Blog 5: $5 Billion in Grants Offered to Revisit Teacher Policies

Using the Race to the Top school improvement competition as a model, the Obama administration is proposing a $5 billion competitive grant program.  This program will encourage teachers by keeping good teachers on the job and offering rewards to the most excellent ones.  It will organize officials, union leaders, and teachers to address salary increases, permanent status rules, and improving professional development.  On Wednesday, Arne Duncan, secretary of education, will unveil a program meant to promote the Respect Project (Recognizing Educational Success, Professional Excellence and Collaborative Teaching).  They plan to help teachers have more of a voice in federal, state, and local education policy and also to rebuild, in a sense, their profession.  States will be allowed to design their own plans for improving teachers and the federal Education Department will select the ones showing the most potential for multiyear funding.  This project is designed to focus only on teachers—to concentrate on the needs of experienced teachers and to make teaching a more attractive career overall.  Steps such as increasing salaries and having more selective teacher colleges hope to draw more interest to students to become teachers in the future.  They want people to view teachers in a light of professionalism—where they are respected as “thinkers, leaders, and nation-builders.”  With hopes that this competitive grant program will give states an incentive to come up with the most pioneering ideas, Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, thinks that this will attract top notch teaching candidates for the future and help advance professional development. 

Although this program is seemingly attractive because of the hopes that teaching will begin to be held in much higher regards among people seeing career paths, the government must put their money where their mouth is and make this happen.  We all know that this has gone on for decades but somehow we must make teaching better seeing as how this profession is burdened with the most pressure in securing our economic future as a nation.  As I read this article I can only hope that this program is successful because teachers are an extremely important asset to our future and they need to be held in higher respects in order to be certain that children are being educated to the highest of standards. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/15/education/white-house-proposes-5-billion-in-grants-to-overhaul-teaching.html