December 16, 1997

Chair Cooper called the session to order at 6:30 p.m. in the Harold M. Proshansky Auditorium of the Graduate School and University Center. Present were Senators from the following campuses:

I. Approval of the Agenda: The agenda was adopted as proposed.

II. Approval of the Minutes of the 246th Plenary, November 18, 1997: The minutes were adopted as proposed.

III. Reports: [recorded in Reports & Deliberations.]

a. Chair (oral and written).

b. The Interim Chancellor (oral).

c. Faculty Members of Board of Trustees Committees (written).

IV. Panel on Teacher Education

Mr. Joseph Frey, Coordinator for Office of Higher Education,

State Education Dept.

Dr. Russ Hotzler, University Dean, Office of Academic Affairs, CUNY

Prof. Edwin Farrell, Education, CCNY

Prof. Maryann Feola, English, CSI

Prof. Charlotte Phoenix, Education, Medgar Evers

OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

December 16, 1997

III. Reports:

a. Chair:

Tonight for the first time this semester, the agenda finally includes a report in person from a Chancellor. At least somebody called Chancellor. At the 24th of November meeting of the Board of Trustees, the Board named, as you all know, Dr. Christoph Kimmich, the Provost of Brooklyn College, and a fellow European historian, to the position of Interim Chancellor, to serve until a permanent person has been located. Dr. Kimmich has his doctorate from Oxford and his undergraduate degree from Haverford. He has worked in political and diplomatic history in the 20th century. He arrived at Brooklyn in 1973. He has agreed to spend a few minutes talking with us before we begin our panel. He is somebody who has held a long list of honors. I will not read them to you, but you can read them in the official literature. He comes to us with a commitment and an understanding of the role of the faculty in the University. I would be happy if you would welcome Dr. Kimmich, and I think he would probably take a few questions if you have any at the end.

b. Interim Chancellor Kimmich: Sandi, thank you very much for a very handsome introduction and this warm welcome. It is a pleasure to be here, and I’ll say it right up front, the faculty is our greatest resource, and you represent it, and I am delighted to be here. I was here a year ago as some of you may remember, wearing a different hat. I think at the time Sandi was quoted as saying that the Provosts had more interesting conversations than Presidents. I hope that’s all to do with ex-provosts, Sandi. I did not think I would be here again so soon, and not wearing this particular hat. Let me just say that I find it extraordinarily humbling to be appointed to serve as the head of this great University. I was talking to somebody earlier today, who described us all in a memorable phrase, that CUNY is one of the most interesting institutions of our time, and I think that is true. The third largest university system in the country, the largest urban system in the country, a concentration of intellect, intelligence, skills, competencies, capacities, which few can rival, I think. And for that reason alone the experience I’m getting into as Interim Chancellor is both gratifying and really exhilarating.

This is the beginning of my third week, so don’t expect necessarily a regular report or all the answers. I’ll hold that until the next time. But I can tell you that we’ve begun the budget cycle, we have submitted the University request with full-time faculty as one of the major priorities with an emphasis on the connections between high schools and college, and similar programs as another priority. I can tell you also that this is an election year, as you all know, and that might make life a bit easier, but I don’t think it can exempt us from a role of pressure of lobbying, a presence with our legislators in Albany; we still need your help. One of the things I’m going to be asking you throughout this period of my tenure is to give your help and that of your colleagues to our efforts in Albany. We’ll need your help in this coming year. It is next year that we really have to worry about, but let’s talk about that at some other point.

We all know that the contract is under negotiation and one of the things that I would like to do is to bring it to conclusion sometime soon. I have met with your Executive Committee for an exchange of views and ideas. I think frankly that it was a very constructive and productive meeting, and that we had a lot to talk about that we have in common and that really made sense, I think, to both of us. I tried to give Sandi and her colleagues a sense of what I saw as the issues and where I stood on these issues. I’m second to none, I think, in the belief of the quality and stature of the University. I’m second to none in the belief that there is enormous potential and enormous promise in this University. But I am also aware, and increasingly so as I begin my task, of signs that indicate that we have suffered, in many areas, long term neglect. That of course we have been battered and battered by budget cuts. And that we have had to make some very painful adjustments to different expectations among our students, among our public, to a different environment. That we have managed to maintain our creativity, our commitment in all of this, on the part of the faculty and on the part of the campuses, I think simply confirms what I said earlier about the quality of this institution.

We have our critics, internal critics and external critics; we all know that. I’d be worried if we didn’t--only the insignificant escape criticism. But it is incumbent upon us, I think, to engage the criticism and to engage the critics. Are we being misrepresented? Is it unfair? Is it out of ignorance? Or is there a germ of truth here and there? My sense of it is, and my own inclination is, to try to identify the underlying issues, the concerns that are expressed by the critics. But also, and that is the other side of this coin, to educate them. What are we about? What do we do? Who we are, who are our students. I think it’s two ways, I think it cuts in two directions. We shouldn’t ignore, at the same time as we take a more proactive role. The issues that we are faced with by our critics are well known to all of us -- academic standards, graduation rates, remediation, the progress toward the degree, the pass rate on the bar exam, grade inflation, admission standards -- these are just the obvious ones. I think we should ask ourselves as they come up, are we satisfied with our performance on these? Are we doing as well as we might? It may be true that there is no grade inflation, or at least let me say that is no different than anywhere else. Are we satisfied with that? I don’t think that is an illegitimate question, and I think we should ask it. Are we satisfied with our own explanations that we have been giving both to the media and to others about where we are and what we do? Are we as up to date on curriculum as we should be given the changes in the disciplines, the changing environment, the changing expectations of our students? The answer may be "yes." Have we examined it lately? Can we speak with conviction?

What I really want to say to you are two basic things. One is, I’m going to try to enlist your help, as the Faculty Senate, as representatives of a great faculty, in raising some of these topics on the campuses. I think that we need to talk about them, if only to examine them closely, not to live the unexamined life or the unexamined curriculum. To see where we might decide to improve to change, to modify, to ratify, whatever. I will come to you, asking you for your help. And secondly, I want to hear from you on these topics, I want to have your input, your opinions. I want to be as broadly open to these issues as I possibly can. I hasten to add that there are only 24 hrs. in a day, even for the Chancellor. But I’m available on e-mail, I’m available on telephone, I read and write so I can get your letters. So do let me know, do give me your thoughts, where the University can be better, where it might change. We have a big ship here, it’s like a proverbial aircraft carrier that takes at least six or seven miles to be able to even turn around. That ship I think needs to move in the right direction, and with your help it will. I’m delighted to be here, I look forward to enlisting you in this cause, and I look forward to your help. Thank you very much.

IV. Panel on Teacher Education

Chair Cooper - The Senate Executive Committee decided to hold a rather special panel tonight on the subject of teacher education. The subject which is, I hasten to tell you, of importance to every single one of us, even if we do not have majors in that on our campuses. We have been apprised by the Board of Regents that there are severe difficulties with the way CUNY students are performing on the New York State Certification Examination. So severe that some of CUNY’s campuses have brought the state average down to a totally unacceptable level. The Faculty Senate is historically aware of the fact that historically the City University has educated almost all the teachers in the public schools in New York City. This is not the case anymore. We are being told now that fewer than half of the staff in the public schools are coming out of CUNY campuses, and that number seems to be shrinking. This is a subject that I would very much like to ensure that I leave this year having impressed on everyone its central importance to us. It is not just an issue for the teacher education people, it is absolutely for the liberal arts and science faculty. To that end, we have organized a panel tonight. I should say that Leslie Jacobson, the head of our Academic Policy Committee from Brooklyn College, has done most of the organizing along with Bill Phipps, the Executive Director. At this point I would like to invite Leslie and the members of the Panel to come up front and Leslie will introduce the panelists.

Professor Jacobson (Academic Policy Committee Chair) - Good evening. As usual, Sandi had made my opening remarks, so I guess you’ll just have to hear them again. New York, over the next five years, will need 20,000 new teachers. In the past, City University graduates served as the main source for the schools in New York City. Today, however, that is no longer true. It appears that our students have fallen behind in passing the Teacher Certification Examination. If you have attended any of the CAPPR meetings, those are the academic planning meetings of the Board of Trustees, you know that teacher education is an all-important issue and foremost on their agenda. It is all the more important for the faculty to take the pivotal role in addressing the academic needs of students preparing for teacher education certification. It is we who should develop and set the curricula and the standards. It is the hope of the Senate’s Academic Policy Committee that you will take the message home to each of your campuses in order to facilitate those changes which will be necessary to improve the liberal arts and sciences curriculum of teacher education programs, since that is where much of the problem seems to reside. It is therefore with great pleasure that I welcome our guests this evening, who are here to address the all-important issues facing teacher education programs at CUNY. Each speaker will address a different issue from his or her vantage point. Our first speaker, Mr. Joseph Frey, has been with the State Education Department since 1980, serving as the Executive Assistant to the Deputy Commissioner for Elementary, Middle, and Secondary Education, Chief of the Bureau of School Food Management and Nutrition, Chief of the Bureau of Proprietary School Supervision, and Director to the Division of College and University Education. At present he serves as coordinator for the Office of Higher Education. He has worked with the Regents Task Force on Teaching since its inception in May of 1996. Mr. Frey will provide us with information on the status of proposals under consideration by the Board of Regents for the review of teaching and teacher education programs in New York State.

