CSUN School Considers Charter Status

NORTHRIDGE — Cal State Northridge’s College of Education is considering becoming a charter college, a change that would make it the second such program in the country after Cal State Los Angeles, where administrators are touting the success of their own experiment.

As a charter college, CSUN’s College of Education would be allowed to write its own rules and be exempted from some current regulations governing Cal State University schools, a novelty administrators hope will streamline the process of training thousands of new teachers for the state’s class-size reduction initiative.

“We are facing many challenges in the way we prepare teachers for the classroom,” said Dean Carolyn Ellner. “We have to adopt ways that allow us to think outside the box.

“This proposal may be no more than a motivator,” Ellner continued, emphasizing that faculty and administrators are only exploring the possibility of becoming a charter college. “We may find that we can do everything that we would like to do . . . through existing methods, but it gives us permission to think in a different way.”

CSUN President Blenda J. Wilson is in the process of convening a group to study the matter, Ellner said, and the proposal already won the blessing of former CSU Chancellor Barry Munitz. Munitz approved charter status for the college last year, before he joined the Getty Center, saying in a letter to Wilson that it would “better respond to the needs of the educational community and . . . provide leadership in professional reform efforts.”

Unlike K-12 charter schools in California, which must follow a legal framework established by lawmakers in 1992, there are no such guidelines for charter colleges.

Proponents envision a charter college where creative new teacher training programs are quickly launched to meet changing education needs, where public school teachers and university professors work together to improve student achievement, and where the process of training thousands of new teachers is more efficient.

But exactly how the charter college would be formed, and how the program would operate, has yet to be worked out by Wilson’s study group, said Associate Dean Crystal Gips.

The charter college concept grew out of CSUN’s plans to help to prepare some 22,000 untrained teachers across the state who are working with emergency credentials in order to implement Gov. Pete Wilson’s class-size reduction initiative for students in kindergarten through third grade. Additionally, an estimated 300,000 new teachers must be trained to meet an anticipated increase in the state’s school-age population in the next century.

Cal State L.A.’s School of Education became the first charter school in the nation in 1995 for similar reasons tempting its counterpart at CSUN: greater creativity in preparing teachers for the classroom, a shortening of the time it takes to get new teachers into needy classrooms, and exemptions from certain system regulations, school officials said.

There, after receiving permission from then-Chancellor Munitz in 1993, a committee spent the next two years reviewing everything from the school’s educational philosophy to its operating budget.

Today, the Charter School of Education’s revamped operations have resulted in several changes, said Dean Allen A. Mori, who spearheaded the overhaul of the school’s structure:

* A streamlined, interdisciplinary approach that enables undergraduates to earn their bachelor’s degrees and teaching credentials in four years instead of five.

* New programs get off the ground in a matter of months instead of years because of fewer regulations.

* Innovative programs have attracted financial support from corporate and private donations. In addition, although the college still receives its funding from the CSU system, it has more flexibility over how to spend it.

Some things have remained the same. For example, reformers did not renegotiate union contracts.

The National Council of Accreditation of Teacher Education granted the charter school full accreditation following a review last year, Mori said. Although the school received the same high marks in 1991, before it became a charter college, he said the council recently instituted stricter standards for accreditation.

Enrollment has grown from 2,299 students during the 1993-94 school year, the year before the charter college began, to 3,226 students in 1996-97, a 40% increase, according to the latest figures available, school officials said. The school is second only to the School of Business in student enrollment and degrees awarded.

“We are receiving greater freedom, but we are also being held to a higher standard,” Mori said. “It is our responsibility to prepare people for the challenges of working in urban classrooms in Los Angeles.”

At CSUN, the College of Education’s 71 full-time faculty members will have the final say about whether to become a charter school, said Ellner, the school’s dean.

After Wilson selects a committee to study the proposal, the panel will collect recommendations from faculty, administrators, union officials, community leaders and others, said Ellner. Should the plan go to a vote, she said, it would probably take place late in the 1998-99 academic year.

“We realize that we depend on the other colleges on campus and that we can’t stand alone,” Ellner said. “We can’t just secede and drift off into the distance. We must work cooperatively.”

Union officials are reserving judgment on the plan until they learn more about it, said Edda Spielmann, president of the Northridge chapter of the California Faculty Assn., the bargaining unit for university faculty, part-time lecturers, librarians and counselors.

Still, she said, there are numerous questions to be answered:

“Are they intending to stay in the union and be covered by the contract? Will they give long-term contracts instead of tenure? What about personnel and salaries? What is [a charter college] going to cost the system and the local campus? Where is the money going to come from?”

While backers of the plan acknowledge they have many hurdles to clear, they say it is worth the effort if it results in improved teacher training programs and increased faculty in needy public schools.

“A label of a charter college would give us the impetus . . . to revamp our programs,” said Gips, the associate dean. “I think that the college is poised on the edge of taking a look at itself and how it can improve what it is doing.”