INDIANAPOLIS (December 19, 2007) - Governor Mitch Daniels today joined state and national education leaders to announce that Indiana will be the first state to launch the Woodrow Wilson Teaching Fellowship, a program that will encourage the nation's top talents to seek long-term teaching careers in Indiana's high-need classrooms.
"We're talking about the Rhodes Scholarships of teaching with Indiana as the first state to award them and the first state whose young people will benefit. Nothing gives a child a better chance in life than an excellent teacher. The reverse is also true. Anything we can do to increase the quality of teaching in Hoosier classrooms will pay off enormously in brighter futures for our kids," said Daniels, visiting Arsenal Technical High School to make the announcement.
The Woodrow Wilson Indiana Teaching Fellowship will provide fellows with a $30,000 stipend to complete a year-long master's program at Ball State University, Purdue University, the University of Indianapolis or Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. The program is open to college seniors, recent graduates and career-changers with outstanding undergraduate records and majors in math or science who are willing to teach in high-need schools in Indiana for three years. The Indiana fellowship program will prepare 80 new math and science teachers for the state each year and will be supported by a grant from the Lilly Endowment.
"The time is right for this effort, and the need is great," said Sara B. Cobb, vice president for education at Lilly Endowment. "We are pleased that four of Indiana's top schools of education are committed to work with the Woodrow Wilson Foundation to recruit excellent candidates and enhance their educational programs so that they focus more on student learning. We look forward to seeing the eventual impact of the new approaches on the students they teach."
"Indiana was selected as the lead state for launching this fellowship because of the commitment to education shown by the governor and other state leaders, strong support for the program within the state's philanthropic and business communities, and the willingness of leading universities, as well as local school superintendents, to advance exemplary approaches to teacher preparation," said Arthur Levine, the president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, who led a multi-year study on needed improvements in teacher education.
The participating universities will introduce new curriculum and outcome measures anchored by supervised clinical experience and ongoing mentoring in schools. The universities will receive 20 fellows each year and work with schools to support their graduates and track their effectiveness over time. These universities will break new ground in teacher education, reworking their programs to center on an outcomes-based, clinical approach to teacher preparation that includes three years of mentoring, as well as residencies for teachers on campus and for professors in the schools. The host institutions also will lodge responsibility for the teaching fellowship in the provost's office and promote close partnerships between their teacher education programs and their colleges of arts and sciences.
Fellows are expected to be placed in high-need classrooms in both rural and urban school districts, including Indianapolis Public Schools.
Applications for the first Woodrow Wilson Indiana Teaching Fellowships will be available in fall 2008, with fellows to be named in spring 2009, begin master's work later that academic year, and start classroom teaching in 2010. In the interim, the selected universities will enhance their teacher education programs to meet Woodrow Wilson's standards for fellows' preparation.
"Schools are only as good as the teachers who serve in them," said David Haselkorn, senior fellow at Woodrow Wilson, who directs the Foundation's teaching fellowships. "This is a new strategy to ensure excellence in teaching, the profession that shapes America's future."
For more information on the Fellowship program, please visit the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation's Web site: http://www.woodrow.org/
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Audio of the governor's remarks may be found here: http://www.in.gov/gov/files/Audio/121907_Governors_remarks_Wilson.mp3
Woodrow Wilson Foundation media contact: Beverly Sanford, 609/452-7007, sanford@woodrow.org
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