Mr. Joseph Frey (Coordinator for the Office of Higher Education, State Education Department; overhead slides are on file) - Good evening. In May of 1996 Chancellor Hayden of the Board of Regents convened the Regents Task Force on Teaching. Really what he asked the Task Force to do was to look at the state of teaching and teacher education and to see what has to be done to ensure that the teachers can help students to get to the new learning standards that they promulgated in our state. The Regents Task Force has been meeting for about two or three times per month over the last eighteen months. We’ve met with hundreds of groups, including the CUNY deans. Right now we are just completing a sweep of the state with teaching forums, presenting to the field the draft version of the Regents paper on teaching. We expect then to come back and make adjustments and present it to the Board for approval.

What I would like to do quickly today is to give you an overview of the presentation that the Regents have provided across the State of New York. The first thing they did was look at the status of the data, both in terms of student performance and where teachers were in terms of teacher candidate performance. In New York State presently, only around 40% of the graduates are receiving the Regents diploma. And as you know, with the new graduation requirements those students entering grade nine in 2001 will have to complete a Regents diploma. That percent gets even smaller for New York City and for schools which are under registration review. Even those students who are sitting for Regents Exams, the pass rate is not where we would like it today. Approximately 50% of our students who are taking the English Exam are passing it, 63% in Math, and as little as 48% statewide in U.S. history. Students in grade 3 on the Statewide PEP Test in Reading, the performance there shows an uneven distribution between New York City and the rest of the state. Where the balance of state average of those students who are above the statewide reference point is around 90%, for New York City it is down to about 60%, a drop of about 10% over the past seven or eight years.

The other thing they looked at was the minority composition of our students in relationship to the minority composition of our teaching force. In New York City where 83% of our students are minorities, only 34% of the teaching force is minorities, comparable numbers for the big five cities and the statewide total. If we look just at projected student enrollment, not considering retirement, not considering the fact that there is new legislation to reduce a class size, you’ll see that over the next 10 years we are projecting the need for a significant number of new teachers. You take this as your base, and you add on to it with respect to teacher retirements, over the last 10 years, the average age of teachers in our state has gone from 41 to 45 years old. And another interesting statistic, over the last 10 years those teachers who are 49 or older, have gone from 24% to 34% of our teaching force. Clearly that is probably going to double the number of new teachers that we are taking. At present we are hiring statewide probably 5,000-6,000 teachers without any experience. We project that by 2007, that is going to at least double. So the numbers are getting scary.

One of the critical issues that the Regents have to deal with is the issue of the temporary licenses. In New York City the number of temporary licenses over the last 7-8 years has been between 8,000-10,000. For the rest of the state the numbers have been under 1,000. This is an area that in particularly hard-to-staff subject matter areas has been an extremely critical issue and they are trying to look at that right now. One of the most interesting charts which really demonstrates the hard-to-staff area, is the comparison between temporary licenses and initial certifications. If you look at that chart for K-6, the state of New York produced over 12,000 certificates, and we still had 1,800 K-6 temporary licenses. Only in the area of bilingual and ESL were the number of temporary licenses exceeding the number that we certified in that area. Clearly we are producing teachers; the issue obviously is the geographic distribution of those teachers. One of the things that the Regents tried to do in looking at teacher characteristics, was to examine them in relationship to certain indicators. The next three charts look at certain teacher characteristics in relationship to the minority composition of schools. Here is a chart showing teacher turnover rate as a percent of minority composition of school. We have here, we go from 0-20% minority composition to 100% and a turnover rate changes from 15%-20%. Another issue that greatly concerns the Regents is the number of non-certified teachers in school buildings that are mostly minority students. Again, these statistics show a tremendous increase in the number of temporary licensed teachers as you break it down by the percentage of minority students in the building. Finally, given those two facts, you wouldn’t be surprised that the median years experience, the higher the percent the minority population, the lower the median experience for the teachers in that building.

With respect to teacher education institutions, the Regents looked at the number of institutions where 20% or more of the college recommended students did not pass the various State Certification Exams, the LAST, the Arts and Sciences Science Test, the ATSW (Assessment Teaching Skills Written), and the Competence Specialty Test. Just by way of reference, there are approximately 112 teacher education institutions in our state. And those represent the number where there was a 20% or more failure rate among the college-recommended students. This chart compares, by sector, those institutions where 85% of their students have passed the NYSTE (New York State Teacher Certification Exams), as opposed to more than 85% or less than 85% by sector. You see (reference to chart) 14 SUNY institutions’ pass rate was greater than 85%, two with lower than 85%. CUNY 4 and 5, and the independents are broken out by size of the programs. Clearly the data on the teachers and on the students demonstrate that there is an unevenness in performance across the state.

Looking at those data and looking at the gaps in the data, Regents have come up with five basic recommendations with respect to teaching that are included in their paper. Clear and rigorous standards, for teachers - develop standards and guidelines for teacher preparation programs, new certification structure, mandated professional development and a periodic review of competence, and expanded effort to match teacher supply to demand. A commitment to education and well being of all students regardless of sex, background, level of ability, style of learning, solid grounding in the Arts and Science with in-depth knowledge of subjects to be taught, understanding how students learn and develop, skill in adapting teaching to student needs, skill in classroom management including technology, collaborative approach with colleagues, parents, cultural institutions and broader community, and dedication to life long learning.

They are also talking about the appointment of a new professional standards and practice board for teaching. This has got quite a bit of interest during the forums because there is a lot of push to have the majority of members being teachers, a lot of push to have the majority of members being teacher educators. Basically they are looking to have this board advise the Regents on teacher standards, standards for teacher education programs, professional development, standards for an intern/mentor program. They envision it to be comprised by 21 representatives, 21 educators including teaching educators and certified teachers, along with 6 public members including parents, and business representatives, and one teacher education student. The second area - standards and guidelines for teacher preparation programs. The most controversial piece we have in terms of teacher education programs was whether or not the Regents were going to require that all teacher education programs be accredited by NCATE (National Commission of Accreditation for Teacher Education). Right now, within the draft paper, they are recommending that the institutions be accredited by NCATE or any other certification body recognized by the Secretary of Education. Or they are calmly working with the Panel of Presidents from across all three sectors to determine whether or not there can be an alternative model for accreditation that we can implement in addition to NCATE.

Clearly the reasons for looking at some type of professional accreditation whether it be NCATE or a model that we can develop in New York State. They are looking at present to require institutions to have an 85% pass rate for their recommended students on the New York State Teacher Certification Exams. They will be looking for the Commissioner to provide preferential treatment for those programs that combine different certificates. Those of you who might have seen the Regents paper, know that there are many levels of endorsements that would be required in addition to the certification. For instance, they are retaining the K-6 base certificate and they are recommending that if you are going to teach in pre-K, K, or 1, you would get an endorsement onto the K-6 certificate.

That leads us into the new certification structure. There was universal agreement by most of the teacher education institutions to eliminate the transcript evaluation route to teaching. We’ve heard a lot of criticisms of the transcript evaluation route that where we in the New York State Education Department were actually getting all of the transcripts together and certify that the individuals met the requirements and issue a certificate. New York City Board of Education has come out against the elimination of the transcript evaluation route completely because of the shortage areas in New York. The Regents are still considering that issue but I think that they are moving to a more rigorous program of requiring the institutions for taking more responsibility for certifying that the students have completed a rigorous program. They are going to be encouraging institutions to develop programs for second career individuals who want to get into teaching, a course for para-professionals and to meet the needs of those folks who want to enter a teacher education program. They are looking to limit the temporary licenses from 6 years down to 2 years. Again, this has been a rather controversial piece too, because of the shortage we have, particularly in the area of ESL and bilingual education.

The last requirement is something which is already required in New York City but would be required across the state. With respect to the new certificate titles, they are looking for teacher education programs to adjust to strengthen the content of pedagogical preparation, to focus more on student developmental needs, prepare special education and diversity for all students, strong content in special education for teachers, and multiple field experiences. As I indicated, the paper shows clearly that they are using more endorsements in special education. They divided it between those special educators who work in the general education curriculum where that will now be an endorsement or a certificate, and those special educators who deal with youngsters who are not in the general education program, that will be a free standing certificate. One last area in certification. As you know, right now we have provisional and permanent certifications. The Regents are suggesting we go to a three-tier certification, an internship certificate where the student would have to pass the LAST, ATSW, and the Content Specialty Test, and be recommended by the college. At that point they would be eligible for an intern certificate. The internship will be one year in post-employment. If they complete the intern certificate, they will then be eligible for the initial teaching certificate. That would be good for up to seven years. During those seven years the student would have to complete five years teaching experience, pass an advanced Content Specialty Test, and pass an Assessment Teaching Skills Test which would include a portfolio, a career growth plan, and an in-class assessment by the school principal and two peers who are outside the school building. No one has agreed on that part, but stay tuned on that.

The last piece of course has to do with professional development. There has been a lot of controversy as to whether or not the Regents are going to require renewable certification or renewable tenure. They have elected not to go for either one of those. They have elected to require institutions to have a professional development plan which is focused on moving the students to the new learning standards. Focusing on local needs, on the needs of the students, and on the needs of the teacher. It will require that they would continue with the annual professional review of the teachers which is currently mandated in the regs. They are also discussing a five year review that would be done by the school principal and two outside peer evaluators. Those teachers who did poorly on the annual and five year reviews could be subject to peer evaluation. And subsequently if the peer evaluation did not remediate whatever the issues were, teachers then could be subject to disciplinary action through the present system in the 30-28 process. Part of the Regents package will be requests to the legislature for funds to implement the professional development component of the plan.

