The Center for Educational Renewal at the University of Washington, directed by the noted educator John I. Goodlad, has named three new colleges of education to its list of reform-minded institutions.
The University of Texas at El Paso, the University of Hawaii at Honolulu, and Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, will join 12 other sites the center has selected over the past two years to participate in its project to overhaul teacher education.
In a statement, Mr. Goodlad said the colleges were chosen for their commitment to renewal, their strong links to local schools, and their supportive faculties and central administrations.
The center’s project is based on the recommendations of Mr. Goodlad’s 1990 book, Teachers for Our Nation’s Schools. The 15 institutions participating in the project are focusing on strengthening the general and professional curriculum for prospective teachers, minority-teacher-recruitment programs, assessment and evaluation practices, and school-university partnerships.
The California Teachers’ Association has launched an advertising campaign in that state to bolster the public schools’ image and to try to make a private-school-voucher ballot measure less attractive to voters.
Earlier this month, the C.T.A. began a series of seven 15-second television ads in which the accomplishments of many of the state’s students were spliced with images from the Guinness Book of World Records.
The ads, which were paid for with a $12-per-person assessment of the union’s 240,000 members, were designed not only to show the “amazing feats’’ performed in public schools but also to take a shot at the school-choice initiative expected on state ballots in June 1994.
The teachers’ union has been sharply critical of the voucher proposal, which is sponsored by the Excellence Through Choice Education League.
A California-based program, American Professional Partnership for Lithuanian Education, or APPLE, is seeking American teachers to help “overhaul a stolid, longtime Soviet-dominated educational system’’ in the former Soviet republic.
Under the “Teach in Lithuania’’ program, educators--particularly teachers of English--are enlisted to spend a semester or an academic year at an elementary or high school in Lithuania.
For more information about the program, call or write Ms. Dalile Polikaitis, APPLE, 1501 Valecroft Ave., Westlake Village, Calif. 91361; (805) 496-9711.--J.R.
