(Vol. 4, No. 1 - Spring 2000)

Community Partnership:
"Seamless Education" Pact
Builds on Mutual Dependency

"I have developed a real appreciation for the idea that the education of students in our community is not a partitioned responsibility," says Glenn Nagel, Long Beach State's dean of natural sciences.


By John Norton

Like many university professors, Glenn Nagel began his association with the public schools by taking a "one-way street" point of view. "Usually university people see themselves as givers when they start working with schools," says Long Beach State's dean of natural sciences. "They don't see themselves getting anything. But it turns out that the public schools have a lot of stuff that can help us, too."

That powerful insight might be fashioned into a motto for the Long Beach Education Partnership -- something along the lines of "We're all in this together." And the truth of that statement is not in doubt. Long Beach State has over 1,500 teacher education students at any given time, and of those who graduate, a large percentage find employment in the Long Beach public schools.

CSULB president Robert Maxson is fond of saying that "we need them more than they need us." But as Long Beach Unified vigorously pursues standards-based reform in an environment where well-trained teachers are in very short supply, it's apparent that the dependency is mutual. And the willingness of Nagel and other university and school leaders to accept and even relish their mutual dependency helps explain why the Long Beach college-school partnership has been hailed by U.S. Education Secretary Richard Riley as one of the strongest in the nation.

When Nagel came to Long Beach State four years ago as dean, he brought with him a background as a lab scientist who had had little contact with the world of K-12 classrooms beyond his marriage to an elementary school teacher. When he was approached by a group of teacher education faculty and representatives of LBUSD anxious to build a "seamless partnership" among educators in the city, "I was skeptical at first, because I've seen partnerships come and go."

"Most of these kinds of partnerships are forged out of convenience when one is seeking resources from some external agency," Nagel says. "We get together for the good of group, form a partnership, and then split the spoils, and hopefully we'll do something good for our institutions in the process."

But he soon realized that the Long Beach effort was different. "The Seamless Education partnership actually came together with no other goal than to improve education with our own internal resources." The impetus came in part, he says, "from the fact that everything was going wrong in Long Beach in the early 90s. Things were crumbling around them." The infrastructure of the university was shaky, and the community was suffering from the withdrawal of the shipyard, the aerospace downturn, and the problems with McDonnell Douglas. "People said education was going wrong, too, and maybe if we got together we could improve the situation."

Working under the leadership of the presidents of Long Beach State and Long Beach Community College and LBUSD superintendent Carl Cohn, Nagel and his fellow deans have spent the last four years collaborating with key school district staff, plowing their common ground in an effort to improve the crop yield. "I have developed a real appreciation for the idea that the education of students in our community is not a partitioned responsibility," he says.


University standards

At a recent national conference presentation, CSULB education dean Jean Houck ticked off the Education Partnership's accomplishments since 1994. The list was extensive: regular exchanges between college and school faculty; summer courses designed specifically to deepen the content knowledge of math, science and social studies teachers; an extensive "service learning" program that places hundreds of college interns in LBUSD classrooms each year; and a new $2.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation to modify K-8 teacher education in math and science.

But the most profound development, college and school leaders agree, has been the impact of Long Beach Unified's standards-based school reform on the relationship between the district and Long Beach State.

"Our seamless partnership work is awesome now," says Dixie Dawson, who heads the district's mathematics programs. For example, she says, college professors now meet regularly after school with math teachers to explore algebra together, and meeting agendas are aligned with the content teachers will be teaching in their classrooms the following month.

"We are all getting on the same page with standards," Dawson says. "The university is paying attention to the kind of content knowledge our teachers need to help kids meet our standards, and we are showing college professors what it means to teach to standards."

CSULB associate education dean Kathy Cohn agrees that the impact of LBUSD's standards initiative among college faculty "is significant and growing." Traditionally, Cohn says, university students who planned to become teachers have completed a four-year degree before taking teacher preparation courses in a fifth year.

While that remains the dominant model, the university -- in collaboration with the school district -- has developed a new teacher training program, ITEP, that teams education, liberal arts, and science faculty members to offer a "blended" curriculum of education and content-area courses offered over a student's entire college career.

A key feature of the program is its commitment to modeling standards-based teaching -- not only in College of Education courses, but in classes taught by science, English, mathematics and social studies professors. "They have examined the California academic standards and they have everything in their courses that our ITEP students need to teach those standards," Cohn says. "Our faculty has known in general what the standards are, but they are thinking about them in a much deeper way."

And that's a huge shift in thinking for professors, Cohn and other CSULB leaders say, requiring close cooperation between the College of Education and other colleges on campus. David Dowell, associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts, says the new ITEP program, which has involved about 60 faculty members on campus so far, is already having "a significant impact on the way faculty operate here. It's not just that you have to change your content, you have to change your delivery."

Dowell says faculty discussions about standards-based teaching are generating "some very interesting conversations." At one meeting, professors examined a core principle of the standards-based classroom -- grading and assessment. "The gist of that discussion was, 'how good is good enough'? What does it mean to meet a standard? Does that mean that you're satisfactory if you master most but not all of the standards? And if not, what do we do to make sure students do have mastery? Those kinds of questions are really getting to the heart of the issue of faculty responsibility for student learning, in a way that's very new on university campuses."

These same kinds of conversations about the meaning of "grades" and the attainment of standards are going on in every middle school in Long Beach Unified. And Nagel says the district's "spadework" on standards issues has been invaluable in helping university leaders begin to rethink their own approach to educating students. "The level of pedagogy in most university classrooms is, 'I lecture, you listen.' We've put all the responsibility for learning on the student," he explains.

Nagel notes that universities in the Cal State system are under increasing pressure from Chancellor Charles Reed to create "student-based outcomes for our instructional programs. And it's all the same thing."

One goal of the NSF grant, Nagel says, is to draw more prospective teachers into the subjects of science and mathematics. The key is to shift the emphasis in college courses from the threat of failure to the promise of success. "A typical science instructor will say that 30 percent of students will fail the class," he explains. "We have to not think that way anymore. We can't afford to do it, and it doesn't work very well with these students. You end up scaring most of them."


A fundamental "disconnect"

As the ITEP program expands from its current enrollment of 50 students to an eventual target of 500, Cohn and her colleagues believe its impact on teaching across the university campus will grow as well. The launching of the ITEP -- and other initiatives, including a long-awaited new program in middle grades education -- represent a culmination of the Long Beach Education Partnership's original goals. This summer the Partnership will showcase its success at a statewide conference aimed at promoting similar partnerships across California.

Cohn says Partnership leaders have agreed it's time for reflection. "The goals that were established six years ago have all been accomplished, so we are taking some time now to stop and take stock."

One sticky issue the Partnership must face is an apparent "disconnect" between the College of Education and the school district over the basic preparation of new teachers. While Long Beach Unified educators generally agree that the Partnership's internships, teacher-faculty interchanges, and collaboration on programs like ITEP have increased teacher graduates' understanding of standards-based instruction, they still complain that too many graduates arrive in classrooms without fundamental teaching skills.

The district's recent decision to implement a training program in the "Essential Elements of Teaching" is attributed, in part, to the university's lack of attention to the basics. "I think our partnership with the university has done some really good things," says Lisa Isbell, who heads the district's professional development office, "but I don't see our teachers as being exactly where they need to be coming out of teacher preparation."

But, Isbell says, the Education Partnership is strong, and she's confident that "our university will get there."


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