UNIVERSITY VILLAGE — Citing a shortage of black and Hispanic science teachers in Chicago Public Schools, officials have announced a six-year, $3 million effort to train thirty new minority instructors.
According to CPS, 18.6 percent of teachers in city public schools are Hispanic and 24.3 percent are black.
Since 2012, the percentage of Latino teachers has grown slightly but not nearly as rapidly as the city's Hispanic population, according to researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Blacks made up 40 percent of CPS teaching corp in 2012, the UIC researchers said.
The UIC researchers will use a $3 million National Science Foundation grant to train the new group teachers, recent grads who will be fellows in UIC's master's program in science education. Fellows will receive a tuition waver and an annual stipend of $10,000 during the master's program and through four years of teaching in CPS.
Called Project SEEEC (Science Education for Excellence and Equity in Chicago), the effort will begin with its first class in May of 2015.
The fellows will be taught by ten "master fellows" — current CPS high school science teachers who will pursue doctorates in science education at UIC. These master fellows will have their tuition waved and will also receive stipends. To participate, they must agree to continue to teach in CPS for five years, officials said.
"African Americans and Latinos are so underrepresented in science, technology, engineering and math and we're perpetuating the cycle unless students see black and brown professionals succeeding," Carole Mitchener, associate dean of academic affairs in the UIC College of Education, said in a statement.
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