Washington, D.C. — Teacher-preparation programs should be judged based on the academic growth of the students being taught by their graduates.
That is the crux of a proposal unveiled by the Obama administration in an attempt to identify and support effective preparation programs and, conversely, to weed out weak programs that don’t improve.
“We don’t do enough to identify those (programs) that are not succeeding and help them get better or intervene so that they no longer produce teachers for our children,” U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in releasing the proposal during a recent panel discussion titled “A New Approach to Teacher Education Reform and Improvement.”
The discussion was held on Friday by Education Sector, an independent education policy think tank.
The Obama administration’s proposal calls for state level accountability systems to track on a program-by-program basis how well students are doing under teachers that graduated from a given teacher-preparation program.
In an effort to produce more minority teachers, the plan also calls for $40 million to fund the Augustus F. Hawkins Centers of Excellence program, which was authorized by Congress in 2008 but never funded. Through the program, the proposal would provide competitive grants to teacher-preparation programs at minority serving institutions or MSIs in partnerships with other institutions of higher learning.
The proposal also calls for using a $185 million state teacher preparation grant to reform the $110 million TEACH grant program, renaming it as the “Presidential Teaching Fellows” program and awarding the program’s $10,000 scholarships only to final-year students as opposed to students who are earlier in their post-secondary careers and may switch career plans before they graduate.
