Long before Erika Cedeño came to the United States, she dreamed of revolutionizing education, and now she is doing that and more by shaping Spanish learning standards across the state of California.
She earned a degree in education pedagogy in Mexico and applied several times to the Secretaría de Educación Pública, or federal Department of Education. Her goal? To help Mexican educational authorities create exams that gave them real information about how students progressed over the course of a school year.
When she moved to California, she discovered SCVi — a TK-12 free public charter school in Santa Clarita Valley — and began working as a high school and IB Spanish facilitator in 2015.
“When SCVi gave me the opportunity to work as a teacher, my American dream was fulfilled,” Cedeño says. She set to work learning everything she could about American standardized tests, which differ greatly from those in her native Mexico.
In 2016, she began serving as an integral part of the team, creating the California Spanish Assessment exam, or CAASPP en Español. In May 2019, she was tapped to write and review the borderline standards and Spanish learning standards statewide. Of the 90 educators working on the project, she was one of 12 picked to serve as a panelist and was the sole teacher representing SCVi’s district in Sacramento. She will return to Sacramento in October 2019 to work as part of a statewide Department of Education team focusing on range-setting.
“It fills me with satisfaction,” she says. “It also fills me with pride, because several of the exam items were created by me. But most of all, it fills me with happiness because I am fulfilling a dream that I often thought was unachievable.”
Erika is a graduate of Universidad Autónoma de México in Mexico City, where she earned a bachelor of arts degree in pedagogy. She has a degree in Spanish language and has been in the United States for more than 13 years. She is married to the love her life, Eduardo, and has three children. In her free time, Erika enjoys tennis, running ultramarathons, and participating in Ironman triathlon competitions.