A Michigan initiative is finding success getting good science, technology, engineering, and math teachers in front of the students who need them the most, an evaluation of the program has found.
The 6-year-old Woodrow Wilson Michigan Teaching Fellowship program, funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, has been working with six Michigan universities to build “rigorous, highly selective, clinically-based programs integrating disciplinary content and pedagogical instruction.”
The teaching fellows—from Eastern Michigan University, Grand Valley State University, Michigan State University, the University of Michigan, Wayne State University, and Western Michigan University—receive $30,000 fellowships to complete 12- to 15-month master’s degree programs and get three years of mentoring. The future teachers promise to spend three years teaching in high-needs Michigan schools.
The study by the American Institutes for Research’s National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research finds that fellows are significantly more likely than other Michigan educators to teach black students, low-income students, special education students, and English-language learners. And students taught by the fellows are learning more than their peers who are taught by others.
