[ ED Home ]While the federal government already addresses the professional development of current teachers, little has been invested in developing new teachers. Because our nation will be preparing more teachers than ever before, for increasingly challenging classrooms, a federal investment targeted to teacher recruitment, preparation, and support in the first years of teaching can have a significant impact.
Our proposal has two parts: (1) support for the highest-quality teacher preparation for underserved urban and rural areas, and (2) recruitment of qualified teachers for these underserved areas. Both parts of the proposal also address support for new teachers.
Lighthouse Partnerships for Teacher Preparation: Our proposed Lighthouse Partnerships program is designed to be a catalyst for improving teacher education across the country by funding a number of partnerships among teacher preparation institutions and school districts in high-poverty urban and rural areas. The program would be authorized at $30 million for fiscal year 1999.
The proposed program addresses three critical needs in teacher preparation. First, as a nation, we must identify and rigorously evaluate best practices in teacher education, especially in preparing teachers to teach in high-poverty schools. Second, when exemplary teacher education practices are identified, they should be disseminated to other institutions; otherwise, good programs will remain islands of excellence with little impact on the great majority of prospective teachers. Third, because quality teacher preparation demands strong collaboration with elementary and secondary schools, school districts and teacher preparation institutions must work together in real partnerships to prepare teachers.
The Lighthouse Partnerships program would address these needs. The program, which emphasizes the vital role of K-12 educators in designing and implementing effective teacher preparation programs, would accelerate the change process by linking higher education institutions from across the country with each other, and with K-12 schools, to share best practices and learn from each others' work. The program would award five-year competitive grants to partnerships made up of institutions of higher education, K-12 school districts, and states. Other entities, including community colleges, could be partners as well. The partnerships would be identified by rigorous criteria through a peer review process.
Each Lighthouse Partnership would include institutions that view teacher education as part of the mission of the entire university. In these institutions, arts and sciences and teacher education faculty collaborate in preparing teachers. The institutions have a coherent, core curriculum that reflects the best research and practice and is aligned with K-12 student content standards and standards for teachers and teacher education. They have strong, well-sequenced clinical experiences where pre-service teachers are placed under the supervision of master teachers to learn how to work effectively with all students, especially those who do not learn easily. They both prepare teachers to use technology and use technology to prepare teachers. These institutions have strong connections to high-poverty schools and a proven track record of attracting, preparing, and placing diverse, successful teachers in those schools.
All institutions in the Lighthouse Partnerships must be committed to this vision. Within each partnership, at least one institution must have already done the hard work involved in achieving these elements of high-quality teacher education. Other institutions may be just beginning the process of redesigning their programs. In short, the members of the Lighthouse Partnerships will be at all different stages of their restructuring efforts and will have valuable experience to share with each other. The partnerships will likely represent a variety of approaches to teacher education and will transcend state and regional boundaries. Most important, they will reach institutions of all types and sizes that prepare significant numbers of teachers.
Funds would be used for refinement and evaluation of the institutions' teacher education programs; for the aggressive dissemination of information about best practices in teacher preparation to other institutions that prepare teachers; for technical assistance in restructuring the teacher preparation programs of the institutions in the partnership; for the implementation of program improvements; for joint activities with school districts in the partnership; and for assessing the effectiveness of the grant activities.
Strong evaluation provisions in the legislation would require that the partnerships document improvement in teacher preparation programs and that they show improvement in the effectiveness and diversity of students completing their programs. In addition, they must show improvement in student achievement at the elementary and secondary schools with which they collaborate.
Recruiting New Teachers for Underserved Areas/Minority Teacher Recruitment: Our nation's schools will need to hire over two million teachers in the next decade, and they need a talented, well-prepared, and more diverse teaching force. Urban and rural schools will experience the most severe teacher shortages; at the same time, students in those schools often need the most qualified teachers.
The federal government cannot solve these recruitment challenges alone, but it can be a catalyst that stimulates the recruitment of minority teachers and teachers in areas of high need. We propose a program to increase the number of students, especially minority students, who complete high-quality teacher preparation programs. The program would promote teaching in underserved areas and would be authorized at $37 million for fiscal year 1999.
The program would award five-year competitive grants to partnerships between institutions of higher education and school districts in underserved urban and rural areas, in conjunction with other partners such as community colleges, teachers' unions, community organizations, and states, to recruit and prepare teachers. Collaboratively, the partners would determine the needs of high-poverty schools in their communities, such as the need for diverse faculties or for teachers in particular subjects. Having completed this needs assessment, the partners would identify a pool of potential teachers fitting those needs, recruit individuals from this pool, and design high-quality preparation and induction programs tailored to those individuals.
The needs of the respective partnerships would determine their recruitment focus. Special consideration would be given to applications from minority-serving institutions and to applications most likely to result in increases in the numbers of minority individuals, including language minority individuals, and individuals with disabilities in the teaching force.
The program would support scholarships for potential teachers. Applicants would determine the funding level and number of these scholarships according to the needs of their students. Because scholarships alone often are not enough to attract and retain participants in teacher education programs, the grantees could also provide support services such as academic counseling, tutoring, mentoring, child care, and transportation. Grantees would provide support services during participants' first three years of teaching, as well.
Individuals recruited into the program would commit to teach for at least three years in underserved school districts, defined by poverty level. The grantees would be judged by their success in preparing teachers to teach to high standards and in placing and retaining new teachers in high-need communities. Thus, they would have strong incentives to prepare students well for the challenges of teaching in high-poverty urban and rural schools and to support them effectively during their first years of teaching.
A matching requirement would help to ensure that the program activities continue after federal funding ends. Over the five-year grant period, the federal share of the costs of the program activities would be reduced incrementally from 90 percent to 50 percent.
A focused federal investment in teacher recruitment and preparation can make a substantial impact on the development of new teachers. The Department's proposal for the reauthorization of Title V would be an effective answer to our nation's challenges in teaching.
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