Kellogg Foundation Awards $16.7 Million to Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation
“The Kellogg Foundation has worked across the country to improve educational opportunities for vulnerable children from the early years through high school,” said Sterling Speirn, president and CEO of the Kellogg Foundation. “But it’s especially important to invest in a promising initiative in our home state that will match well-qualified teachers with students most in need.”
The Fellows, who will be announced in Spring 2011 and receive a $30,000 stipend to complete the master’s program, commit to teach for at least three years in a high-need school after they complete their teacher education program. The Fellows also are placed in their schools in cohorts and receive intensive support and mentoring to encourage them to continue teaching as a long-term career instead of making it a brief assignment.
As integral partners in the Fellowship, several Mich. universities also will undergo important changes. The adjustments will be necessary to provide the Fellows with the best combination of content knowledge and classroom expertise to most effectively address the challenges of their specific student populations.
“Research has shown again and again that the most important element in a student’s success is the teacher,” said Arthur Levine, the president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and a respected expert on teacher education. “America’s schools of education are facing the extraordinary challenge of having to prepare a new breed of teacher, ready to teach the most diverse population of students in our history to the highest levels of skills and knowledge ever required--all in an outcomes-based system of education. This Fellowship emphasizes intensive practical preparation, rigorous grounding in the subject matter, and extensive supervised teaching experience in the same kind of high-need urban and rural schools where Fellows will later teach.”
“Having enough great teachers, especially in the math and sciences, shouldn’t depend on where a child lives,” said Mike Flanagan, Mich.’s state superintendent of public instruction. “This program will help heal that disparity.”
