Presidio Sentinel San Diego, March
2013
BY Laura Walcher
The National Conflict Resolution
Center’s 25th annual Peacemaker Awards will take place Thursday,
March 14. This year, the
Peacemakers are the U.S. Naval Ship Mercy and the Preuss School UCSD. We talked with Cecil Lytle, a renowned
musician, a former chair of the Awards, and a founder of Preuss School:
LW: You must be hugely gratified
by NCRC’s Peacemaker Award to Preuss – not “only” for the recognition, but for
the strength & success of the School. Bring us up to date on its mission and practices. What
– if anything – has changed since it’s beginning?
CL:
I’m especially proud of the
parents and families that entrust their children to Preuss! We select students
and families on three criteria: 1) applicants must come from low income
backgrounds; 2) they must be the first in their families to aspire to graduate
from a four-year college; and, 3) the family and student must demonstrate
motivation to strive for success.
Begun in 1999 after several years in development, Preuss School UCSD
today has over 800 students, grades 6
- 12. Its first seniors
graduated in 2004. Since then, over 1,000 seniors have graduated and gone on to
attend the most competitive colleges and universities in the world – proving
that poverty alone should not be a barrier to overcoming debilitating social
and economic situations.
LW: You are among its founders. What in our community, society led to its establishment?
CL: California’s Charter School Act passed in 1992. At the time,
I was Provost of UCSD’s Thurgood Marshall College. It seemed to me that
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anyone leading a college named
after Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall had a duty to promote quality education,
A strong connection between higher education and k-12 just made sense to me.
Convincing my colleagues to
approve what we then were calling the UCSD Charter School was not easy.
Arguments raged over resources, risks, and the likelihood of success. When an
alliance of community members began to support our effort, though, a path was
finally cleared. Community organizations began to speak out. Other than the
services of the Hillcrest Hospital, the impact of UCSD in the lives of people
living south of Highway 52 was, in their eyes, negligible. Indeed, UCSD was
viewed with suspicion. Yet
residents south of I-8 saw the potential benefit of a UCSD intervention in
their lives.
The turmoil during this four-year
debate about establishing such a school caught the attention of entrepreneurs
and politicians as well. Even President Bill Clinton included a reference to
the dust-up about our charter school proposal in his UCSD commencement remarks
in 1997! When the faculty voted down the proposal for the third time, Peter and
Peggy Preuss offered an initial large gift - and their sponsorship finally
convinced all doubters that the School coincided with the mission of UCSD, and
that there was strong support across the state and country. The Preuss family
have remained advocates and supporters;
the school’s success has
led dozens of other university campuses to engage in similar efforts including,
University of Chicago, UC Davis, UCLA, the UC Berkeley campus, Penn, Harvard
and many others.
LW: What in your own educational life led to your interest?
CL:
I was the last of ten children in
Harlem. Our parents, despite their own thwarted educational ambitions, believed
that a quality education led to the leveling of many different playing fields.
Today, all my siblings are
college graduates leading
successful lives. This convinces me that with opportunity and encouragement,
any person can rise beyond the expectations society holds for them.
After 40+ years as a faculty
member and administrator at UCSD, I am convinced that higher education is,
perhaps, the last and only institution that citizens truly believe can be
life-changing. What parent
does not want to see their child graduate from a four-year institution—indeed,
the higher the quality, the better?
That belief led us at UCSD to
cause the university to treat reform in public education as it does all other
areas of legitimate research.. I see Preuss School as something of a petri
dish--a particular effort to build and run a national model for high quality
urban education.
LW: You’ve been an amazingly successful musician – and a
teacher, so you know plenty about education. How do Preuss teachers differ from those at public, or say,
other private schools?
CL: I do not believe that the
teachers at Preuss School differ very much from k-12 teachers everywhere. The chief difference is
institutional—the ability of the bureaucracy surrounding and embedded in the
school to promote innovation and true reform that benefits students.
Bud Mehan (Professor of Sociology)
designed the curriculum and pedagogy that has helped to make Preuss a
successful learning environment. He refers to Preuss as a “hothouse.” Just as students are expected to
develop and sustain the habits of learning, staff is expected to continually
develop and maximize their skills. Teachers willingly support a peer review
system. Treating teachers as members of a learning community goes a long way to
recreating the atmosphere of the university community on which Preuss is
conceived.
The remarkable thing about Preuss
School UCSD is that the innovations or reforms taking place there are not new.
If you were to ask 100 k-12 teachers what educational changes they’d like to see, they would likely list the
same three or four ideas--small
class size, parent engagement, continued teacher development, more time with
students, high standards, among others notions.
LW: Tell us about the children who attend Preuss.
CL: Because students must come
from low income backgrounds, most live in the neighborhoods with the highest
concentration of low income families and Title 1 children: south of I-8 and
west of Highway 805. It is unusual to admit students beyond the 9th
grade; there may not be enough time to instill proper learning habits necessary
for success in college.
LW: Among the challenges in today’s schools is
motivating parents & families to become involved, support the school’s
efforts, help sustain their children’s learning. How does Preuss address this
issue?
CL: Our families do not always look like “Ozzie & Harriet.” Each family is
required to provide 15 hours of service/volunteerism during the year. If two children
attend, then 30 hours and so on. This service can be attending parent-teachers
conferences, chaperoning field trips, attending parent association meetings one
Saturday a month, and other activities. So far, families enthusiastically
support their youngsters and engage with teachers. No doubt, the imprimatur of
the University of California conveys a greater sense of importance to them.
Once Preuss School proved successful, Bud Mehan and I sought
to “replicate” the Preuss model in a neighborhood school; now, the same enthusiasm exists at Gompers Preparatory Academy
(GPA) in southeast San Diego, thanks to
the same Charter School Act.
Our hope is that both Preuss and Gompers will encourage more institutions of
higher learning and k-12 leaders to collaborate for the benefit of our
children.
LW: Your recent Beethoven concert
(that benefited the “Lytle Endowed Scholarships” at Preuss) was a masterful
example of learning, discipline, practice. You performed two lengthy, highly complicated Sonatas
totally by heart!
CL: After my wife passed in 1995,
our kids and I established a scholarship in her name that supports Preuss
graduates who attend UCSD’s Thurgood Marshall College. Each year, I perform a
concert to benefit those youngsters, and each year with a different theme,
usually focused on a specific composer (Chopin, Liszt, Schubert) or genre (jazz, ragtime, blues and
hymns). The first Lytle Scholars have now earned doctoral degrees and the most
recent scholars are at UCSD majoring in Communication, Biology, and
Engineering.
LW: You’re a noted expert on Franz Liszt. What is it about his music that so
compels you?
CL: Both his music and life intrigue me! Liszt was the world’s first “rock
star,” a pianist of phenomenal ability who, in fact, received only 18 months of
lessons from Carl Czerny. He was
perhaps the most original musician of recent centuries, the quintessential outsider
who learned to play the game of Parisian solons. Later in life in Weimar
(1849-59) he premiered works by daring symphonists at the Weimar Court. His
last compositions reflect a more meditative and religious interior life.
Throughout, Liszt championed the cause of social justice by speaking (and
writing) on behalf of the Roma (Gypsies), and laborers. ###
For more information about NCRC’s
Peacemaker Awards and
