$8.2-Million Gift Seeks Improved Teaching

Seeking to raise the quality of teaching and, ultimately, the performance of students in Los Angeles County, a local foundation is pumping $8.2 million into an ambitious effort to drastically improve the preparation and professional development of classroom teachers.

The five-year grant by the Weingart Foundation--believed to be the largest gift to local schools for the purpose of improving the teaching corps--will finance the design and launch of a comprehensive professional training and support system for more than 2,000 teachers and administrators in the Los Angeles and Long Beach school districts.

The grant focuses on teacher quality as an overlooked but central element in efforts to upgrade public education.

“Teachers are ill-prepared when they come out of teacher education programs” and work in isolation, without the time or encouragement to improve their skills, once they are assigned to classrooms, said Maria Casillas, president of the Los Angeles Annenberg Metropolitan Project, which will coordinate the ambitious training project with LEARN, the Los Angeles’ districtwide reform movement, and California State University.

Working with local school districts and teachers’ unions, the initiative will attempt to provide more opportunities for teachers to learn and grow professionally, as well as reshape the priorities of college teacher education programs, which Casillas said have often been too theoretical and removed from the realities of real classrooms.

“That’s the beauty of this grant,” said Helen Bernstein, past president of the United Teachers-Los Angeles union, who helped write the grant proposal along with several other teachers. “It is one of the most dramatic visions I’ve seen for system reform involving teacher training. It proposes a marriage between those who have the theory and those who do the work.”

The brainchild of Weingart Foundation Chairman Roy A. Anderson, former CEO of Lockheed, the grant will help the CSU system, which produces 70% of the state’s teachers, establish a professional development academy that will design and provide services to elementary and secondary school teachers and administrators who want to sharpen their skills.

That continuing education will be offered through professional development programs on school campuses, beginning with three centers serving the schools near Lincoln High School east of downtown, Polytechnic High School in Sun Valley and Long Beach Polytechnic High.

Each center will be led by a teacher and two Cal State professors.

Sid Thompson, superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, lauded the grant as a “darn good idea.”

In particular, Thompson praised the requirement that training programs be held on school campuses, a feature that he believes could make that training more valuable.

“The schools will have the ability to say to us and the university or college, ‘Here’s what we need,’ ” he said. “It’s a real opportunity for the universities to hear what people are saying at the site. I don’t think that’s happening now.”

The timing, Thompson said, could not be better, with the district hoping to hire by mid-February 2,600 new teachers--”many of whom have never been near a classroom”--as part of its effort to reduce class size in first and second grades.

The grant requires participating districts to commit funds to the development of some of the school-based training centers. In Los Angeles, Thompson said the district has already earmarked up to $20 million for teacher training and preparation this school year.

Other elements of the project include training outstanding teachers to serve as coaches for instructors in their first few years on the job and changing the way that teachers are paid to encourage them to acquire the skills and knowledge that their particular skills need.