History of School Counseling - United States - National Center For Transforming School Counseling

National Center For Transforming School Counseling

Also in the late 1990s, a former mathematics teacher, school counselor, and administrator, Pat Martin, was hired by The Education Trust to work on a project focusing the school counseling profession on helping close achievement gaps hindering the life successes of children and adolescents, including children and adolescents of color, poor and working class children and adolescents, bilingual children and adolescents and children and adolescents with disabilities.

Martin's project developed focus groups of K-12 students, parents, guardians, teachers, building leaders, and superintendents and interviewed professors of school counseling in Counselor Education programs. She hired a school counselor educator from Oregon State University, Dr. Reese House, and they co-created what became the National Center for Transforming School Counseling at The Education Trust in 2003.

Their foci included (1) changing how school counseling was taught at the graduate level in Counselor Education programs and (2) changing the practices of K-12 school counselors in districts throughout the USA to teach school counselors prevention and intervention skills to help close achievement and opportunity gaps for all students. The NCTSC focus groups found what Hart & Jacobi (1992) had indicated—too many school counselors were working as gatekeepers for the status quo instead of advocates for equity. Too many school counselors were using inequitable practices and unwilling to challenge them, which kept students from nondominant backgrounds from the advanced coursework (honors, AP, IB courses) and academic, career, and college readiness skills needed to successfully graduate from high school and pursue rigorous post-secondary options including college.

They found funding for $500,000 grants for six different Counselor Education/School Counseling programs in rural and urban settings, to transform their School Counselor Education programs to focus teaching school counselor candidates advocacy, leadership, teaming and collaboration, equity assessment using data, and culturally competent program counseling and coordination beginning in 1998 (Indiana State University, University of Georgia, University of West Georgia, University of California-Northridge, University of North Florida, and Ohio State University) http://www.edtrust.org/node/139 and then over 25 other Counselor Education/School Counseling programs joined as companion institutions in the following decade. By 2008, NCTSC consultants had also worked in over 100 districts around the United States including most major cities to help transform the work of school counselors to help close gaps and challenge inappropriate policies and procedures through the use of data and assessing equity.

Practitioners, too, jumped on board the school counseling transformation train. In 2008, Rowman Littlefield Education published The New School Counselor: Strategies for Universal Academic Achievement. The text, written by Rita Schellenberg, a practicing school counselor and counselor educator, describes the new vision for school counseling and guides school counselors and pre-service school counselors through accountable, data-driven programming. Schellenberg introduces Standards Blending, a crosswalking strategy that hold the potential to be culturally sensitive and effective in enhancing academic achievement and closing the achievement gap.