Institute targets urban education

By JENNIFER LEWANDOWSKI
Reporter Staff

The Urban Education Institute at UB is reaching out to the Buffalo Public Schools, other urban school districts and other on-campus programs to create partnerships to work toward a common goal: improving urban education.

Jim Collins, the institute's director and a professor of English and literacy education in the Graduate School of Education, says the institute is on a quest to help students in city schools explore their opportunities and help teachers explore their possibilities through partnering with the university.

Collins says he recently attended the annual meeting of the Council of the Great City Schools, at which a public-school official from Chicago criticized the ability of teacher-preparation programs to ready educators to work in urban schools.

"The perception of the city school district is that teacher-education programs don't do their jobs and (the schools) have to re-educate their teachers," he says. "The irony I find is that teacher educators often think that students in city school districts have problems."

Collins notes that as long as educators focus on the problems, no progress will be made "because each side misunderstands the other by reducing complex reality to a set of problems. Instead, we need to look for possibilities for collaboration.

He wants to promote a collaborative spirit through the work of the institute, which was created by the late Jacquelyn Mitchell, who served as dean of the Graduate School of Education for two years.

"She came (to UB) with a lot of good, big, positive ideas and one of them was to turn UB into a major player in the field of urban education at the national level," Collins says.

The institute, which was established in June of 1998, aims to collaborate with the Buffalo Public Schools through the development of a Technology Staff Development and Research Institute and shared-services agreements.

A state program, shared services offers big-city schools the chance to purchase services from universities or the Board of Cooperative Education Services (BOCES).

"Districts need to plan how much money these purchased services will cost in their current budgets, and can later apply for state aid, based on a predetermined aid ratio," says Karen Drew, coordinator of field experiences for UB's Teacher Education Institute. If the schools prove they have a need for a service, such as one provided by UB, the state will contribute additional funds to help pay for the existing project, Drew says.

Buffalo schools, for example, have identified literacy as a major need, Collins notes, a need the institute could address through such a shared-services agreement.

The Technology Staff Development and Research Institute for Buffalo Teachers is another initiative on which the Urban Education Institute is collaborating. The research institute-headed by Don Jacobs, research associate professor of education and a new member of the UB faculty-has several goals, including providing teacher-preparation programs, curriculum development and developing strategies that integrate the use of technology into classroom instruction.

Collins believes the Urban Education Institute has a responsibility to address the needs of both students and teachers in urban public schools. One key need is overcoming poverty as an obstacle to learning.

Collins-who is no stranger to urban education, having taught for 10 years in a Springfield, Mass., high school wrought with race riots and drug problems-points out that many people are working to move beyond the problems. These problems run deeper than simply academics, he says, but the "forces of good"-teachers, students and parents-"are winning the battle."

"I have a great deal of admiration for kids and teachers who work in city schools and what they accomplish," says Collins, who describes his work with the institute as an effort to build on that accomplishment. "We're all in this together."