The New York Times

December 20, 2007

By KAREN W. ARENSON

Taking the prestigious Rhodes Scholarships as a model, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation in Princeton is creating a fellowship program that it hopes will lure top students into teaching and transform teacher education in the United States.

“Research shows that providing excellent teachers is the single most important way to improve student achievement,” said Arthur E. Levine, president of the foundation, which coordinates a variety of academic fellowship programs. “But the quality of our teaching force today is not as strong as it needs to be, and our teacher preparation programs are too weak. We hope this program will produce significant improvement in both and provide models that the rest of the country will follow.”

Other programs, like Teach for America and the New York City Teaching Fellows, have also tried to attract more top students to the teaching profession using approaches like recruiting at prestigious universities, and offering fellowships and training. Dr. Levine, who became president of the Woodrow Wilson foundation last year, was previously president of Teachers College, Columbia University, and has been a strong critic of teacher education in recent years.

 The Woodrow Wilson program will offer about 33 national Leonore Annenberg Teaching Fellowships a year, with $30,000 stipends, for students to attend graduate education programs at Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Virginia and the University of Washington. Applications will be available next year for enrollment in fall 2009.

Another part of the program will provide fellowships in selected states, beginning with Indiana, at universities that agree to remake their graduate education programs along certain lines.

These include closer integration between the education colleges and colleges of arts and sciences, direct oversight of the education programs by university provosts, greater collaboration between education colleges and primary and secondary schools, more experience in schools for graduate students, and three years of mentoring after the graduates start teaching.

“If they did all those things, we would have a radically different brand of teacher education,” Dr. Levine said.

In Indiana, Ball State University, Purdue University, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, and the University of Indianapolis will participate initially, with fellowships focused on math and science teachers. Each will receive 20 fellows a year, beginning in 2009.

Dr. Levine said that while he hoped the new fellowships attracted top students, he was also trying to remake teacher training by using the fellowships and foundation dollars as leverage.

“It is not a sure thing,” said Mary M. Brabeck, dean of the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development at New York University. “But every dean of an education school in the country is hoping that this is successful. There is so much we need to learn about teacher preparation and how to do it well, that any movement up that flagpole is welcome.”

The Annenberg Foundation, based in Pennsylvania and California, put up $5 million for the national fellowships, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York contributed $1 million. The Lilly Endowment Inc. is providing $10 million for the Indiana program.

A consortium of Ohio foundations has agreed to provide financing for Ohio to start next year. Dr. Levine said he was talking to foundations and government officials around the country about financing initiatives in other states.