Providing teachers that reflect the students

The Sacramento Bee published a good story on Saturday  by Lorett Kalb and Phillip Reese  on a group of teachers at McClatchy High working together in a colectivo to recruit students to get a college education and return to McClatchy as teachers.  Here. http://www.sacbee.com/2014/09/20/6712601/mcclatchy-high-wants-students.html

However, the story misses  an important issue. 

Mc Clatchy used to get many minority teachers, both Asian and Latino from the Bilingual Multicultural Education Department at Sac state, before that program  was eliminated in 2012.  The major minority teacher recruitment program in Northern California was quietly shut down.  I was the first Chair of that department.

By 2007, BMED was recruiting and placing minority teachers in the region such that between 30 and 36 % of all new teachers at Sac State were Latino. We did this for over 18 years.  We trained over 600 teachers, most of them minority and most of them local.

Now that has been re- organized out of existence under the disguise of low enrollment.  Current enrollment in teacher preparation at Sac State is about 6-8 % Latino.  This data is available in publicly available sources. 

BMED Graduate - Principal puts struggling school on new path

dlambert@sacbee.com

PUBLISHED SUNDAY, DEC. 02, 2012

This is the third in an occasional series on principals who are turning around local schools.

Maria Lewis spends much of her day on bent knee. The 44-year-old principal bends down to give direction to bigger kids and to soothe the smallest. But mostly she bends down to listen.

It's clear that kids come first on the T.L. Whitehead Elementary campus in Woodland.

"Every child can learn," Lewis said. "They may be lacking some skills. So what? Let's try to build on prior knowledge."

She must be right. The school's Academic Performance Index has grown from 704 to 793 in the two years since she took the reins of the school. On a scale of 200 to 1,000, the statewide benchmark is 800 for each school.

The increase was enough to make Whitehead Elementary the only traditional school in the four-county region to come out of program improvement this year, a designation Title 1 schools receive if state officials don't think they are improving their scores quickly enough.

"We are really proud" of Whitehead Elementary, Debra Calvin, an associate superintendent at Woodland Unified, told The Bee in October. "It's an incredibly difficult thing to do to pull a school out of Program Improvement."

Mrs. Lewis is a graduate of the Sac State BMED program. Like hundreds of other graduates she has done a great job.  The program has now been terminated.  For details see, The Chicano / Mexican American Digital History project. https://sites.google.com/site/democracyandeducationorg/chicano-mexican-american-digital-history-project/history-of-bilingual-education-dept-at-sac-state

read the entire piece on Mrs. Lewis at the Bee. http://www.sacbee.com/2012/12/02/v-print/5024345/principal-put-struggling-school.html

Beyond the Swindle of the Corporate University: Higher Education in the Service of Democracy | Truthout

Beyond the Swindle of the Corporate University: Higher Education in the Service of Democracy | Truthout

Henry Giroux. this provides an important context for the decision by the College of Education at Sacramento State to dissolve the department of Bilingual/Multicultural Education.

Becoming Biliterate- BMED Conference

Becoming BILITERATE AGAINST THE ODDS : A Cause for Celebration:---  Nov. 5, 2011.

                  The entire Sacramento community is invited to attend the 18th Annual Multicultural Education Conference at Sacramento State University, Saturday, November 5, 2011 from 8:30 am-1:00 pm in the University Union, Sacramento State.  Admission and parking (in Structure II) is free.

                  The keynote speaker is Dr. María de la Luz Reyes, author of Words Were All We Had: Becoming Biliterate Against the Odds.  At the 9:00 am keynote address Dr. Reyes will explain why growing up bilingual in America should be a cause for celebration.  The success of today’s Latino educational professionals dispels the “at risk” myth regarding native languages, suggesting that knowledge of Spanish supports English literacy while emboldening resistance English-only ideologies.