Finally, to address the disparity in the availability of teachers and the issues about trying to get teachers to stay within schools that are at risk, the Regents will be proposing a series of recruitment and initiative efforts. To fund incentive programs for schools that are at risk, to drive dollars for teachers into those buildings to match the Federal Loan Forgiveness Program, to look at programs specifically designed by dollars to recruit more teachers in the New York City area, and to provide additional professional development dollars to buildings that are at risk so that teachers have more time to plan for professional development activities. That is a very quick overview and for those of you who would like a copy of the plan, you can either call Russ, he has 15 at his desk, or you can just stroll right down off the Internet. There are two versions of the paper. There is a 15 fifteen page version that we use in the public forums, and there is a 35 page version which is all of the details.

Professor Jacobson (Academic Affairs Committee Chair) - Thank you very much. We will take questions and comments at the end of our session. Our next speaker really needs no introduction, being a faculty member of the City University. Dr. Russell Hotzler became a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering Technology at Queensborough Community College in 1971 and is still active in numerous professional societies. He joined that college’s administration in 1979, serving as Assistant and Associate Dean of Administration before being promoted to Dean and Vice President for Academic Affairs, a position he has occupied for twelve years. For the past two years he has served as Acting University Dean at 80th Street. In that capacity he serves as liaison to the State Education Department in matters related to college and program review, and as the University Representative to Middle States Evaluation Team conducting college evaluation visits. Since May he has also helped to coordinate the University’s teacher education initiatives, working with the colleges to ensure compliance with the state’s evolving requirements for teacher education. It is on this topic that he will brief us this evening.

Dr. Russ Hotzler (University Dean, Office of Academic Affairs, CUNY; overhead slides are on file) - Thank you very much, Leslie. Not to repeat for you some of the things that Dr. Frey has laid out this evening, I’d like to take a slightly different path, but I will repeat a number of the things that have been up on the screen previously. First of all, let’s perhaps start closer to home, because I think the issue of educating teachers for all of us is a very special one. There is an obligation which the University has had since its very beginning to provide for the City of New York a source of highly qualified teachers for the public sector. This graph sort of illustrates for you rather dramatically the expectation of the New York City Board of Education for teaching staff over the next several years. This is a cumulative number of teachers that will have to be either replaced or hired in anticipation of increasing enrollments. I will come back to this later and provide some background for it, but I think that this really emphasizes the importance of the task ahead of us. Traditionally these teachers have come from the City University and a number of that magnitude will not be produced by colleges outside of the City of New York.

There are efforts under way at the state level to bring more teachers from upstate schools to work in the city. But I think that these numbers will be small in comparison to the overall need. Perhaps, to put another context on a few of the issues that Dr. Frey has raised earlier, the issues under discussion by the Board of Regents are not new on the national scene. In fact New York State is really somewhat behind. In 1994 there was a national commission appointed which began to look at the issues of teacher education and preparation across the country. This was prompted by the fact that only 72% of the teachers nationwide were certified. And every year over 50,000 people enter the profession who were not fully qualified to get in front of a classroom. The national statistics were very compelling and, as a result, a commission of rather distinguished individuals pulled together and they have been working rather diligently ever since. The National Commission looked at a number of these factors and what you heard earlier from the Regents really picked up on what the National Commission recommended in many instances. For example, the National Commission recommended that professional standard boards be established in every state, that accreditation be required by all schools of education, that inadequate schools be closed, license teachers based on demonstrated performance, these came from the National Commission.

I have to tell you that there are 12 states so far that have signed on to this. New York has not yet signed on, but I think it will once the Regents act and in fact their recommendations fall very much in line with what’s coming from the National Commission. There is a rather comprehensive document that they just put together, but when the initial document came out New York was criticized because it did not have a standards board; it had fewer accredited programs. I think it was largely as a result of some of these concerns that the Regents have moved so quickly to put in place many of the recommendations that were just outlined for you. This repeats a little bit of what you have just heard, but I think it puts it into a context. Let me preface some of this in a somewhat simplified way; this addresses some of the things you have heard recently. There are new graduation requirements that were just passed by the Regents. Students are going to be held to higher standards. The report that was just outlined documented how the state was going to hold teachers to higher standards, higher requirements for certification, additional exams. And finally if teachers are going to be held to higher standards then certainly the schools of teacher education are going to be held to higher standards. They are going to be required to be professionally accredited and subject to new requirements for continued professional development. Again, that somewhat simplifies it, but nonetheless, this is an indication of the activities that are going on at the state level and they affect our students, our teachers and many of you sitting here today.

There was a handout on the table out front which is basically somewhat of a summary of those recommendations in the Regents report that apply most specifically to us. And perhaps we’ll just spend a moment to review them. You’ve heard a lot about the first one where we are linking continued registration of programs to the institutional results on the teacher certification exams. Perhaps before I go to much further, it might be helpful, since many of you in the audience may not be familiar with some of the terminology, a couple of us have learned rather quickly. The certification process is more complicated than we have time to talk through this evening. However there are three tests that must be completed to become fully certified. The first one is termed the LAST (Liberal Arts and Science Test). I know that Professor Farrell and others will be speaking to this in a little while, so I am not going to go into the test. A liberal arts test which is usually taken by students at the end of the sophomore or junior year. A second test that addresses the pedagogical component and that is the ATSW, as you may have heard that term used. And finally the Content Specialty Test, which in effect, if the person is going to teach math, then they would be taking a test in math, if they are going to teach chemistry, it would be a chemistry test, and so on.

You’ll notice that institutions as it’s currently written, whose pass rates fall below the 85% mark, will be notified that their registration is in jeopardy and the accrediting agency will be informed of the student performance on the exam. That is clearly a concern for us, something we are looking at very closely and many of the colleges, as most of us are aware, are dealing with this very directly right now. The second item is not necessary in any priority order, but of somewhat more importance, is the issue of accreditation by the National Commission for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE). As was mentioned, the presidents, and there is a panel of presidents, and I have a slide here which projects for us those presidents within CUNY who are active on our council, have proposed to the Regents an alternative route to accreditation. The issue is one that we are not going to go into right now, but it has to do with NCATE. There are issues with NCATE, there is a cost factor, and there are requirements that NCATE might ask for that some people may feel are inappropriate. This is a hotly debated issue right now and not one that we’re going to spend too much time discussing at the moment.

Dr. Frey pointed out the change in the certification requirements for teachers. The main change would be that right now to become a provisional teacher you have to pass the first two parts of the exam. The change would require someone to complete all three parts of the exam before they could become provisional. They would have to complete an internship, and then subsequently a master’s degree within the seven year period. That is tightening up the requirement. Restructuring certificate types, I cannot emphasize to you strongly enough the implications that that has for all of us and especially for those of you who are involved, not only in the education programs, but the liberal arts programs that are linked and provide routes to provisional certification. In particular you will notice that the recommendation indicates multiple certificates and endorsements. Basically what’s required here is that in many instances there must be more content moved into these curricula in order for people to satisfy the new certification requirements. That is not finished yet because the Regents are still working on some of those and I know it will be a while before we see a final copy. But in effect it will require us to go back to the drawing board, to review the curriculum and especially the liberal arts and science content of many of these programs. That’s a bigger job than it might first appear. The top one (reference to slide) speaks to the fact that they are closing down some of the alternative routes to certification and would require everyone in the state who wishes to be certified to actually attend a college and take courses relevant to teacher education.

We are being called upon here to assist in the process to provide innovative, new alternative tracks for people to complete these requirements. Again, this is a rather considerable undertaking. I know that among the deans of education, we have talked about this already, there is quite a bit of concern on the campus. Quite a number of people have looked at this and feel that the number of people who will be coming to the colleges requesting the opportunity to pursue an alternative route will be significant. It could not already burden the current structure, but require us to view how we handle this issue, perhaps with new programs, perhaps with some other more innovative approaches. But there will be a cohort that can no longer apply to Albany for transcript review and get certified. They will have to come through an institution of higher education in order to complete that process. We all look forward to having future support for teacher education, so that is good.

The Professional Standards Boards, again as Dr. Frey indicated, this is an issue that has raised a lot of concern. Perhaps the best way to frame it is the following: the teachers feel that since this is a board determining the regulations by which they function as professionals, they want to be in control of that board. It is understandable. Since that board will rule ultimately on the accreditation of our programs, we too feel that we must have an appropriate role in place and voice on that board. So there is a serious issue here as to the composition of the board, and the Regents right now I think have taken a number of suggestions, one coming from our presidents, that the board actually operate through a sequence of sub-boards. One that would address the K-12 issues, one that would address higher education, and one should address administrative concerns and administrative licenses. I don’t know if that will be the final structure, but at the moment that seems to be the direction it is taking. Actually in consideration of time, you have copies of this, so we can review those.

I will point out the last bullet there (reference to handout), "the expectation of when an institution awards a degree and recommends an individual for certification, those actions will signify that the institution has used valued instruments to determine that the individual is committed to promoting the well-being and learning of all students..." I’ll let you finish it. You can see that the responsibility is being placed on everyone to ensure that these objectives are met. Just a quick piece here, the Panel of Presidents that both Dr. Frey and I spoke of, two papers were put together by the Panel of Presidents. One had to do with institutional support for teacher education, a second one had to do with the process by which teacher education programs can be accredited. Both of those recommendations were taken seriously by the Regents and in one form or another appear in the current draft document.

