Education groups led by the nation’s main membership organization for teacher colleges are calling for a large congressional investment in overhauling and rebuilding federal support for teacher-preparation pipelines, following years of disruption from falling enrollment in teacher prep and upheaval in existing federal programs.
In a new report, they call for Congress to solidify teacher-training programs in the U.S. Department of Education, including $2.5 billion in new, revived, or expanded teacher workforce development grants and scholarships. It also calls for the development of a national educator workforce data system, which would report each year to Congress on teacher supply, demand, diversity, and outcomes.
“Teachers and school staff are now on the frontlines of addressing trauma, anxiety, and learning loss, often without the preparation, staffing, or resources to meet the magnitude of these needs,” said the groups, led by the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Preparation, in the report.
Among the financial proposals, the AACTE recommends that Congress authorize $500 million to transform the current federal Teacher Education Assistance for College and Higher Education (TEACH) grants into a nationwide teacher-residency scholarship, modeled on the National Health Service Corps, which provides scholarships and loan forgiveness for more than 18,000 health-care workers in high-need communities.
Such a scholarship would pay for prospective teachers’ full tuition and fees, clinical residency programs that feature student-teaching, along with child care and living-expense stipends for teachers who commit to work in shortage areas like math or special education at high-need schools.
The proposals likely face an uphill climb in the current political environment, given the Trump administration’s general hostility toward higher education, where most teacher preparation takes place. But it may have a window to gain traction in Congress, which has recently held hearings on teaching and where members hail from areas struggling to recruit and maintain teachers.
Peter Shulman, a former New Jersey deputy education commissioner and leader of the City Teaching Alliance, a non-profit teacher preparation organization, said he thinks many of the proposals have promise, but said he was skeptical of any being taken up at the federal level right now.
“These are substantial amounts of money, and my sense is that you want to have the data and guardrails and accountability set up before asking for this kind of investment,” Shulman said.
Initiatives to strengthen teacher preparation and accountability may find more support among states, said Shulman, co-founder of Wake Up New Jersey, a nonprofit policy and advocacy group for public education. “Different states have different needs in terms of teacher supply and demand, so there are ways to think about getting the states more involved in how money should be allocated … instead of being top down from federal government.”
Moving past ‘reactionary mode’
It has been a difficult few years for teacher colleges. Enrollment in programs is down. Challenges around AI have surfaced. Diversity, equity, and inclusion—concepts at the heart of many teaching programs—are under attack. The “science of reading” movement and new conversations about math teaching have led to increased scrutiny about what teaching methods programs are emphasizing and, in some cases, legislation specifying how those things should be taught.
The Trump administration has ended most of the major discretionary grants supporting teacher preparation, including the Teacher Quality Partnerships, which funds initial preparation; Supporting Effective Educator Development grants, which support in-service professional development; and the Augustus F. Hawkins grants to support future teachers at historically Black universities.
Among the most frightening new prospects for teacher colleges is the Trump administration’s proposal to drop teaching as a “professional career” under the Higher Education Act, which would limit loan repayment relief and flexibility for would-be educators, among other professions.
The proposed recategorization is a “troubling signal” from the administration, according to Jacqueline King, a consultant for research, policy and advocacy at AACTE.
“It has big practical impact because it defines how much financial aid students are going to have access to,” she said, but “it also has big symbolic impact, because it’s our federal government saying that educators aren’t professionals.”
Out of this situation came the impetus for the new report, AACTE officials said. The group spent 2025 in “reactionary mode” to the Education Department’s new policies, said Cheryl Holcomb-McCoy, AACTE’s president and chief executive officer.
“There’s been very little talk about how we are going to rebuild our educator workforce,” she said. “We needed to, instead of complaining about all the things that are happening, start setting the course for what we think needs to happen.”
What’s in the new proposals for teaching?
The proposal could represent a softening for the nation’s teachers colleges, which have repeatedly pushed back against prior attempts to strengthen accountability for teacher-preparation programs. But the report provides few details of what accountability for teacher preparation in exchange for the new federal infusion of cash might look like.
Among other things, the groups’ proposals call for the federal government to:
- Overhaul the existing TEACH grants, which have a strict loan-repayment condition, into a scholarship program to pay for the tuition, fees, and living expenses of a residency—in which would-be teachers work in a school with a mentor-teacher while earning an education degree. Recipients would need to work in high-need areas and schools.
- Reestablish and expand the Education Department’s office of educational technology;
- Create a new office of educator workforce at the department to “develop and coordinate national policy on educator recruitment, preparation, professional development, retention, and advancement;” and
- Add a new national research and technical assistance center within the Institute of Education Sciences, the department’s research agency, to study educator pipeline issues.
Though no bill has been introduced yet to codify the proposals, the Republican-controlled Congress maintained funding for teacher-preparation programs in the fiscal 2026 budget bill passed earlier this month. And lawmakers have expressed recent interest in supporting efforts to expand and update the teacher pipeline.
Earlier this week, AACTE representative David Slykhuis testified at a House education subcommittee hearing that a lack of federal guidance on teacher training and use of artificial intelligence has led to “a bit of a wild, wild West” in teacher technology preparation and forced districts to rely mainly on the major AI developers for pre- and in-service training.
AACTE also called for AI training as well as promising practices such as tutoring to become part of teachers’ preservice clinical training.
“We really don’t have any kind of national educator workforce design-and-development strategy, but we need one,” King said. “The world has changed a lot, but the teaching profession is remarkably similar to what it was when my mother was starting out as a teacher in the 1960s.”