Apparently, the Obama administration wants to “overhaul the teaching profession;” but in so doing does not plan to advocate for many more bilingual teachers prepared to teach in language immersion programs. So, by further training and embedding monolingual English teachers, they will further strengthen the status quo and make shifting to more extensive immersion programs more difficult.
From the NY Times article “$5 Billion in Grants Offered to Revisit Teacher Policies,” by Winnie Hu (here):
The Obama administration will propose a $5 billion competitive grant program to encourage states to overhaul the teaching profession, federal education officials said Tuesday, using its Race to the Top school improvement competition as a model.
The new program, which needs Congressional approval, is part of President Obama’s budget proposal and expands upon a call in his State of the Union address last month to give schools more resources “to keep good teachers on the job and reward the best ones.”
Federal education officials said the program would seek to bring together state and district officials, union leaders, teachers and other educators to address a range of issues, among them tightening tenure rules, increasing salaries and improving professional development.
And:
Officials said the new program, which has been in development for a year, was not a response to any current efforts to install teacher evaluation systems in specific states, including New York. They said it was intended to address the needs of experienced teachers and to make the teaching profession more appealing over all — through salary increases, more selective teacher colleges and other measures — to attract a new generation of teachers.
Yes, and no change in attracting a “new generation of teachers” will be more important than shifting from monolingual English teachers to bilingual teachers working in immersion programs in a variety of foreign languages. I worry the Obama administration does not understand this needed shift.
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