The issue of the Board of Education and the job that lies ahead of us is a very serious one. We could pretty much set this up and apply to ourselves as well as to the Board of Education. Teacher recruitment needs, we have to deal with enrollment changes, the future of those components. Here is one that is close to the recent enrollment trend within the Board of Education. Enrollment has gone up at approximately 2% a year within the system. That trend is not expected to change in the near future. Well, what does this mean? It means basically that if no one retired from the Board of Education, we would still have to produce a significant number of teachers, 3,600 to be exact, to meet their needs over the next several years. As I pointed out to an earlier group, this trend line is being actually put to use by a number of our campuses that are working on master plans. That also signifies a potential increase in enrollment of the University at some point in the future. That should not be lost in the equation. Just the general education teachers that would be needed over the next several years to provide for the increase in enrollment, I think is much more relevant.

These numbers, by the way, are coming from, note the reference at the bottom (reference to handout). The Board of Education has contracted with a consulting agency that is working very closely with their personnel department to provide as accurate as possible projections as to their needs over the next decade. This has never been done in great detail before, but the numbers involved here are so significant, it cannot be left to the last minute, to attempt to adjust to the needs that are about to befall the system. This speaks of people eligible to retire -- that doesn’t mean they will. But the problem is compounded by the number of people who don’t hang around very long. As you can see (reference to slide) the attrition rate is rather significant. These are people that in some instances fall out perhaps because they haven’t been trained properly. But what’s going on now is a little bit different than that. Actually these people are being recruited away. As a result of the National Commissions’ efforts, and one of their recommendations, for everyone to go out and aggressively recruit teachers. While the rest of the country is aggressively recruiting teachers, a number of states are doing it right here in New York City. And they are recruiting away some of the teachers who are most valuable to our system, people with bilingual certificates, people in math and sciences. Some of this attrition is so devastating that the Board is acting rather precipitously to try to curtail. But as you can see (reference to slide), that is a rather significant loss of new hires to have to contend with. When we put all of this together we are back to where we started in the following sense, a composite of where we see the projected mean at the moment.

I’ve said this at the other forum that we had last week, and I’m going to repeat it here today, there is no more serious challenge facing us than our need to help the Board of Education meet this requirement. There is no elected official in the State of New York who we will be able to approach as a University and articulate our needs and our concerns for centers of excellence, for new faculty, for all of the things that we will need to operate unless we can address this need for the City. Sandi said it, other people here have said it, and I think it is really important that we address this by coming together. Teacher education people represent a small fraction of what’s involved here. This is a very broad based issue for us, it involves all of the liberal arts, all the sciences. The shortages the system is seeing are not confined to areas that are the domain of the teacher educators. They are the responsibility of all of us in the system, and I can tell you that all of the faculty who I have met with are taking this very seriously. Many of the campuses as you know have formed task forces. The presidents have convened, and they have been holding special meetings. Dr. Cooper has some plans as well, and I think there will be a rather broad mobilization here to attempt to address this need in a rather straightforward manner.

One of the things we are going to have is a little bit of information that breaks down that need. This is a little bit of a break down of one year’s projection. It was the projection they give for the current year as to where the needs would actually be. What will be helpful for us is getting this data over a ten year period that will allow us to match the needs of the system with our own capacity. As the colleges review their programs and build capacity in certain areas, we have to ensure that we build capacity in those areas that are in most need by the Board of Education. I will stop at this point, and we will wait for questions later. Thank you very much.

Professor Jacobson (Academic Affairs Committee Chair) - Our next speaker is Dr. Charlotte Phoenix, who is a professor in the Education Department at Medgar Evers College. She has taken the certification examination within this last year. Dr. Phoenix has taught full- and part-time in the Department of Mathematics, and she has served as an Associate Dean of Academic Affairs and also as Department Chairperson. Currently she is assigned half-time to work as liaison between education and liberal arts faculty through the Office of the Provost. She will tell us about her experiences and the examination.

Professor Charlotte Phoenix (Education, Medgar Evers) - Thank you. I’d actually like to begin by giving each of you one question from the exam, and then we will start to talk about what it is really like. This is actually my favorite question; it is the one that stuck out in my mind the most that day. I took the exam on May 10th in the Spring and it was quite an interesting experience. Remember when our students take it, they are taking it with a lot of pressure on them because this is what determines whether or not they will actually get to have the opportunity to do what they have been preparing to do for the last four or five years, or for our part-time students even longer. When I sat for the exam, all I was doing was really trying to understand what the nature of the exam was, and my score didn’t matter. Except that like most academicians, if I sit for the test there is something deep inside you that says you have to do your best. I was very pleased I did do very well on the exam, but then more importantly when I came back, I started analyzing why I did well and why it is that I think sometimes our students don’t do as well as we think they should. That is what I am really going to talk about tonight.

The LAST, and this is where this particular question would come from. The LAST as you saw is divided into five sections. There are four sections, although they are not divided so you the reader or the test taker can see that division. The person who is scoring the exam knows where the different sections end and the next one begins. But when the students sit down to take the test, there are 80 multiple choice questions, followed by an essay which they can write from 300-600 words for the essay. The areas that are tested on the Liberal Arts and Science Test are science and mathematics, social sciences, artistic expressions and the humanities, and communication skills. And then finally they are asked to write an essay. What I wanted you to see, and the reason that I decided to make this copy for you were a couple of things. The first is the length of the passages. Some of them are actually longer than this (reference to handout), most of them are not very much shorter than this. You see that there is a good deal of reading to be done, and at the end of all of this reading you get one question. There was no passage that had more than two questions based on it. The majority of the passages of this length had one question. If you could just take a few minutes and look at the question and see how you would then approach it and then how you think your students might approach it. And then let’s just talk for a few minutes about what the implications are for us as faculty in terms of teaching.

(Reference to Test Question Handout) This is from the social science section. Now what’s important here and the reason I wanted to stress it, is two things. First, if you notice, this is not a seriously content based question. That is, if you’re teaching Intro to Psychology or Intro to Sociology and your primary focus is to make sure that by the final exam they can identify the id, the ego, and the super ego. And that they know the names of prominent psychologists, and that they have terms and strategies that they can push around pretty easily. That’s not what’s really being tested here. It is assumed that that basic content will enable them or will empower them to analyze a sophisticated situation like this. So that in sociology, it’s not so much important that you know specific terms from sociology, but rather that you have an analytic approach to looking at it. So that the correct answer -- by the way, does anyone want to jump out there and say what they think the correct answer is? The correct answer is B.

It had been 35 years since I had a liberal arts course when I took the exam. I got a near perfect score in it, but my point there is not so much to brag about my score, but to say that I could do that well after 35 years away from a liberal arts course, because what I have 35 years after taking these courses is not the direct memory of any specific content, but rather the overall picture. I’ve had enough time now to step back from the content and put it into some holistic perspective. And that’s really what the whole liberal arts test is like. So that what happens here is that if you look at this God of Fire, obviously fire has been important to them. So that kind of took me right to those volcanoes. If you look at this God of Fire as being the chief God, you are suppose to find that that would relate it to volcanoes. Again, you can figure out also that IV is correct because there seems to be an emphasis on preparing for some military maneuvering here. So it would lead one to suspect that at some point in the past they’ve needed to defend themselves. Beyond that, and I’ll be honest with you, I couldn’t figure out anything else. As I’m reading it through I said, well III and IV make sense. And the reason I went right to the answer was luckily the only one where they had III and IV together. And since I knew III and IV were right, I looked at I and said, well, they do do something with the river over there in the water. So that could be a flood or a drought, I didn’t know which way to go with that. Whether having too much water would show you that water is strong. Or whether the absence of water would make you weak. It could have gone either way. But they didn’t have II hooked up with III and IV, so I was safe.

Now the point is though, it really looks back now at us as a faculty. When we are teaching, are we really giving students the opportunities, are we giving them the necessary direction and skill to begin to analyze? One could argue that realistically, if this is what it’s all about, that we could go back and blame secondary education or elementary education, because really what this is is a reading comprehension test. So if it is a reading comprehension test, reading comprehension is supposed to have been taught in elementary and secondary school. But the honest to gosh truth is, it isn’t, not to this level. And if it isn’t, it means that in addition to the content, we also have to build the comprehension and the analytic skills. We’re beginning to look at that at the college. It means that the things that we’ve been tossing around for years, reading intensive, writing intensive, it means looking at how we assess.

Basically I spent two weeks earlier this year in Sierra Leone, and I was working with faculty there. We were talking about the problems we have in terms of our really good students sometimes not testing well. I was saying, yes I know exactly what you mean. So many times our students will do well on the multiple choice and that essay really gets to them, and they were like, "what?" Their students do very well on the essay portions of the test, but when they want to get into American or British schools, they have to take multiple choice tests. Their students don’t do well on multiple choice tests. So the answer is just as simple as it could possibly be. I asked them what kinds of exams are they used to in the high schools? They said everything is essay. It’s reasonable that they would do well on the essay part of the test because that’s what they’ve been practicing, that’s what they are used to, that is the way they are used to analyzing and dealing with the knowledge that they have picked up. Whereas in the high schools here and for much of the college courses, our students are used to taking multiple choice exams. Maybe not multiple choice exams on this level, or in this format, but they are used to multiple choice exams more so than essay.

