(From WIBC, April 19th, 2012)
By Ray Steele
School corporations across Indiana are sharing a new state grant designed to reward efforts to recruit and retain effective teachers.
“It’s giving out more money that will pay us dividends in the future,” said State School Superintendent Tony Bennett, who divided $6 million among 28 school corporations. The grant was created by the General Assembly in 2011 as an incentive for school districts to implement new evaluation standards required by state law.
Bennett says those standards help provide more meaningful feedback to help teachers improve and give financial rewards to the best teachers, but he also says he can’t take credit for the idea of the grant. “Larry Grau, who is the executive director of Democrats For Education Reform; in a conversation I had with Larry two years ago, we talked about the marriage between fiscal policy and education policy and how that would be transformative in education,” Bennett said.