The Ohio State College of Education and Human Ecology received a five-year federal grant worth $12.9 million to help fund a new program that will better prepare future teachers.
The program, Project ASPIRE: Apprenticeships Supported by Partnerships for Innovation and Reform in Education, will prepare teachers to work in high-need areas for the Columbus City School District.
The project will provide a “stronger teacher workforce that is ready for a community that is under a lot of economic stress,” said Rebecca Kantor, director of the School of Teaching and Learning in the College of Education and Human Ecology.
“We are focused the hardest on staff and high-need schools,” Kantor said. “We are hoping there will be longer teacher retention.”
According to a press release, the grant will help support the graduation of “600 bachelor-degree teachers, focusing on those specializing in math, science and foreign languages.” OSU was chosen as one of 28 schools awarded it. It was the only school in Ohio to receive the grant funded through the U.S. Department of Education’s Teacher Quality Partnership.
“We are going to create more valued and more flexible pathways into teaching at undergraduate and graduate levels,” Kantor said. “It is all about education reform and creating options at different levels for people interested in becoming a teacher.”
The grant will strengthen a long-standing partnership with Columbus City Schools and include partnerships with the OSU College of Arts and Sciences, Nationwide Insurance, Battelle for Kids, the Ohio Board of Regents and the Ohio Department of Education, Kantor said.
“We are proud, as the flagship center for education research in Ohio, to engage with these critical partners in creating a new model for teacher preparation,” said Cheryl Achterberg, dean of the College of Education and Human Ecology, in a press release. “Our experts will apply strategies they have perfected through years of research in teacher preparation. Our goal is to meet the learning needs of all children in the 21st century.”
Kantor said future teachers will also benefit from an increased number of scholarships available through the grant and job opportunities in the Columbus City School District, which pledged to hire more scholarship students. The benefits of this pledge are that OSU graduates will stay local after graduation and will have greater accessibility to jobs.
“The students who graduate from our program and get hired at local schools will experience a new kind of, and level of, support,” Kantor said.
Project ASPIRE supports House Bill 1, “which is historically changing the preparation of teachers,” Kantor said. “The state of Ohio is in a huge period of transition because of House Bill 1.”
This year will be spent setting up infrastructure for Project ASPIRE, Kantor said. The first group of students will be brought in next year. The impact of the project will be increasingly seen in the community as more students are added in the next five years