Going back, they have to be prepared to use the knowledge in multiple ways. The other part of it, because there is so much reading on the test, many of the students say that one of the reasons they don’t do well is that they have not allowed enough time to write the essay. Because they spend so much time on this new looking multiple choice question and the lengthy passages, by the time they get through the 80 questions, they may only have 20-30 minutes. The essay for the liberal arts calls into being all of the areas of the liberal arts curriculum. Again it is a holistic kind of question. For example, the essay question that day was about smoking. It starts off with what we already know, that smoking has reasonably been proved to be bad for one’s health, and they quote a few statistics, they talk about the Surgeon General. And with this in mind, secondary smoke can be even more dangerous than primary smoke. And there is already a ban, they tell you in certain public places, in airplanes on flights of a certain length. Now should we just take the big leap and just ban smoking all together in the United States. And that is the essay question, you have 300-600 words to answer that. But it is not a free form answer. Pretty much they give you an outline of how they want the answer structured. So they wanted you to begin by speaking to the social, economic, health, and something else, issues related to smoking. Having done that, take a position as to whether or not smoking should be banned. And then support your position with examples from government from your own personal history or from current events and things that you’ve read. So that the answer is structured. So not only does the student then have to come up with this, but they also have to frame it within the confines of this outline. What that does again, is that it is stepping back from, and looking again in general.

How does the information that you acquire in a liberal arts curriculum translate into the solution of social problems? Or of other issues. And that’s really the way the test is based. So that the state has said, why do we need to give anybody practice exams? If someone is going to teach they ought to be teaching communication. The students who are going out there to be teachers ought to be able to read and write and that is all this test is really asking them to do, is to read and write. I’m a math person, so I’m waiting for the math section. I hated these long passages. I was doing them o.k., but it was taking up time and energy and it was a Saturday morning, and I had other things I could be doing. So I said, that’s o.k., when I get to the math section I’ll race through it. I never knew I was in the math section -- I was on my way into communications, and I said, wait a minute, math comes before communications. Clearly if you are asking me to edit a paragraph, this has got to be communications. I looked back and the math section was passages asking me to deal with quantitative problems. It was not about solving an equation. No one asked me in science or math what is Boyle’s Law. No one asked me to look at a set of numbers and figure out what X was. The closest they came was asking me which of the following equations could be used to find X. And there were actually three equations that would work. But again, would the student know that? The student might say that B will work, do they recognize that D and E would also work in terms of finding X? Because they are taking three different approaches. If you are good in mathematics, you would recognize that all three of them were mathematically correct. But if you have again learned a way of solving an equation, you might not see the alternate routes.

The same kinds of things in science, so there were graphs to be read. They asked you questions that would help if you knew scientific method or social science method. Because they gave you a problem and they gave you a hypothesis and they ask you what would be the best way to research and test the hypothesis. Basically it is looking at research design. So those are the kinds of things that they were asking in the liberal arts test. I gave you an example of the essay. Most of the test takers were considerably younger than I was. They all walked out and said, gosh this is such a hard test. And I remembered thinking to myself, challenging, but I wouldn’t really call it difficult, but it was difficult for them. And these were not our students, it was in Westchester County. These were students for the most part who were coming from private schools from upstate or out of the City schools who had found it difficult. Obviously they did well on it, because they are scoring higher for the most part than our students are scoring, but it was not a test that they found easy. Yes, one could argue that if you are good with diagrams, you could analyze a lot of the questions very quickly. If you are good at this, you could do that.

The one challenge that I found -- and I consider myself to be a pretty good writer actually, I do a lot of editing, I help people with things they’re writing, I publish -- was the communications section, because they didn’t ask straight grammar questions. Usually when you get to the communications section of the test, it will be something like, find the error in the paragraph, and there will be something obvious like subject/verb disagreement or the tenses are off. No, the question that stands out in my mind from communication, is that they gave you an essay of about 250 words. You read the essay, they give you the title, and it is structured into about 4-5 paragraphs. The question is, "This essay could best be improved by --Rearranging sentences 11 and 12, Eliminating sentence 9, Moving paragraph 4 to the position to paragraph...." There is not one question in there that has to do with grammar. What it had to do with was fine tuning an essay that’s already grammatically correct to make it easier to read or to make the content flow better. Adding a sentence, a transition sentence between paragraphs two and three. So it’s quite different, and again we ask students to proof their writing. Please don’t give me something where you have not proofed the typing and you haven’t proofed the writing, make sure that everything is structured. But again, do we really fine tune? Do we teach them in an English I & II class to fine tune their writing to that extent? I’m not sure that we do. So what is the answer?

I’m a faculty person, and I don’t think for one moment that the faculty of this University is anything less than first rate. I don’t think that the faculty of this University is anything less than really putting forth an effort to give our students our best and to empower them to show their best. What I do think is that the resources have sometimes been questionable. I think that had I not sat for the test, looking in the test booklet and with what we have been given, I would have absolutely have no clue what our students are facing and what to expect and how best to prepare them. I feel that I’ve been empowered by sitting for the test to work a bit more effectively with our students. Everyone has practice exams, let’s all just talk seriously. If you have a child who is about to go to college, and who has to sit through the SAT, the majority of the people in this room, if you’re honest, would admit that you would look for Kaplan or Test Takers, or Princeton Review, or somebody to sit them down and give them test preparation. But what does Kaplan, Test Takers, and Princeton Review have going for them? Well, for one thing they have professionals who are professionally trained to sit for exams, analyze exams, and to come up with practice exams. Half of the sessions that Kaplan does are practice testing. And yet there is no practice test that is available for us to work with. Our students don’t even get one, and when you are looking for the SAT, GRE, the NTE, for any of the other tests out there that they are asked to take, the MCAT, LSAT, whatever, all of these have professional test preparation courses and all of these test preparation courses have a strong emphasis on practicing the test. Just taking the test, taking a form of the test helps you to get better. That is a basic principle of test preparation, so we don’t have that resource.

Secondly, I think that most of us are faced with classes that are very large. I don’t know about anybody else’s college, but I know that our classes are large. When you are trying to do a reading intensive, writing intensive course and deal with critical thinking in a meaningful way with each class, having 40-45 students in a classroom and trying to do that, I find a bit beyond challenging. I find it really very difficult and I did try to do it this semester. I think I did better with it this semester than I’ve been doing. But it was also at a great personal, draining cost. This semester has really beaten me down in trying to do that, and I have colleagues who have 3-4 classes that same size. So I think that it is real easy to beat up on faculty, to beat up on CUNY and say that we are not doing what we are supposed to. But I think that realistically education has to change systemically. I think that we can do the job, and I think we are up to the task individually and collectively. But it’s not going to happen overnight. Because we can do test preparation courses, but you cannot go back and change a whole way of how we look at knowledge, how we construct it, and how we deliver it to students and change that in a semester; that takes time. We are definitely going to need the support of our colleagues at the secondary and elementary level to really get the job done the way it needs to be done. So they need us, but we need them, and I guess that’s my take on taking the exam.

Professor Jacobson (Academic Affairs Committee Chair) - Our next speaker, Dr. Ed Farrell, is a professor in the Department of Education at City College. He has also recently taken the exam. Among the courses he teaches are "Educational Psychology" and "School and Society." His research specialty and the topic of two published works is urban adolescents. Since 1963 he has been a high school English teacher, social studies teacher, a K-12 special education teacher, and founder and director of an alternative high school. So I think that you cover all bases for us, Dr. Farrell.

Professor Edwin Farrell (Education, CCNY) - I think that Charlotte has given you a good picture of what happens when kids take this test; pardon me for saying "kids." Let me give you a little bit of my experience and then what I think is happening and what should happen to change the situation. I had very similar experiences. I think that this is a literacy test. Previous to this, you may know that students in New York State and in most other states were required to take the National Teacher Examination called the NTE. The NTE was criticized, among other things, for being culturally biased. The state contracted with another group who created this test and it contains many more items to bring in at least recognition of cultures other than the dominant culture. On the particular test that I took, there were two poems, for instance, to analyze. One was a poem by a Puerto Rican poet and the other was a poem by Wordsworth. As it happened, I had memorized the poem by Wordsworth 35 years ago and still remembered it. Did that give me an advantage? Sure it gave me an advantage, but I really don’t think there is too much difference. The kinds of questions, the analysis, the interpretation, were roughly the same. I don’t think the fact that there was a poem by a Puerto Rican poet made the test anymore multicultural. But again, I don’t fault the test for this. I think the state of New York wants its teachers to be literate, and that’s a very reasonable thing for them to want. This test is surely as good, if not a little better than, the NTE, at getting at that and our students are not doing well. At City College, we are down among the 40% rate of people passing the LAST.

It is my belief that the student who can pass the LAST and who takes 24-30 credits in education, will pass the ATSW as well because they are both literacy tests. Neither has a great deal of content. Even the ATSW has many questions phrased in a situational nature. Mr. Farrell comes into class, Johnny throws a chair out the window, Mr. Farrell should throw Johnny out the window, call Johnny’s parents, send Johnny to the principal, sit down and talk to Johnny about the consequences of his actions. I found that my scores on the ATSW were not as good as my scores on the LAST. I think because they were situational and there was room for interpretation and perhaps maybe I was a little too expert in the area and maybe second guessing some of the questions.

