Whitworth meeting education challenges

Whitworth is among the first 20 colleges nationwide to launch chapters of Students for Education Reform (SFER), a high-profile new advocacy and awareness organization dedicated to mobilizing the next generation of leaders to close the educational achievement gap. Founded at Princeton University in the fall, SFER recently announced that new chapters are opening this spring at Columbia, Duke, Florida State, NYU, Ohio State, Penn State, Stanford, SUNY-Geneseo, North Carolina-Chapel Hill, University of Georgia and University of Texas as well as at Whitworth.

Macy Olivas, a sophomore elementary education and sociology major, is the driving force behind the Whitworth SFER chapter. Joining her in leadership of Whitworth’s SFER are: Haley Atkinson as vice president, Marissa Ranno as secretary and Joshua Dagnachew as treasurer. Political Science Professor and incoming Lindaman Chair Julia Stronks is their advisor.

“As a student that was statistically supposed to fall into the achievement gap, I want nothing more than to give future generations the same opportunity that I have been given,” Olivas says. “I had many teachers and mentors that helped guide me on my journey to college and now it’s my turn to fight for students the same way I was fought for. We look forward to working hard and closing the achievement gap in Spokane”

In a recent speech on the Princeton campus, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan praised Students for Education Reform for providing a critical student voice to the next generation of the education reform movement. As an estimated 1.6 million teachers from the Baby Boomer generation begin to retire, Duncan observed, the nation faces the potential of a severe teacher shortage. And we don’t need just more teachers; we need more of our hardest-working, smartest, most passionate and interculturally competent students to become those teachers.

Whitworth is doing its part. This year, Whitworth will graduate 59 students from its undergraduate teacher preparation program – five times as many as Princeton produces in an average year. Our Continuing Studies Evening Teacher Certification program and Master in Teaching program – tailored especially for people seeking to make a career shift into teaching – also produce about 50 teachers per year.

And Whitworth’s teachers are well prepared. Representatives from the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education, which provides the most rigorous and recognized accreditation for teacher-education programs in the U.S., and the Washington Professional Educator Standards Board recently made accreditation site visits and gave our School of Education an outstanding review. That’s not too surprising since our School of Education has such an outstanding reputation and its graduates are in such high demand.

With passionate and capable students like Macy in the pipeline, I don’t see that changing any time soon.