Top Federal Official & Big Federal Grant Come to CSUN

It was an important spring for Cal State Northridge, its future teachers and its education partners. Within days of the announcement that CSUN had won an $8.4 million federal grant to improve the education of teachers who work with students with disabilities, one of Washington’s top education officials came to campus to describe President Obama’s “cradle to career” plan for American education.

The big five-year Teacher Quality Partnership grant speaks volumes about “the great work happening on the Cal State Northridge campus and in our partner schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District,” said President Jolene Koester. What CSUN achieves under the grant’s auspices will “help inform teacher residency programs across the nation,” she said.

Funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the grant monies will support an integrated credential/master’s degree teacher residency program designed to reform traditional university teacher preparation.

CSUN’s education and humanities colleges will work with the LAUSD to recruit 150 special education teachers from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. Together, the education partners will prepare the teachers to serve children with disabilities in high-need schools. They also will evaluate the project’s impact on new teachers and their students.

“It is through our attention to the single most important school-related factor affecting student academic performance—the quality of the teacher—that we will truly improve our schools,” said Michael Spagna, dean of the Michael D. Eisner College of Education.

Sherman Oaks Rep. Brad Sherman, a proponent of the grant legislation, considers CSUN the logical home for the teacher quality grant. The university is “recognized for its exemplary programs to prepare highly qualified teachers…,” said Sherman.

The federal grant also was on the mind of U.S. Department of Education Under Secretary Martha Kanter, who days later told a regional audience that the program will help special education as part of the administration’s “cradle to career” education plan. Under that plan, Kanter projected, the U.S. will have the best educated, most competitive workforce in the world by 2020, despite currently ranking only 10th worldwide in the number of college graduates.

“The truest measure of society’s worth is whether it offers the top 100 percent of Americans the opportunity to go wherever they want to go, do what they want to do, fulfill their dreams,” Kanter said. “We hope their dreams will include a college education.”

The under secretary served as keynote speaker at the inaugural Eisner Education Lecture, funded by The Eisner Foundation together with a colloquium that offered sessions exploring CSUN’s educational partnerships with K-12 schools, Northridge Academy High School, the LAUSD, and the CHIME Institute charter schools for elementary and middle school education. A roundtable discussion on issues such as college readiness preparation and the education of English-language learners filled out a day of thoughtful exchanges.

Visit the Michael D. Eisner College of Education website at www.csun.edu/education/.

— Brenda Roberts

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