We’ve reported extensively on the reconciliation bill passed by Congress earlier this month and its student aid provisions that shift taxpayer subsidies from lenders to students. But, like all major pieces of legislation that go through Congress, this one has a lot of moving parts, some of which have received little public scrutiny. 

TEACH Grants

For example, the reconciliation legislation created a new program, TEACH Grants, that makes significant additional financial aid available to prospective teachers. But very few people outside the higher education lobby—who like the new program—know much about it.

The TEACH Grant language is lifted wholesale out of the Teacher Excellence for All Children (TEACH) Act, which House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller (D-CA) proposed in 2005. (Yes, K-12 policy wonks, that’s the same TEACH Act that also provided the performance pay provisions that are causing such a ruckus in Miller’s draft No Child Left Behind Act reauthorization bill.)

TEACH grants provide $4,000 a year—up to a total of $16,000 for undergraduates, or $8,000 for masters students—in scholarship aid for students enrolled in a higher education teacher preparation program (including alternative certification programs). To receive a grant, students have to have a grade point average of at least 3.25 or score in the top 25 percent on a college or graduate school admissions test. Once they’ve earned their degree or teaching certificate, TEACH grant recipients must spend at least four of the next eight years teaching in a “high-need” field at a school with at least 30 percent poor students. High-need fields include math, science, foreign languages, bilingual education, special education, and reading specialists..

Praise and Concern

The focus on teacher candidates’ academic quality is the TEACH Grants’ best feature. One of the strongest findings in teacher quality research is that teachers who score higher on college entrance or other exams of academic ability have better student results. Unfortunately, such academically strong individuals are less likely to go into teaching and, if they do, more likely to leave the profession. To the extent that TEACH Grants create an incentive for high-ability individuals to become teachers, that’s good.

The question is whether, and how well, TEACH Grants are really likely to incentivize high achieving individuals to enter the teaching profession? Another federal financial aid program already provides an incentive for teachers to work in high-poverty schools, by forgiving their student loans. The TEACH Grant’s definition of high-poverty schools its recipients can work in is the same as the one in the loan forgiveness program. But there’s not much evidence about how the loan forgiveness program impacts teacher quality, retention, or shortages—if it does so at all. And, the TEACH Grant language doesn’t require the Secretary to study or report on this new program’s effects, either.

This is an important point: If all we want is to put a little extra cash in the pockets of people who do the difficult work of teaching in high-poverty schools—which may be the goal of the loan forgiveness program—then maybe it doesn’t make sense to rigorously assess the program’s impacts. But if we are trying to create incentives to attract more of the best and the brightest to work in high-poverty schools—which seems to be TEACH Grants’ goal—it’s critical to evaluate the results so that we know whether the programs are actually working—or if we’d be better off spending the money elsewhere.

And a Dash of Criticism

TEACH Grants could be viewed as a teacher counterpart to the National SMART Grants, created in the Higher Education Reconciliation Act of 2005, which provide additional grant aid for low-income students majoring in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields.

The big difference is that SMART grants go only to Pell grant-eligible students, while there’s no need-based criteria for TEACH Grants. It’s worth asking why should we offer bigger grants to rich kids who want to teach than to poor kids who want to be social workers.

It’s also worth asking whether we really should start conditioning more new grant aid on what students choose to study. Certainly, there’s a case that teaching and STEM fields are both areas where there’s a public interest in using financial aid policy to foster a strong workforce. But one could also make a case for grants to incentivize students majoring in gerontology, criminal justice, or a host of other fields.

To what extent do we want federal aid policy, rather than markets and personal inclination, to shape students’ vocational and academic decisions? And to what extent do we want federal aid to be based on what students study, rather than financial need? There’s no clear “right” answer. But a major policy decision like moving towards a more career-oriented financial aid system deserves serious, explicit policy debate. We don’t want to realize one day that a series of well-intentioned programs to support students in certain important fields has redefined the premises of our student aid system while no one was looking.

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