Effort to Train More Teachers Is in Jeopardy

Four innovative education programs that promised to help ease the state’s severe teacher shortage by adding hundreds of new, certified teachers to the job pool each year could be cut because of the state budget crisis, some faculty members fear.

Launched four years ago, the programs at California State University campuses at Dominguez Hills, Long Beach, Los Angeles and Northridge were heralded by educators as models for quickly getting college graduates into kindergarten through 12th-grade classrooms as fully certified teachers.

But with grants from private foundations set to run out this academic year and little expectation of public funding, the programs face uncertain futures.

“I guess we were cut off by [the] electricity” crisis, said Joe Braun, executive director of Design for Excellence: Linking Teaching and Achievement, or DELTA, which coordinates the programs at the four campuses.

Before the state economy hit the skids, program managers thought the Cal State system would pick up the $5-million tab for administration and career counseling when grants from the Weingart and Ford foundations ran out. The individual universities foot the bill for professors’ salaries and the school districts provide additional staff members at the high school.

Although Cal State officials say they do not have any plans to drop DELTA programs, they acknowledge that they have not figured out how to offset the loss of private funds.

Phil Rusche, dean of education at Cal State Northridge, vowed last week to find a way to pay for his school’s widely admired program, even if he has to reassign staff members from other departments to run it.

Many Teachers Are Not Fully Trained

DELTA began as part of a larger effort by the Annenberg Foundation to reform the Los Angeles Unified School District and 13 others in the county. At the time, CSU Chancellor Charles Reed promised to graduate more teachers from the system’s 22 campuses.

Since then, state-mandated class-size reduction and a growing school-age population have created a teacher shortage, said Beverly Young, director of teacher education and public school programs for the Cal State system. This caused desperate districts to hire untrained teachers who worked with emergency credentials, she said.

One in five instructors in Los Angeles Unified works on an emergency credential or waiver, which means he or she is not fully trained. Compton Unified has the worst ratio in the state for a district of its size, with about half of its 1,279 teachers working without full credentials, according to state records.

DELTA was established to attract college graduates who might consider teaching with emergency credentials but would be better served with full professional training, Young said. The Cal State programs were designed to show how universities and school districts could work together to produce fully credentialed teachers in a short time.

To that end, Northridge has developed the most advanced program, officials said. What it calls the Accelerated Collaborative Teacher Preparation Program, or ACT, has provided about 200 teachers for Los Angeles Unified. In classes taught at Francis Polytechnic High School in Sun Valley, future teachers learn from veteran high school instructors and university professors representing a variety of disciplines.

“It’s true that because of the way the Northridge students work with faculty and students, they know more than traditional interns or other first-year teachers,” Young said.

Dan Schar, assistant principal of Poly High, said ACT graduates have an advantage because they know what they are getting into before they step into a classroom of their own. There is a 50% turnover rate among emergency-credentialed teachers at Poly, but ACT-trained instructors almost always stay with the district, he said.

“They know to have lesson plans,” Schar said. “They know you’d better have something for the kids to do in that first five minutes when they’re taking roll. They’re self-assured, not cocky.”

Determined Not to Let Program Fold

Cal State Northridge officials said they will not allow their program to fold.

“We’ve found something good that works for our students,” Rusche said. “We just challenged the faculty to recommend to us ways in which we can do it under our current funding.”

David Spence, vice chancellor of the Cal State system, said: “We have no higher priority than teacher preparation. Too much depends on it.”

But talk of impending closure has caused the ACT faculty to send out invitations to apply for next year’s class with a caution to prospective students that the program might change before they enroll. A brochure that describes ACT in further detail is being shelved, said ACT co-coordinator Nancy Burstein.

Other campuses where DELTA programs have not been as successful have the double challenge of shoring up funding while revising their programs to follow a more effective model.

At Cal State Dominguez Hills, for example, students studied under high school instructors for no pay during the day and took university classes at night. That may help explain why nearly half the students in the program have been lured away to full-time jobs before completing their certification, Braun said. In contrast, ACT students are paid for their work at Poly High.