Our students who can pass the LAST tend also to be able to pass the ATSW. Who can’t? Well students who have a great deal of trouble passing this at City College are the students that the language they learned at their mother’s knee was not English. And among that group, the age at which they learned their English is very crucial. A student who learned her English at the age of five does considerably better than the student who learned her English at ten and certainly at fifteen. Let me talk for a moment about how we mediate that problem. We have a newly designed test preparation course. I don’t think test preparation courses are the answer. Those courses will pick up some of the people who are marginal and might get them over the top. We can make changes in our curriculum. I think more changes in teaching styles would be appropriate, more close reading. I wish students would read more math word problems and more poetry than they do now. The kind of reading where every word counts. We have wonderful courses in World Humanities where students are reading great books, but whole books. But if you are teaching methodology, it is not that you are taking one paragraph and making sure that on that particular day all students know every word in that paragraph.

It may not help them to do the kind of close reading you have to do to get a good score in these tests. I did not find the reading passages overly long. I found them shorter than you find in the Graduate Record Examination and the Scholastic Aptitude Test. Besides reading, you have to do what I would call thinking, other people call it critical thinking, but I’m not sure what critical thinking is as opposed to non-critical thinking. As with the question that Charlotte showed you, you have to do some analysis, you have to look at the data, you have to come to some conclusions. The books that are out, there are two books out that are telling you how to prepare for the test, one is absolutely no good, and one is mediocre at best.

Simply because they do not have the tests. They have managed to reconstruct some test items, but then they use a lot of filler of factual information questions which are not the kind of questions that are on the test. I noticed that Kaplan does offer a class in how to offer the NTE, but not in this test. I think Kaplan is an establishment of some integrity and I don’t think that he would try to give us a bogus test. Of course he is a graduate of City College and we gave him an honorary degree a few years back. To make a major difference in this test calls for some solutions that we have some great trepidation about making and trying to implement. If you want to increase the test, get it up to 85%, we have to change our admission standards. We cannot do it with the population that we have now. City College will not make 85% by 1999 and I don’t believe that CUNY as a whole will make 85% by 1999. We could make more rigorous standards. I don’t think there is anything wrong with making more rigorous standards to professional schools. We don’t let people into schools of medicine simply because they want to be in schools of medicine. They have a rather rigorous application process, tests and what not to go through. I think that we could make admission to teacher education programs more rigorous, however it would cut down on the number of people in those programs. You also heard the data on what will be required in numbers of teachers in the next few years in the City of New York. I don’t know how to reconcile those two factors. But I do agree with Edison Jackson, the President of Medgar Evers, talking about CUNY as a whole, and perhaps limiting it to Schools of Education. I’m not sure of all of his intent. He says we have sacrificed quality for warm bodies. That is a hard pill to swallow and I think we have to talk about that in individual schools, in individual Schools of Education. I myself am worried.

Professor Jacobson (Academic Affairs Committee Chair) - Our last speaker is Dr. Maryann Feola who is going to put a different spin on all of this. She is a Ph.D. in History and an Associate Professor in the English Department at the College of Staten Island. She is also the coordinator of the program in Science, Letters, and Society, a program unique at CUNY that attempts to integrate teacher education with liberal arts education.

Professor Feola (English, College of Staten Island) - I have not yet taken the Liberal Arts Test although I plan to next semester, so I will speak to you just about our program. I’m pleased to be here tonight with colleagues who have a special interest like mine in teacher education. Sandi invited me to familiarize you with the liberal arts major that the College of Staten Island requires of students who seek certification in early childhood or elementary education. As coordinator of this program, Science, Letters, and Society, which we have short titled into SLS, I’m in the somewhat unique position of working on a regular basis with both the education faculty, and faculty from various academic departments. Coming from the English Department as coordinator, I bring a strong commitment to reading and writing across the curriculum which is also an integral part of this program. I would like to describe the program’s design and its linkages to the Education Department and the work that has been under way to enhance what we regard as a rigorous liberal arts major. In addition to providing our students with a high quality education of their own, SLS also provides our future teachers with what literary critics Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine in their from Humanism to the Humanities, Education in the Liberal Arts in 15th and 16th Century Europe have described as the sort of classical education that aims to produce effective writers and active participants in civic life. However, please have no fear that tonight I aim to present a history that reaches as far back as the Renaissance, yet I would like to begin by providing you with a sense of how and why SLS came into existence some 20 years ago.

As most of you know, the College of Staten Island was formed by joining the faculties of the former Richmond College and Staten Island Community College. By the early 1970's Richmond College, which offered only an upper division curriculum, featured a number of rigorous interdisciplinary programs and among them was a program called "Logic, Language, and Rhetoric." This program, influenced by similar models at institutions including Columbia, Chicago, and Stanford, caught the attention of Fred Binder when he became Associate Dean of Education at Richmond College. Recognizing that elementary school teachers are true teachers in the liberal arts, Dean Binder formed what became the first of many committees comprised of education and liberal arts faculty that continued to elevate our teacher education programs. This first committee discontinued psychology as the major for education students and revamped the Logic, Language, and Rhetoric Program into SLS.

The program now consists of some 36 credits of intense interdisciplinary work in the upper division and continues to be studied and enhanced. Much of the work is now conducted, and the overseeing of the program and the revamping of the courses, by the Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences. Under her leadership we attend monthly meetings where the liberal arts and education faculty work together to maintain a cooperative environment where we can share ideas and collaborate on internal and external issues. The teacher education items on the agenda during one semester regularly get brought to college-wide committees for consideration during the following semester. For example in 1995 in the Spring we studied the degree requirements, we took a look at our GPA in the program, we looked at the prerequisites, we looked at the course numberings, and these went into subcommittee and by next year we had elevated everyone of those points. The GPA now for our students to get into the program and to maintain enrollment in it is 2.75.

In the Spring of 1996 we took a look at the idea that many students are disappointed when they hear that they have to enroll in a liberal arts program as their major and not education. We looked to address this issue by constructing an orientation which students take early in their education sequence. So by the second semester they must take this orientation where they meet faculty, where they work in little study groups, where they meet alumni who are out there, and students who were presently in the program. They can also air their concerns. We are currently going to be looking at assessment, how we review students’ work and the assignments that we plan for them --this is for the upcoming year. At present we have about 500 majors who take nine, four-credit courses, selecting three of six social science courses that include two world civilization courses. Sandi was in on the construction of those some 20 years ago, I believe. Being carefully sure, like the other committee members, that these didn’t evolve into just Western Civilization courses, having a bend for multicultural aspects of this.

In anticipation of revised general education that we just put in place, we recently changed the level of our three humanities courses and added a third semester of English, a literature course as a prerequisite. The committees involved in the enhancements of the humanities were guided by the recognition that our students need more experiences with history, literature, and writing before they enroll in courses like Ancient Culture, Medieval and Early Modern Culture, and of course those that just focus on the modern era. Each of the humanity courses include a study in the history, literature, philosophy, and fine arts of the period. In addition, our instructors provide our students with multi-media exposure to material as well as assignments that bring together the assigned text and art work at the City’s museums they visit as a group.

Let me give you a sample of what they study. Many instructors center the Ancient Culture course around Gods and Heroes. (I think they would do well with that question on the test.) Students read and present their responses to texts including Gilgamesh, the Iliad, the Aeneid, and the Bhagavad-Gita. We help students see the connections between some of the ideas in this class and the work in their education courses. For example the education course called Workshop in Social Science, where they read texts including Classic Myths to Read Aloud, and where they work with their instructor in practicing writing and reading myths that they will present to young learners. I center my Medieval Early Modern Culture course around journeys that reflect the experience and representations of the "other." We read works including 12th century Muslim account of the Crusades, the Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare’s Tempest, Behn’s Oroonoko, and Swift’s Travels. The faculty who teach our modern culture course expose students to the interdisciplinary tapestry concerning the modernist ways of seeing, delving into works by Kafka, Wolfe, Freud, Einstein, and the post impressionists.

Students who have taken the liberal arts portion of the Teacher Certification Exam, many of whom initially resisted this rigorous curriculum and were miffed when they learned they could not major in education, regularly stop by to tell me how much of what they learned in the major turned up on the exam, or at least helped them through the exam. In the major, our students also take two courses in mathematics and one in physical processes. The SLS courses in math and physical science were devised with the particular need of elementary school teachers in mind. They deal with common topics of college mathematics and physical science from the point of view of the nature of scientific and mathematical explanation. Both the nature of these modes of explanation in themselves and the ways in which they can be translated for young learners. Our physical science course has an exciting hands-on component where students work in groups at specially designated work stations and in a lab where they apply their experience with mathematics and computers to scientific experiments that produce items such as a Galilean telescope and a try at Newtonian Optics.

Each course in the major requires a substantial amount of writing and oral presentation that is graded on content, oral use of language, and audience awareness. Like the education programs at CSI, we have recently upgraded our GPA for entry and continuance to 2.75, and have attempted to maintain the level of rigor in the courses by making the GPA requirement also apply to those non-majors who may enroll in the course. No one faculty member can wave these requirements; all appeals are reviewed carefully by a joint committee of SLS and education faculty that meets regularly to review such appeals and share ideas about a variety of concerns. Those of us who are involved in this work participate in an ongoing dialog to insure the quality, breadth, and depth of our work, and of course the linkages between SLS and education as well as our students’ preparation for the Teacher Certification Exam.

