Thirteen years ago, the University of Texas, Austin, started a program called UTeach that allowed math and science majors to simultaneously earn teaching certificates. It worked so well at UT-Austin that the school set up the National Math and Science Initiative to help the program spread to other universities across the country, according to the Dallas Morning News. It’s now in 14 colleges nationwide, and between them, they will educate nearly 5,000 new math and science teachers by 2015.

That good work caught the attention of the Obama administration, which wants to put the project’s growth into overdrive. Last week, as reported here, the President announced a second phase of his $500 million, public-private Educate to Innovate program, which seeks to produce thousands of new math and science teachers, and a key component of the project is a bigger roll-out of UTeach. High-tech companies Texas Instruments and Dell Inc. are helping fund the UTeach push. “This is about putting great teachers in front of our kids,” Rich Templeton, TI chief executive, told the Morning News.

Filed under: K-12 Education News

Tags: College, Grant Opportunities, Programs for Teachers, Teacher Training