President Obama’s budget request for FY 2010 contains a couple of interesting tidbits relating to teachers. The administration says it wants to :
--Strengthen and increase transparency around teacher and principal preparation programs;
--Implement systems that reward teacher performance, help less-effective teachers improve or, if they don’t improve, exit the classroom;
--Support community-based education through the creation of Promise Neighborhoods similar to the Harlem Children’s Zone, which combined rigorous education standards with wraparound support services for students.
There aren’t any figures or line items, so we don’t yet know if these are new programs or tweaks to existing programs. For example, the federal Teacher Incentive Fund supports principal and teacher compensation programs but doesn’t really deal with the issue of remediation and removal of ineffective teachers.
We’ll be sure to bring you more once we know what’s what.