The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation has just announced the creation of two programs that will subsidize the advanced education of prospective teachers to help better prepare them for elementary- and secondary-school classrooms.
One program will be state-based, with the pilot effort in Indiana. Fellows there will receive a $30,000 stipend to complete a yearlong master’s program, and will be required to teach mathematics and science for three years in urban or rural schools, where good teachers are in short supply.
The undertaking will involve four higher-education institutions: Ball State University, Purdue University, the University of Indianapolis, and Indiana and Purdue Universities’ joint campus in Indianapolis. All have agreed to overhaul their teacher-education programs with a more clinical approach that entails working closely with schools to provide mentors for their graduates and monitor their progress.
In its initial year, the Indiana program will be financed with $10-million from the Lilly Endowment and will cover 80 new math and science teachers. The Wilson foundation hopes eventually to expand the Indiana program to give annual awards to 400 prospective math and science teachers.
The second fellowship program is national in scope. To be financed with $5-million from the Annenberg Foundation and $1-million from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, it will provide outstanding recent college graduates and people changing their careers with $30,000 stipends and a year of graduate education at one of four participating institutions: Stanford University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Virginia, and the University of Washington.
Applicants for the fellowships must agree to teach for three years in a low-income school.
In a prepared statement, Arthur Levine, the Wilson foundation’s president, said the programs had been “designed to develop new models for effective teacher preparation that can produce a new corps of outstanding teachers where they are needed most.” —Peter Schmidt
