A long-range effort by the Annenberg Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to foster innovative uses of technologies in precollegiate science and mathematics reform has announced a $1.5 million grant to help develop a national cadre of minority teachers in those subjects.
The Annenberg/C.P.B. Math and Science Project announced late last month that it would make the grant over the next three years to enable the Quality Education for Minorities Network to develop a corps of minority teachers who would take a leading role in curriculum reform.
The network’s Teacher Leadership Corps Project, which aims to create a group of 100 African-American, Native American, and Hispanic teachers, will be headed by Mary Hatwood Futrell. Ms. Futrell is the immediate past president of the National Education Association and currently serves as a fellow in the Center for the Study of Education and National Development at George Washington University here.
Barbara Holmes, the former director of policy studies at the Education Commission of the States, will serve as a senior consultant to the project.
The project began last year with a $60 million grant from the foundation to the C.P.B. (See Education Week, July 31, 1992.) The project later announced that it would make parents, education policymakers, and teachers the target of its funding. (See Education Week, Dec. 4, 1991.) The grant to the Q.E.M. Network is the first to be made under the effort.
“The nation’s goal is to enable all children to acquire the knowledge and skills they need in math and science to be productive and informed citizens,’' said Mara Mayor, the director of the Annenberg project.
She added that “this effort represents the first of four initiatives [the project] will fund this year to help implement widespread reform of [math and science] education by working with the adults charged with shaping the school environment.’'
50 Schools Involved
The Q.E.M. Network will form a consortium of six universities and 50 schools in Arizona, Maryland, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Virginia to develop corps of 20 teachers per state.
The teacher-corps recruits will work with university researchers to develop school-based curricular improvements, with a special focus on the effects of reform strategies on low-income minority students.
They also will lead workshops for colleagues in their areas.
Shirley McBay, the head of the Q.E.M. Network, said the project’s goal is a “radical restructuring’’ of existing schools that will target the “full development’’ of the math and science skills of poor minority children.
