from data collected from
4 the Department of Education that followed our children
5 coming into the school system in 1988 and what it looked
6 like 12 years later when they left that school. 57
7 percent had dropped out, 13 percent entered the
8 community college, two percent entered Cal State, and
9 one percent the UC system, and from that they projected
10 that one percent will graduate from the UC system and
11 one from the Cal State system.
12 This is the comprises we're facing. We
13 recently received a study that was done by the National
14 Summit for Educational Status. A June study called an
15 essay and we took that star that they used for
16 first-time bound students going to college and we've now
17 begun using this star.
18 It's was incredible last night at graduation.
19 I asked the parents to walk me through the steps of,
20 one, making the decision that they're going to college
21 on or before the eighth grade, two, knowing what the GPA
22 requirements are, the four-year plan that their children
23 must do in order to qualify for college, and then
24 understanding that there are tests such as the PSAT that
25 they can take as early as ninth grade, and the research

91
1 shows the more times the student takes it, the better
2 they do.
3 We found in the study of San Diego that 76
4 percent of the children did not take the SAT in their K
5 through 12 years. We are out to change that. Obviously
6 the GPA, they must understand the importance of
7 maintaining a GPA and how competitive it is now to get
8 into the four-year institutions.
9 The last one is we give a great deal of
10 information on financial aid, the new Cal grants in
11 California. All the different things the families have
12 available.
13 PIQE outcomes, to enhance the learning
14 environment, to increase parent participation, to
15 increase children achievement in literacy skills,
16 attendance, homework, and lower the drop out rate.
17 We recently had an organizational assessment
18 done out of a group in Washington, Mosaica, and found
19 these are the factors that make PIQE so successful.
20 One is the passion and commitment that we
21 employ. We have about 60 permanent staff in California,
22 about a thousand contract staff and about a thousand
23 volunteers that work with us throughout the state.
24 We have comprehensive documentation. We know
25 the most critical factor for us is to be able to show

Back | Transcripts Home | Continue

President's Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans
The White House President's Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans home