Aspiring teachers can breathe a bit easier in their educational and career pursuits as the U.S. Department of Education relaxed its rules for the federal Teacher Education Assistance for College and Higher Education (TEACH) Grant Program and the Biden-Harris administration proposes boosts to the program via the American Families Plan (AFP).
The Department of Education changes – first introduced in the summer of 2020 by former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos – aims to remove hurdles involved in the TEACH program, which have often saddled grant recipients with burdensome loans – converted from grants due to paperwork issues.
The program gives grants of up to $4,000 annually to students majoring or planning to major in education for a teaching career. In exchange, recipients have to teach in a high-need discipline and in an underserved school for four years with an eight-year deadline. If recipients did not complete the required four years or submit proper documentation, the grant was subsequently converted into a Direct Unsubsidized Loan.
The intent behind the existing TEACH Grant program was to encourage people to go into teaching, “which is not always as highly paid as we wish it were, as other real professions are – and to keep people in the profession because they’re not trying to work off debt and lured into higher paying jobs to be able to work off those debts,” said Dr. Elizabeth Birr Moje, dean of the University of Michigan School of Education. “Unfortunately, the way the TEACH Grant program ran in the past, found many people actually incurring more debt than they would have had they not gotten the TEACH Grants because of the way the TEACH Grants were regulated so that if your materials weren’t filed properly in exactly the right time frame, they would turn into loans at very high interest rates.”
Under these new changes which took effect on July 1st, TEACH Grant recipients will not have grants converted into loans if they do not certify they have begun teaching or intend to begin teaching within 120 days of graduation or withdrawal from school.
The Department of Education also opened the reconsideration process to all TEACH Grant recipients whose grants have been converted into loans to give more relief to recipients whose grants were converted in error.
In addition to these changes from the Department of Education, the Biden-Harris administration is attempting to bolster the TEACH Grant program through the AFP. The plan would double the grant to $8,000 a year for juniors, seniors and grad students, eliminate GPA requirements and expand the TEACH program to early childhood educators.
