Bill Gates, put $50 million of your “Great Teachers” money in a program like this

by David Safier

We want to attract higher quality teachers, right? That won't solve all the socioeconomic issues hampering many students' educations, but no one doubts, better teachers mean greater student success.

So how about starting a Teaching Fellows Program? Find some of the best and the brightest high school seniors and tell them, if you agree to teach at least four years, we'll give you a scholarship to a state school. A program like that encourages some of the top high school students to go into teaching. And because of the scholarship component, it's likely to draw students from low income families, including minorities. That means students who otherwise couldn't afford college will get an education, and the teaching pool will draw from more diverse backgrounds.

Sound like a good idea? It sure does to me. Well, North Carolina has been doing it for 20 years. And a few years ago, a Democratic congressman from North Carolina actually got it enacted at the federal level.

Compare the staying power of North Carolina Teaching Fellows with Teach for America students, who make a two year, not a four year, commitment, and often see teaching as something to do until they get on with their lives.

After five years, 7 percent of the Teach for America participants were still at work in North Carolina, versus 73 percent of the fellows. Sixty percent of the fellows who started teaching 20 years ago still work in North Carolina public schools.

The Teaching Fellows program creates career teachers. Teach for America creates mainly short timers.

But there are problems ahead. North Carolina spends $13 million a year on the program, and even though it's popular, it may be phased out because of budget problems. And the federal program barely exists.

Financing [for the federal program] has been limited. New York, one of 12 states that won a grant, received enough money to prepare only 125 teachers over five years.

Unfortunately, the NY Times article doesn't have any stats on North Carolina student achievement or how the Teaching Fellows teachers stack up to their fellow staff members, which means I can't say the program has been a "success" from those standpoints. So why don't the big time corporate philanthropists who fund charter schools and voucher-promotion organizations — especially Bill Gates, who is on a "Great Teachers" kick — study the effectiveness of this kind of program, and if it looks like it's working, pump some money into educating future teachers?

The problem is, this kind of thing isn't sexy enough to appeal to "big idea" corporate types. And the conservative "reformers" who have the ear of big money education donors absolutely aren't interested in ideas to lure better teachers into district schools. Their agenda is to knock the legs out of the district public school system along with all those Democratic-voting, Democratic-funding teacher union types, and privatize, privatize, privatize.