By For the first time in recent years, Long Beach State improved first-time submission and pass rates on the California Teaching Performance Assessments for candidates who are from historically underserved populations.
“We have developed our curriculum with the [College of Education] and our programs to be more responsive to our students and the needs that they have to help them get the information to be able to take it and move forward with other children,” said Bre Evans-Santiago , co-director of the Center for Transformational Educator Preparation Programs and associate dean for the College of Education. “It’s a domino effect, if we do our job and help them become more culturally competent then they will take that out and became stronger teachers for our community.”
The Center for Transformational Educator Preparation Programs was created by the California State University system to emphasize its dedication to recruiting, preparing and retaining teachers of color.
Over the last four years, CTEPP has made a system-wide effort to better understand the systemic challenges facing minority educators in order to implement changes to improve diversity, equity and inclusion in teaching.
“The ability to recruit, prepare and retain diverse and culturally responsive educators is critical to the success of students and the state,” Assistant Vice Chancellor of CSU’s Educator and Leadership Programs Shireen Pavri said in a press release. “Our university teams have used improvement science methods to investigate specific problems of practice in their programs and then they’ve taken action so that aspiring Black, Indigenous and other teachers of color can thrive in our programs.”
New practices including partnering with school districts to support job opportunities for historically underserved candidates and more intentional, strategic outreach and recruitment of historically underserved candidates have had positive results. Adjusting clinical practice supervision to be more fair and impartial while being culturally responsive has also shown effective results.
Increasing teacher residencies, developing them within the teaching programs and providing continuous support for teacher performance assessments are some goals the College of Education and CTEPP have for CSULB’s future. These objectives aim to help educators in performing better on the job and demonstrate their competencies and knowledge in education.
“For Cal State Long Beach, some of the goals were not just to continue, because we already do, we recruit and we do prepare and retain teachers of color which is a big part of CTEPP, so we’re continuing to do that,” Evans-Santiago said. “We’re looking at more specific ways to support and bring in Black educators because we’ve noticed throughout that we have lower enrollment with Black students.”
Other goals include recruiting teachers for CSU campuses across California and for CTEPP to work with all of the teacher programs in the CSU.
“Regardless of who is in office at different times we still have to make sure we serve our students, our communities… As a college we will continue to do our due diligence to make sure to stick what we believe and that we support our students the best that we can,” Evans-Santiago said.
She emphasized that CTEPP is not over and was made to sustain and keep going regardless of continuous funding.
“CTEPP is working with 13 campuses still, so it’s not ending. We’re continuing to have a center which is the goal of the grant, to continue to reach out to people, provide resources, to help support future endeavors and build networks,” Evans-Santiago said. “I’d like to thank the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for the funding for CTEPP and Dean Ortiz and the EDI team that helps with initiatives, especially Nina Wooldridge, who leads these efforts.”
