Message from the Dean

We are on track to open a Principal Leadership Institute in June with a cohort of 25 candidates seeking master's degrees and administrative service credentials. Also we are expanding our three existing teacher credentialing/master's programs starting this summer. Both efforts respond creatively to requests from the governor and legislature to produce more urban educational leaders in the classroom and the school.

Yet these initiatives comprise only a part of the ferment around the School of Education. I have been asked by Chancellor Berdahl to advise him how to expand and make more effective the campus's partnerships with the broader educational community.

Inside the School, we are now pursuing a host of cutting-edge projects to build campus capacity to allow us to be more effective collaborators with teachers, essentially utilizing our expertise in content, pedagogy, and research and evaluation to propel cross-campus partnerships. Let me list some recent examples of our collaborations, catalyzed by our Center for Excellence through Outreach and Collaboration (ECO).

Our faculty's expertise in literacy, urban education, early child development, mathematics, bilingual education, and statistics is resulting in collaborations with other campus departments and close liaisons with Bay Area schools. In fact, Tolman Hall is now hosting university-school liaisons from Berkeley, Oakland, San Francisco, and West Contra County school districts.

We are coordinating with the America Reads program for the campus, as well as designing research and evaluation tools to assess it.

We have jointly planned a symposium to present results of Berkeley Pledge projects in literacy, mathematics, technology, and school reform. This new forum enables information-sharing and discussion of critical issues related to School-university partnerships-all with the purpose of raising student achievement in some of our most challenging schools. The papers were presented in AERA panel-format and will be published this summer. We expect the forums and publications will become a much-anticipated annual event with teachers participating as inquirers and presenters.

We are working very closely with neighboring districts to advance their school reform efforts by helping them identify areas of critical need and developing effective intervention strategies both at the district and school site levels.

Most intriguing--and equally complex--are pilot investigations underway to figure out how to scale and sustain classroom or school-based projects as they are applied at many different sites. For instance, projects to be replicated that would build pipelines to college must engage the professional development of teachers and administrators, and they must involve college and career planning functions aimed at parents and students, community organization support, and advocacy of public policies to enable broad-based programs to succeed.

If you are interested in learning more about ECO activities and how to support them, contact ECO: eco@socrates.berkeley.edu, or School Relations at: ext_rel@berkeley.edu.

Eugene E. Garcia