Dean Elizabeth Moje speaks about new federal guidelines and resources for programs supporting teachers
Arrman Kyaw interviewed Dean Elizabeth Birr Moje for a Diverse: Issues In Higher Education article regarding the U.S. Department of Education’s newly revised guidelines for the federal Teacher Education Assistance for College and Higher Education (TEACH) Grant Program and the Biden-Harris administration’s proposal to boost to the program via the American Families Plan (AFP).
Moje explained that the intent behind the existing TEACH Grant program was to encourage people to go into teaching, “which is not always as highly paid as we wish it were, as other real professions are—and to keep people in the profession because they’re not trying to work off debt and lured into higher paying jobs to be able to work off those debts.” Moje added, “Unfortunately, the way the TEACH Grant program ran in the past, found many people actually incurring more debt than they would have had they not gotten the TEACH Grants because of the way the TEACH Grants were regulated so that if your materials weren’t filed properly in exactly the right time frame, they would turn into loans at very high interest rates.”
The Biden-Harris administration is also attempting to bolster the TEACH Grant program through the AFP. The plan would double the grant to $8,000 a year for juniors, seniors and grad students, eliminate GPA requirements and expand the TEACH program to early childhood educators.
“The American Families Plan would really add to the TEACH Grant program in ways that I fully support,” Moje said. “Doubling the amount for the grants is absolutely crucial. … I think the very least we can do is really try to recruit the most committed, the most passionate about teaching, and especially teaching in historically minoritized and marginalized communities.”
Moje praised the program expansion to include early childhood education. “It’s even harder to encourage people to go through university-based certification programs to recoup only the salaries of early childhood educators,” Moje said. “It’s a real problem in our society that we don’t pay the people we entrust our children’s learning with more, but this at least expands the opportunity for people to recover some of that investment that they make in actual professional learning.”
Moje also expressed her support for the AFP’s additional commitment to Grow Your Own programs, year-long, paid teacher residency programs, special education teacher development, and teacher preparation programs at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs) and minority-serving institutions (MSIs).
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