A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

Dear Colleague:

A central part of the President's school improvement agenda in elementary and secondary education is vigorous support for community and state efforts to set very high standards. Indeed, there is nothing more important in American education than setting and achieving the highest standards for our students, schools, and teachers.

For this reason, the President and I were extremely interested in a report on the quality of teaching in this country released last fall by the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, a bipartisan panel of elected officials, business leaders, and educators. This study, What Matters Most: Teaching for America's Future, reports that two million teachers will be needed in the next ten years to accommodate growing student enrollments and to replace an aging teaching force, and that the nation is neither setting high enough standards for current or future teachers nor providing adequate help for teachers to meet high standards. The Commission challenged the nation to ensure that every child in the country has access to competent, qualified, and caring teachers by the year 2006.

While I joined Commission members in releasing their report at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., the President was visiting an elementary school in Fresno, California, where he called on the nation to invest in quality teaching and help America's teachers meet the highest standards. In the President's A Call to Action for American Education In the 21st Century, outlined in his most recent State of the Union address, he described strategies to help ensure that there is a talented and dedicated teacher in every classroom in the nation. The President also asked the U.S. Department of Education to notify state and local officials of Department resources available to help address the following challenges to promote excellence and accountability in teaching:

• recruiting talented people into teaching;

• setting high standards for teachers, including tough licensing and certification standards, and increasing dramatically the number of teachers who meet the demanding standards for accomplished teaching set by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards;

• investing in high-quality teacher preparation and career-long professional development strategies to help teachers meet high standards; and

• rewarding and retaining good teachers, restoring enthusiasm and providing intensive assistance for teachers who need it, and counseling out of the profession or removing -- fairly, quickly, and cost-effectively -- teachers who are incompetent or burnt-out.

I am pleased to share with you the enclosed Excellence & Accountability in Teaching: A Guide to U.S. Department of Education Programs and Resources on how this Department's resources can accelerate state and local efforts to support high-quality teaching. I hope that you will find it useful in highlighting U.S. Department of Education resources available to help schools, communities, universities, and states address these challenges. If used thoughtfully, in ways that are consistent with state and local school improvement strategies and with the underlying purposes of the relevant programs, these resources can make significant contributions to the quality of teaching and learning in classrooms throughout the nation. Where program requirements impede the use of effective strategies to improve teaching and learning, my staff can help explore the possible use of waivers, schoolwide projects, and other strategies for tailoring the use of U.S. Department of Education program funds to your needs.

Specific questions about the programs and resources included in the User's Guide can be directed to the contacts identified in the program descriptions. More general questions or comments can be addressed to our new Teacher Excellence Desk by telephone (202-260-4794) or by Internet (teacher_excellence@ed.gov).

In addition, with help from teachers, principals, colleges, and others around the country, this Department has also developed a number of other documents related to excellence in teaching that you may find helpful. I encourage your office to call 1-800-USA-LEARN to request any of these documents, including a brochure outlining the mission and principles of high-quality professional development, brief profiles of schools recently honored by the Department for their outstanding work in teacher professional development, and a guidebook on programs offered by agencies throughout the federal government that support teacher education and professional development. The Department also will soon release a document identifying promising practices in each of the areas of challenge discussed in the enclosed materials.

Quality teachers and quality teaching are cornerstones of all our school improvement efforts. The President and I look forward to working with you to ensure that all students have access to the well-prepared, high-quality teachers they need and deserve.

Yours sincerely,

Richard W. Riley

Enclosure
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[Title page]

[Part I: Improving Schools: The Critical Role of Good Teachers and Good Teaching]