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- Dr. Bill Katzenmeyer
College of Education Faculty Oral Histories
Dr. Bill Katzenmeyer
LB: Well, I have a list of centers, institutes, and projects that occurred during your time as the dean and perhaps you can comment about each of these in one way or another. There was the Southwest Florida Educational Planning Council, which was made up of the superintendents in the area, but wasn’t very active when you arrived, but you revived that, didn’t you?
BK: I did. I thought it was really important that we had the superintendents on our side. It’s very rare in a university for the central administration to see the College of Education as a top priority and to support the College with adequate development resources. But in a public university like ours, the administration is always concerned about, and responsive to, the public schools of the area they serve. If superintendents and other school leaders are pleased with the College, this information will be known to the university administration and, we found, to the Board of Regents and the state legislature. The strongest natural constituency for a College of Education is in the schools, not in the administration at the university. If school district leaders support you and provide good feedback to university leaders and legislators, many good things happen. I thought that was really important for me to get to know these people also to be involved with them in the things that were of concern to them. We tried to serve as a catalyst, a place where they can come together and talk about the things they were concerned about and discuss the best strategies for getting needed resources. They talked about what is going on in the legislature and what can we do about it. It worked very well for a long time.
LB: Well the next thing to happen was to the Teacher Education Centers, which we alluded to earlier in regard to the College of Education’s outreach programs. Then the legislature funded the school systems to buy the services from us. Is that the way it worked?
BK: Actually, it was a piece of genius on the part of the legislature. Unfortunately, we haven’t seen much genius from the legislature lately. What they did was put a pot of money out there and say, “School districts, you can use this money if you buy services from the universities. And universities, you can only use this money to provide services to the schools.” And of course, that made an entrance for our instructional programs. We could take a master’s degree program to Ft. Myers, for example. That was back before Florida Gulf Coast University came into being. We had programs in Sarasota, Ft. Myers, Lakeland, and some in the Ocala area. That’s how we created the productivity that the College needed, so not only were the administration not interested in laying off faculty members, we would get back in the hiring mode.
LB: At one point I think I remember hearing that College of Education at USF was providing more teacher education center services than all the other universities in the state of Florida combined.
BK: I know we did more than any university, but, as I recall, for much of the time, it was more than all of the other universities. The teacher education initiative was very energizing because it put large numbers of faculty out in the schools, enhancing the currency of their knowledge, and building relationships with teachers and school administrators. In addition to supporting faculty travel, the Teacher Education Center resources provided more cash in the pocket of many faculty members. Since we combined the teacher education center activity with bringing needed academic programs to the districts, we served faculty work in both kinds of activity increased, and the TEC funds led to overload pay for many faculty members.
LB: Chronologically, next came the Educational Research Center for Child Development. I know you were a part of that, although Ron Linder headed up the planning committee for the building. We were able to get that funding from the student activity fees, I think.
BK: Yes. That was interesting because some people in the University did not want a child care center on campus. They had something resembling a Quonset hut on campus for child care. Then, Vice President Bert Hartley did not think our plan for the first-rate building was what the University really ought to have. We were able to prevail and have reason to be proud of our facility.
LB: Still going strong, isn’t it?
BK: Still going strong. We did the right thing.
LB: The Suncoast Teacher Training Program, SCATT. I know that was your brainchild. At least, I heard about it from you first.
LB: Yes, SCATT was the end product of a series of discussions about how to upgrade the image of the College with the schools and within the University. It’s hard to believe this now, but if you may remember that in 1978, the year I arrived to be the dean, the state had a surplus of teachers in Florida and jobs were hard to come by for our graduates. The College also had had some bad press in the St. Petersburg paper about the quality of our graduates. So we wanted to create something that would provide a place for our most able students. At the same time, when we started looking at SAT scores, our students were not doing very well. This and general knowledge of our graduates were among the criteria for the negative press so we decided to test our students for general knowledge. We used the criterion that every student by the end of their sophomore year should earn scores at the 50th percentile or higher, 12th grade norms on the ETS Cooperative English and Math Achievement Tests. Using that criterion, we un-enrolled more than 100 students who couldn’t meet 12th grade norms, 50% or higher.
That wasn’t a high standard, but it showed you that we had quite a lot of students in programs that were not ready to become teachers. I think a few faculty members thought that their dean had lost his mind to disenroll students when the College needed to generate more FTE. But as it turned out, we soon had increasing enrollments and higher quality admissions. My fear was that, in addition to the bad press the weaker students created for us, the less able students were creating a context of mediocrity that could cause more able students to decide that teaching was not for them. LB: Students in their classes?
BK: Yes, I believe that talented and dedicated students need to be able to look around at almost all the students in their classes and be proud to be among them. I believe we made that happen. The SCATT program was designed with very high standards, and not only for grades, but also for willingness to go the extra mile to meet the needs of our students and of the children they would teach one day. That SCATT still prevails is a testimony to its value. The program is back up in enrollment now, and they’re doing very well. Joyce Swartzman deserves 99 9/10 % of the credit for making the SCATT program work during the first 20 years.