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- Dr. Colleen Kennedy
College of Education Faculty Oral Histories
Dr. Colleen Kennedy
CK: Yes, it is. We’re so proud of the fact that right now we have about 4,200 to 4,500 of our graduates in the Hillsborough district alone providing leadership. You know, of course, that Dr. Earl Lennard was a member of our charter class and, until quite recently, was superintendent of Hillsborough. We have continued to have a very strong relationship with the Hillsborough school district. We’re so pleased that Superintendent Mary Ellen Elia asked the College if we would like to join with her and the district in partnership to affiliate with the Council of Great City Schools. That organization is composed of the largest school districts in this country. Boston, New York, LA Unified, and Hillsborough County are all members, along with their superintendents. Within the last few weeks I traveled to Washington, D.C. with Superintendent Elia, members of her staff, and a member of the Hillsborough County School Board, Candy Olsen. We received a great deal of information from the US Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings, and from the minority staff member of US Senator Tom Harkin, who fought hard for an increase in budgets for K-12 education.
I think that new mechanisms such as the Council of Great City Schools help to further cement the day to day partnership work that all of our faculty members are engaged in here with Hillsborough County Schools. It was only yesterday that Roger Brindley, the director of the Suncoast Area Teacher Training Project, and I met with former superintendent Earl Lennard and a donor to talk about the possibility of having SCATT students tutor students in our community. That would be a win-win situation. I’m also so proud of the fact that we have students from the STAGES program (secondary education students with disabilities) on our campus working in programs right alongside faculty and students in the Department of Special Education, because I think they enrich all of our lives. We share a lot in common with Hillsborough County Schools and continue to develop our partnership.
LB: We were doing a lot with the professional development schools. Do we still have a number of those agreements?
CK: Well, it’s interesting because the concept of professional development schools (PDS) has grown and evolved over time. I was a member of the Holmes Group Board and then later the Holmes Partnership when the concept of professional development schools was introduced on the national level. It seemed that every college in the country defined those schools as they saw fit. The original Holmesian Model was that there should be a strong emphasis on the preparation of beginning teachers, an emphasis on research about children and their learning in schools, and also a focus on the continuing professional development of teachers. Some faculty never wanted to call a school a PDS unless it has all three legs of the stool. Whereas, others were quick to call a school a PDS as long as they were placing teachers there. A PDS is hard to define nationally. What is clear is that the concept of PDS shows the commitment of colleges of education all across the country to enter into and to sustain long-standing professional partnerships with school relationships that grow and evolve over time.
LB: Since coming here to USF what would you view as some of the challenges you had to face in terms of being the Dean of the College of Education in a Research I institution?
CK: Well, I can think of one in particular, and that is the challenge of the teacher shortage. There is such a need to help the public and the legislature to understand that preparing competent educators through high quality academic programs is critical. I was in a meeting last week where someone in a policy-making role indicated that the state of Florida needs 34,243 teachers by next fall and questioned why we are not producing them. It’s almost as if they’re saying that colleges of education just need to crank out more and more teachers as fast as possible with minimum resources. What I challenged them to think about was this: if we need 34,243 teachers next fall, how many will we need in 2010 or in 2020? And if we want to get serious about it, how many nurses will we need in the future and how many engineers?
It was just within this last year that the deans in the State University System banded together, at the bidding of the State University System, to submit a legislative budget request that would provide us with sufficient resources to prepare more teachers, more nurses, and more engineers. If we just focus on teachers for the time being, we could have predicted years ago that we would need over 34,000 teachers in the fall. While the demand for teachers has been increasing, the funding allocated to colleges of education during the preceding 10 years funding has decreased. You can’t have it both ways. What we need now is to help the state understand that we have an infrastructure problem in the state that has created the teacher shortage. It is a failure to invest in the future of the children of the state and, essentially, in the economy of the state. The teacher shortage cannot be solved by simply turning out more teachers. What is being perceived as simply a teacher shortage is just the tip of the iceberg. We need to improve working conditions for teachers, increase their salaries, improve their professional development opportunities, and elevate the prestige of the teaching workforce. There is no silver bullet or easy answer. The community and policy makers have to work together to find solutions. I’ve been trying to communicate that this issue is a huge challenge, and we’ve had several successful meetings.
Our new chancellor, Chancellor Rosenberg, understands the importance of educator preparation. In a recent meeting he indicated to all the deans of education present that he thinks there are two honorable professions: farming and teaching. He also believes his job is to help dispel some of the myths about colleges of education. Our role as deans of education is to ensure that he has the data to communicate to others that today’s colleges of education are not the traditional colleges of education of old that their grandmothers may have attended. We now offer programs in the evening, on weekends, and online. We have fast-track MAT programs for mid-career changes and so much more. If colleges of education do not spread the word about their innovative programs and practices, then people fall back on what they know based on their past experience. We must expand our outreach and marketing efforts to potential students and the community to inform them about what we have to offer that is different and exciting.
LB: We’ve alluded to a number of your accomplishments since you’re here as the dean. But are there some among those which are you most proud of or maybe there are some additional accomplishments that we haven’t covered yet?