'Respect Project' to Focus on Teachers

article by Nancy Swanson | February 16, 2012

Using the Race to the Top contest as a model, the U.S. Department of Education is using $5 billion in grant money to sponsor a teacher development contest. The contest encourages states to overhaul the teaching profession and improve teacher quality. Among some of the changes the department is pushing are: higher teaching salaries, compensation tied to performance and more selective and improved teaching colleges.

“Our goal is to work with teachers in rebuilding their profession and to elevate the teacher voice in federal, state and local education policy,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in a statement.

The project,dubbed the Respect (Recognizing Educational Success, Professional Excellence and Collaborative Teaching) Project, comes as a part of President Obama’s recently proposed $68.9 billion education budget for the 2013 fiscal year. In addition to the Respect Project, this budget proposal will also include measures to continue with the Race to the Top program, money to prevent teacher layoffs and funding to revamp ailing school facilities.

The Respect project follows the same format as the Race to the Top contest. Individual states will submit proposals to the Department of Education that show how they will rework and improve teacher training and quality. The Department of Education will then disperse money from various grants to fund these proposed programs.

According to a press statement, a project proposal should be made up of six main components:

1. Attracting top-tier talent into education and preparing them for success

2. Creating a professional career continuum with competitive compensation

3. Creating conditions for success

4. Evaluating and supporting the development and success of teachers and leaders

5. Getting the best educators to the students who need them most

6. Sustaining a new and improved system

“Instead of a lifetime guarantee, tenure needs to be a recognized honor that signifies professional accomplishment and success,” Duncan said. “And we need a system of due process to deal fairly with those who are not up to the challenge.”

Gaining approval for the program may prove to be a challenge, as this would likely require an overhaul of many teacher tenure practices. Teacher’s unions have been strongly in favor of seniority as a measure of teacher tenure and would likely protest any alternatives. However, the program has gained the support of Dennis Van Roekel, the president of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teacher’s union with a membership of over 3 million teachers.

“We always worry about the details and how we implement this and that’s really important, and we want to work with them on that,” he said recognizing the importance of implementing these programs and improving teacher salaries.

This program comes at a time when research has shown that good teaching can prove to be crucial not only toward a child’s development into a successful adult, but also a strong asset to a strong economy. Recent research has shown that a child with a good teacher can potentially bolster the economy as children with effective teachers are more likely to have higher incomes later in life. Because of this Duncan feels that the nation needs to recognize this and act on it.

“We need to change society’s views of teaching from the factory model of yesterday to the professional model of tomorrow, where teachers are revered as thinkers, leaders and nation-builders,” Duncan said. “No other profession carries a greater burden for securing our economic future.”