We have outlined a number of issues that will help us provide even deeper and more varied liberal arts instruction for our students. I would just like read them to you briefly. The first on the list is to review programs and the program admission process. We also need to exanimate and coordinate our grading practices and assess how we involve students with challenging texts and giving them feedback on their writing and also the criteria that we use to assign grades. We need to enhance reading and writing across the curriculum, we need to also change of course, money and we need support, tutoring, mentoring, and also exploring the possibility of supplemental instruction. The program needs to have more input into departmental selection, training, and supervision of adjuncts. We also need to facilitate interaction between the alumni who are out there presently teaching and the students who are currently enrolled in the program. So we have a large platter in front of us. Thank you very much.

Professor Jacobson (Academic Affairs Committee Chair) - I think our panelists tonight deserve a large round of applause. They have really divided our issues and provided a very clear focus for us in discussing the kinds of issues that need to be addressed. Before I invite your comments and questions I’d like to thank the members of the Academic Policy Committee who have spent many hours discussing the problem, and who along with Sandi Cooper and Bill Phipps have brought this program to you. So my thanks to the Committee.

Professor Bohigian (Mathematics, John Jay College) - "First I think that for everybody I want to thank the panel for bringing this to our attention. Excellent presentation. I will attempt to be extremely brief although I have a lot to say. The first presentation by Dr. Frey is basically data driven, and the data went by us very quickly. There are many things that I would like to challenge there but some of the bottom line issues were that 85% have to pass if the program is going to continue. If you put that in juxtaposition with the fact that we need many more teachers, the two don’t add up. And in particular, the last slide you put up was the most important one: mainly that a certain attention has to be paid to those schools that are not currently functioning. They have to be brought up to par. That is where our attention has to go, not with this punitive value of punishing schools, but they have to be brought up to par. In over 30 years of teaching I have never given up on my mathematics students. Very rarely, if you put in the effort, no matter how poor their background is, they do come up to level and they do pass the courses, and they are not simple courses either. So I think that in that regard we are emphasizing the wrong procedure about penalizing those institutions: we have to improve them. I do have to come back to the test and I have to refer to it. I am extremely upset with this. There is no question that the only correct answer on this test is Roman numeral IV based on the facts provided. There is no evidence for Roman I; there is no evidence for Roman III. One of the things we try to teach our students is that they can’t jump to conclusions, is that they cannot extrapolate, and that is what the test makers have done here. There are many other things wrong with this test. If they are living along a mountain side the elevation has to be higher there, so there is no evidence that it could flood up to that level unless we are in places like Bangladesh where everything is below sea level. This says, "Sub-Saharan." / Prof. Jacobson - I think your point is really well taken. I think that you have everyone agreeing with you, but thank you for bringing it to the floor.

Professor Greenbaum (History, Queensborough Community College) - "I have a question for Mr. Frey or for Dr. Hotzler. It has to do with funding. We see that enrollment is rising, our funding is declining, a mentoring program that has been mentioned as a possibility, existed in the City schools. I believe it was a New York Tech contract, but it was eliminated because of a lack of funding. Loan forgiveness costs money. In order to retain students, the faculty who Dr. Hotzler referred to who are going off to the suburban school systems for far greater money; we have to raise salaries of our inner city schools. Now how do we find the financing that we need when through the years, and this will continue, we are having reduced income from the State and the City through persistent tax cuts, which like a slicing of salami, have cut away the resources of our government. Each year practically more resources are cut away. Where are we going to find that money?" /

Mr. Frey - Part of what the Regents will be doing is examining the comments they get from the field at the February meeting and hopefully approving a plan at the March 1998 meeting. Part of the package is going to be a complete financial legislative package to deal with the issues of teacher recruitment, to deal with the issues of mentor/teacher intern programs. The last time I costed it out, the mentoring program, given the time lines and the paper, we estimated costs around $50-60 million state-wide to implement, assuming that you would go 20% reduction for the teacher and 10% reduction for the mentor. I think that the Regents are looking to put legislative proposals out there to fund elements of this program. The question that you should have, and the question that we all have, is to what extent, if certain student don’t get funded will they still be part of the program? And that is something that the Regents will have to deal with down the road. Right now we are looking at a draft plan, but it is those types of questions that they’ve been getting at when we’ve been going across the state, and they’ve been taking them to heart. /

Professor Hotzler - If I could just add to that, that the Board of Education has estimated that the mentoring program would cost $70 million to implement in the first year. We are talking about providing mentoring to a little over 5,000 new hires. During that process those people would be removed from some of their teaching assignment which further encumbers the requirement and traditional resources. It is an issue that has been brought up and is currently under discussion.

Professor Crain (Psychology, City College) - "After listening to this forum and more forums about what’s going on in education, I’m coming to the conclusion that Orwell and Huxley had it wrong. That it’s not big brother and it’s not pills that are going to control minds in the populace, but who is going to control it is whoever is going to construct tests. Here we are aligning and designing curricula in order to conform to what will help our students pass these tests. What we should be deciding is what our students should know and learn and making sure that whatever assessment is given is in align with our own educational goals. If they coincide, fine; if they don’t, they don’t. If we get kinds of students who are good at taking tests and good at getting the kind of answers that test makers give, and we have a clear illustration here of critical thinking that would not admit to any correct answer on that test. We think that is good thinking that Haig presented, but we really have a problem. I’m a developmental psychologist, I was on the Board of Education in my town in Teaneck for nine years. I have watched what testing has done and people have watched what testing has done. When you over emphasize tests you get test driven education and test driven education affects learning in a particularly bad way. It starts to drive out the love of learning; test driven education starts to kill that. I do not want to see us putting all of this emphasis on tests. I’m wondering who we are excluding on the basis of these tests, which kinds of students are we excluding, are these the kinds of students we really want to exclude. Before we fall into this tyranny of testing, we really have to ask a lot of questions about it and keep it in perspective."

Professor Savage (Sociology, Queens College) - "Two questions. First of all, where are the teachers coming from now, if the majority are not coming from CUNY? What is the trend and what are the new feeder schools that are becoming very important? The second question is, some of the Regents fully expect that programs that currently have very low pass rates on the Teacher Certification Exams, and I am speaking specifically here of City, Medgar, and York, are not going to make the cut and those programs are going to be closed. What is the central administration thinking the impact is going to be on the liberal arts and sciences disciplines that are so closely linked to the teacher education programs at those three colleges?" / Dean Hotzler - Perhaps I should spend a moment and I should talk about the test results because we really didn’t go into that here today. We did spend quite a bit of time with the test results on December 4th and at a previous session that we’ve held. I think that at a session planned in the future, that will be the focus. The CUNY-wide average on the most recent test is approximately 73%. The state-wide average is a little over 86%. If they are setting an 85% target you can see what the gap is; clearly among the colleges there is a significant range. Queens College at the moment tops that off with approximately a 91% average, which is considerably above in some instances the state-wide average, as is Staten Island, and Hunter’s in there as well.

We have three colleges as you mentioned that have a ways to go here. There is a concern about making up those points. There is another dynamic here that we really didn’t get into. Those numbers as they are currently projected represent the average pass rates of everyone who took the exam who was a matriculated student at that college. They were not necessarily students who came out of the teacher education programs. We didn’t dwell on this today, but it has been discussed in the reports and in the literature and in fact in response to these concerns the State Education Department has changed the procedure by which it calculates these pass rates. Beginning this year the pass rates will be based only on the grades of those students who the college certifies. That certification will again be controlled a bit by the college as to who they certify. They will largely be certifying students who have taken the appropriate set of courses and who are prepared to take these exams. Anyone can take this test, anyone can go if you have $70 and take the test. A large number of people who do not come through our education programs do take that test. A surprisingly large number, to be perfectly honest. So these results are not truly indicative of the performance of people who are graduating from our teacher education programs. That has been established. In fairness to the State, there was an effort to move this issue along and so they went with data that allowed the colleges to take a look at it, but clearly the data was not reflective of the programs.

We are quite hopeful when one looks at the performance of those people who are truly graduates of the program or people who are certified, that these pass rates are going to be significantly higher. We looked at that to the best of our ability at the moment, and they are somewhat higher, though I don’t want to throw numbers out right now. But I have to tell you this, you see the LAST, and there were five sub-parts up there. The college gets a print-out from the State Education Department that details the performance of students on each section of the exam. So they get a grade effectively for their performance in math, science, for each of the sub-parts and the writing component. These results have been analyzed now and in some cases rather extensively by each of the colleges. The weakest area pretty much across the University is in the writing components of the test. That has been linked largely to the performance of the ESL population. For example, at Lehman College where they looked very closely at one particular cohort, the students who had ESL or bilingual courses had approximately a 16% pass rate on the test as compared to 60% for someone who was not so classified. However again, this is a broad number that referred to everyone who took the test, and not people who came through the program. I just want to indicate that there is significant analysis going on on most of the campuses in an attempt to direct our activities and resources to closing those loops which are pointed out to us specifically by the sub-scores.

