The Teachers Professional Development Institutes Act

Senators Christopher Dodd and Joseph Lieberman and Representatives Rosa DeLauro and Joe Courtney have introduced legislation (S. 3498 and H.R. 5556) to create a grants program to establish Teachers Institutes in states throughout the nation. The Senators’ and Representatives’ plan is modeled after the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute®.

Passage of this legislation would fuel the Yale National Initiative®, which aspires to establish an exemplary Teachers Institute in most states. The innovative Teachers Institute approach addresses the largely unmet need for long-term university-school partnerships that provide faculty of arts and sciences systematically to assist public school teachers to engage and educate their students in core academic subjects in the sciences and the humanities in high-need schools.

The million the legislation would authorize to be expended over five years would provide for the establishment of as many as eight Teachers Institutes each year, so that by the fifth year there would be an exemplary Institute in as many as forty states. These Institutes would enable state and local education agencies to learn from their own experience about the efficacy of this tested approach for reforming their policies and practices for teacher professional development.

If you favor this legislation, fax a letter to your Senators and Representative and their legislative assistants for education, asking them to co-sponsor or support the bill. Please send a copy to the Initiative.

As background, you may wish to review arguments for enactment of the legislation and the recognition the Teachers Institute approach has received over the past 30 years, as well as the earlier calls that have been made to enact similar legislation.

Follow the progress of this bill in Congress by checking for legislative updates on this website.

Sponsors

Congressman Joe Courtney: fax (202) 225-4977

Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro: fax (202) 225-4890

Senator Christopher Dodd: fax (202) 224-1083

Senator Joseph Lieberman: fax (202) 224-9750

Other Members of Congress

For information on how to contact Members of Congress, enter your ZIP code on the website at congressmerge.com/onlinedb/index.htm.