August 1, 2006
Antoinette Battiste becomes FCE’s Interim Executive Director
By Sharon Nelson Barber and Kenneth Jones

June 21, 2006
FCE Community Bids Farewell to Long-time Executive Director
Stephanie Wick
By Alexandra Bernadotte

May 19, 2006
One Hundred Percent of FCE 2006 High School Graduates Going to College
By Alexandra Bernadotte

May 9, 2006
FCE Receives Stanford Community Partnership and Volunteer Service
Award
By Michael Peña, Stanford News Service

January 29, 2006
East Palo Alto Group Lauded for College Successes
By Sharon Noguchi, San Jose Mercury News

In Annabell Cervantes’ math class at Palo Alto High, she’s the only Latina. All her other courses have only two or three black or Latino students, she said.

“It’s discouraging to see all classes segregated by race,” she said. She’s in a higher-level math class only because her parents challenged a teacher's assignment to basic math in seventh grade. But her friends aren’t so lucky.

Annabell was one of four college or college-bound students to speak Saturday at the 10th anniversary celebration of the Foundation for College Education, an East Palo Alto-based group that nurtures students’ college dreams.

The featured speaker, Princeton Professor Cornel West, told them, “You are a working example of precisely the kind of victory that so many people have struggled for.”

Bringing his blend of political critique, lecture, history and inspiration to Stanford’s Dinkelspiel Auditorium, West roused the sold-out audience of 700 several times to a standing ovation.

“Education in the deepest sense is about courage,” he said. What’s needed is paideia, a Greek word for the exchange of knowledge and cultivation of the self. Politically, he said, Americans need to be shaken out of their complacency.

West, a professor of religion and a scholar on race, politics, equity and social justice, is the author of “Race Matters” and “Democracy Matters”. He created a stir three years ago when he left Harvard University, after a dispute with President Lawrence Summers. West, whose lectures draw hundreds of students, speaks widely and also has released hip-hop CDs and appeared in Matrix films.

The national disparity in education opportunity was displayed in a microcosm on stage. At one of the nation’s elite universities sat four students from East Palo Alto, where 8 percent of adults are college educated, and where many parents send their children out of the community for schooling. In adjacent Palo Alto, 80 percent of adults are college graduates, pointed out moderator Linda Darling-Hammond.

Drawing on sources ranging from the Bible to Toni Morrison, John Coltrane, Curtis Mayfield and Eugene O'Neill, West urged young people to find their own voice, eschew imitation, cultivate their capacity for empathy and find positive channels for their rage.

He said to pursue not just knowledge – after all, the Nazis were highly educated, he pointed out – but see education as a means to an end.

What’s needed, he said, is individual responsibility, parental involvement, qualified and caring teachers, and a priority on educational opportunity.

That, in part, is what the foundation works on. In 10 years, it has enabled 65 East Palo Alto students to go to college. “Our students have succeeded beyond our wildest dreams,” said Executive Director Stephanie Wick.

“I will be the first in my family to go to college,” Annabelle said. “I will not be the last.’

January 28, 2006
FCE Celebrates its 10th Anniversary with National Advisor Dr. Cornel West
By Alexandra Bernadotte