The other piece that is sort of relevant to your question, is that at the other forums there has been significant debates about recommendations, about how the colleges are proceeding. For example, one issue here today was admissions and there is a debate here and actually one or two of the schools with the higher scores are not that restrictive with the admissions requirements but have progression requirements. This allows students to begin the program but hold them to higher and higher standards as they progress through the curriculum. These are the kinds of recommendations we are encouraging everyone to look at and these are the issues that the Deans of Education and other faculty have undertaken at the moment. To come back to part of question as to where the other students or where the other teachers are coming from, at the moment about 40% of the teachers hired this year came from CUNY. They are, as most states, recruiting people from across the country, upstate, they are bringing in people from quite a distance. However, there is a problem with this because of the attrition. Although I can’t speak for certain, what I’ve had anecdotally from the Board is that the students who obviously go to school in New York, do their student teaching here, are more likely to stay with the system, than people who come in and have a rather different experience than the one they were trained under and don’t stay with us too long. That is probably the best I can answer your question right now.

Professor O’Malley (English, Kingsborough Community College) - "I was struck that Professor Farrell called the test a literacy test, and asked up to look at our pedagogy and do more close reading. And then when we moved to Professor Feola she stressed much more content, rigorous liberal arts courses, inter-disciplinary courses, and the content. I wonder if any of the three professors could address content versus close reading, or literacy, or perhaps I shouldn’t make that distinction." /

Professor Feola - I think a lot of it, Susan, depends on how the instruction is conducted in the classroom. Some of us have been working together at my school who have a great concern for the content that is included in the course. But what we are coming together to talk about are ways to help students approach the material, critically; one way by working through close readings, actually looking at sample passages. Taking them through the steps, teaching them how to think about this, how to respond to it in writing, how to make oral presentations on it, to really get into the dynamics of the work. We don’t feel that we had to sacrifice one for the other, that you really get a much more enhanced content when you help students approach it critically through close reading, rather than, say, strictly lecture. Something such as group work, we have been using that, and having students really take the leadership role in the classroom by doing hands-on with the text.

Professor Phoenix - I think that it is a question of doing both, certainly the content, even though the questions are not content specific, if students have the content, but it is the ability to take the content and manipulate it at higher levels than quite often happens. But it is to just be able to manipulate and not have any content would not serve the students well. So it is a question of doing both. I think the issue is not so much that they don’t get content, but that quite often we are satisfied with them memorizing it, or translating it, or simple interpretations, and not really going up through the higher levels with it. But you have to do both, it has to be content and it has to be content as it applies or content as it can be analyzed. That is really what it is. I think both Ed and I did well on the test because we did have content at some point, but it was the additional layer that we were able to bring to it. I think that is quite often what our students don’t have. The reason I would say that, looking at our scores at Medgar, we like City are around 40%. When we analyzed our scores to see where our students did the best and where they did the poorest, they did the best in social sciences and in the humanities. They did their worse in math and science. If we look at our program, our students are required to take actually almost as three times as many courses in social sciences between the psychology courses that are required, the history courses that are required, geography, and sociology options that are there for them. They actually take more social science than anything. So obviously there is some relationship between the extra content and the social sciences and the higher scores albeit, not well enough, there was definitely a difference between performance in that area and a performance in math and science. They take two science courses and two math courses and it is not as much.

Professor Diamond (Mathematics, Queens) - "I had a question for Dr. Frey specifically. I wanted to check a rumor that was told to me by a professor of secondary education. I found it truly terrifying. She told me that there would be a new State Certificate in math and science. I said that is a great idea for the elementary school. She said, "no, you don’t understand, it is going to replace the subject specific certificate that we now have." She said to me that, for example, instead of a student being a math major and getting a math certificate, the future teacher will now get a math and science certificate. That sounds to me that we are preparing 6th grade teachers to teach in high school. I hope you can just say, that’s wrong." / Mr. Frey - That’s wrong. I think some people have looked at the learning standards and how the Regents have combined math, science, and technology as a broad based learning standard and have translated that to the certification titles. The math will remain as 712 certificates, and the sciences will remain as separate 712 certificates.

Professor Baumrin (Philosophy, The Graduate Center) - "Dean Hotzler addressed half of what I wanted to address myself, so I will bring in the other two parts of the issue. First of all, it seems to me that you could play a numbers game. By reducing the number of students who are certified, by taking the exam by giving them a pre-examination and then get your number over 85% unless the State Education Department said there had to be a minimum number of persons or some ratio. Back to Dr. Frey, I’m very concerned when looking at the wording of the first item here. It seems to imply that certification for the examination, and therefore possibility of certification of a teacher, will now be in the control of the Education Department, and not in the control of the colleges. Some of our colleges don’t have education degrees, they have liberal arts degrees, and some additional teacher education that you might take, but you can’t major in education. Is there any intent here to put the pre-certification under the control of the Department of Education rather than under the control of the colleges?" / Mr. Frey - Do you mean the State Department of Education? / Professor Baumrin - "No, under the Department of Education at the college, as opposed to the college. If my question is not clear it can be restated." / Mr. Frey - At present, to get a provisional license from the state, you have to pass the LAST and the ATSW. / Professor Baumrin - "I’m not concerned about that, I’m concerned about who controls the recommendation for certification by an institution? So that that individual can take the examination and will be certified if they pass the examination?" / Mr. Frey - That is an interesting question because I don’t think the Regents have really established whether or not that is controlled by the School of Education or Liberal Arts and Sciences School. / Professor Baumrin - "My college doesn’t have a school, it has a department." / Mr. Frey - That is not an issue that the Regents are going to regulate. I think the they will look for an institutional recommendation.

Dean Hotzler - That is an issue that some of the colleges are already discussing, as to how that will be handled and who will be responsible for it on the campus. I don’t think there has been a determination yet, because quite honestly they are waiting for some regulations from the State as to just how that certification will be processed. But going back to your other question. The college will ultimately be held responsible for everyone who is certified and also for graduates. If you don’t want to certify a graduate you are going to have to have a real good reason. So going back to one of the recommendations where one has to develop a process whereby the college certifies that each graduate is prepared, there will have to be some intervention beforehand to insure that the student is following the prescribed study. And that by the time they graduate they have in fact satisfied all of the requirements.

Professor Baumrin - A 1998 graduate, that makes sense, but would the State Education Department count a 1996 graduate as a liability to the college?

Dean Hotzler - Our understanding is that beginning this year, they will only account, in calculating the 85% or whatever, it turns out to be those students for whom the college has submitted a certification form that is signed off. And it is those candidates for certification whose scores will be counted.

There is another piece here that we really didn’t get into and that is the community college piece. It is very relevant in that approximately 35-40% of the students who go into the education programs come from the community colleges. This is a whole other debate, but I just want to mention that there is quite a discussion under way between the senior colleges and community colleges that have been identified as primary feeders to the education programs at those schools. And the issue here of joint program registration is very much alive and being discussed individually between senior colleges and community colleges, but it is a significant component. Clearly the liberal arts component, which is the basis for the LAST Exam, is really based upon work that is completed by the student essentially at the community college. There has to be an assurance here that the content of that program at the community college satisfies the requirement. Otherwise the senior college is burdened with the test result and accountable for the performance of the student coming from the community college who may not have had proper background. That is an issue; it is understood.

Professor Jacobson (Academic Affairs Committee Chair) - I want to point out that, as I said at the beginning, I’d like you to bring this information which I think has been really superb this evening. I want to commend our speakers once again. It is important for us to bring these issues back to the campus, to identify them, those which are appropriate for action on our campuses, and that we, the faculty, really develop the kind of programs that are necessary for all of our students. So once again, panel members, thank you very much.

[Prof. Phoenix explained that she had reconstructed the test question from memory mainly to show what the format was like.]

V. New Business

Chair Cooper – Before we conclude, I want to make one or two points. Do bring this issue back to your senates. I want to emphasize one thing Russ said. The most successful pairing of two programs in CUNY is that between Queensborough and Queens, as far as two-year students starting out and completing the test and becoming teachers. The closer articulation between two- and four-year colleges is absolutely required if we’re going to get past this issue. There is no way out of it. One of the thoughts some of us had, and we’ll work on this in the winter, is to pull together meetings of the disciplines councils in the spring and instead of having an ordinary conference to discuss those kinds of liberal arts courses which we should all consider as part of our undergraduate education. Not just to pass the test, but to make sure that the students are given a real education. This is an opportunity to revise the graduation requirements that were cut to 120 and 60 by that Board resolution of 1995. It has now come home to roost, and perhaps haunt, the requirements of helping students get past the hurdles to become teachers, are certainly compelling educational reasons for improving your degrees if you have cut them to the bare bones and eliminated liberal arts to do that. I would strongly encourage you to start nagging your curriculum committees in those areas where you might want to go back and increase the graduation requirements. There are many more things that could be said, and we’ll use the spring semester to say them. I would like very much at this point before asking for adjournment if there is any new business. Yes.

Prof. William Crain (CCNY) – I’m very concerned that the CUNY-wide skills tests themselves are so grossly inadequate and are unjustly barring students from courses and resulting in the dismissal of students across the University. In a day that we honor open admissions, I think they become one of the greatest impediments to open admissions. I don’t think the new certification exam in writing – might just scratch the surface – but it’s not going to solve the problem. City College presented a resolution from our senate to the Faculty Senate trying to get more flexibility into the hands of colleges and to get a committee going about what do we think assessment should be. We need to do that whether the Board goes along with it or not. I hope the Executive Committee will be taking that up.

Chair Cooper – The Executive Committee has considered the resolution from City College, and since it was just asked to consider it, we did that. At the moment this is an issue that we have asked colleagues to study and I don’t want to anticipate the results of their work before they come in with a report.

I’d like to wish you all a happy holiday, and do I hear a motion for adjournment.