Choosing Democracy: Providing teachers that reflect the students

Choosing Democracy: Providing teachers that reflect the students:

Providing teachers that reflect the students

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

However, the story misses  an important issue. 

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

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

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

The story of the creation and destruction of the BMED department is here.

https://sites.google.com/site/chicanodigital/home/the-creation-and-demise-of-bilingual-education-at-csu-sacramento-2

We need an investigative article about this closing of a successful program  and  to investigate  how when a successful program was  created to provide minority teachers for our public schools, the program was  later eliminated by self interest politics.

 Dr. Duane E. Campbell

Democracy and Education Institute

http://www.democracyeducationinstitute.org

http://MexicanAmericanDigitalHistory.org