Esther Rodriguez: a fighter for K-12 students, particularly in urban schools.

Esther Rodriguez is a passionate believer in education as a civil right.

“All students need and deserve highly effective teachers,” she says. But too often students, particularly in urban schools, don’t get them.

Compared to their counterparts in suburban or rural schools, urban students generally face higher dropout rates, significant percentages of low-income families with undereducated parents, higher numbers of inexperienced teachers, greater absenteeism rates and more teacher turnover.

Rodriguez decided to address the problem directly in 2007 by becoming the director of Metro State’s Urban Teacher Partnership, a program to recruit, prepare and retain highly qualified teachers for careers in urban middle and high schools.

With an impressive resume that includes a law degree and executive experience in national higher education organizations, Rodriguez has many career options. But, she says, “the only reason I considered the position is because of what Metro State is.”

“With its mission and role in the Denver metropolitan area as an urban land grant institution, Metro State truly helps solve urban problems.”

In a little over a year with Rodriguez at the helm, the UTP is flourishing, with a number of new initiatives and record-high participation (see http://www.mscd.edu/~collcom/artman/publish/tqe_twv5020608.shtml). Rodriguez attributes the program’s success to the backing she’s received at the College.

“Everyone here—the president, provost, deans and faculty from both teacher education and in arts and sciences, and especially my staff—has given me such support. With that, and the latitude to develop the program in ways that make sense, I’ve really been able to exercise the autonomy to conceptualize how to enhance the program and make it preeminent.”

In partnership with DPS Co-Director Theress Piddick, Rodriguez initially held a retreat for all Metro State faculty and DPS teachers involved in the program. “Faculty and teachers wanted to have an opportunity to be creative and to pilot activities that would frame and add substance to the program, so, we decided to create mini-grants,” she says. “The mini-grants give faculty and teachers ownership in developing these programs, which in turn makes them more sustainable.”

In a parallel initiative, the UTP hosted a national summit on urban education. “There has been very little national collaboration or information-sharing among programs that focus on urban schools,” Rodriguez says. “This summit was the beginning of a national network, to learn from each other and better build our own programs.” The summit was such a success that Rodriguez and her colleagues are planning a second, to be held in Denver April1-3, 2009.

“In all the work I’ve done throughout my career on how to build a pipeline for underserved communities to higher education, I’ve realized that unless you connect higher education with K-12 in a very directed way, you simply won’t see gains,” Rodriguez sums up.

“The Urban Teacher Partnership is an opportunity to make those gains.”

For more information, go to http://www.mscd.edu/~utp/.