Indian Education Discretionary Grant Programs; Professional Development Program

DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION <CFR>34 CFR Part 263</CFR> <DEPDOC>[Docket ID ED-2024-OESE-0008]</DEPDOC> <RIN>RIN 1810-AB70</RIN> <SUBJECT>Indian Education Discretionary Grant Programs; Professional Development Program</SUBJECT> <HD SOURCE="HED">AGENCY:</HD> Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, Department of Education. <HD SOURCE="HED">ACTION:</HD> Notice of proposed rulemaking. <SUM> <HD SOURCE="HED">SUMMARY:</HD> The Secretary proposes to revise the regulations that govern the Professional Development program, Assistance Listing Number (ALN) number 84.299B, authorized under title VI of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, as amended (ESEA), to establish priorities, requirements, and a definition for the program, including a priority for teacher retention projects. </SUM> <EFFDATE> <HD SOURCE="HED">DATES:</HD> We must receive your comments on or before August 28, 2024. </EFFDATE> <HD SOURCE="HED">ADDRESSES:</HD> Comments must be submitted via the Federal eRulemaking Portal at <E T="03">regulations.gov.</E> However, if you require an accommodation or cannot otherwise submit your comments via <E T="03">regulations.gov,</E> please contact the program contact person listed under <E T="02">FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT</E> . We will not accept comments submitted by fax or by email or those submitted after the comment period. To ensure that we do not receive duplicate copies, please submit your comments only once. In addition, please include the Docket ID at the top of your comments. • <E T="03">Federal eRulemaking Portal:</E> Go to <E T="03">regulations.gov</E> to submit your comments electronically. Information on using <E T="03">regulations.gov,</E> including instructions for accessing agency documents, submitting comments, and viewing the docket, is available on the site under “Help.” • <E T="03">Postal Mail, Commercial Delivery, or Hand Delivery:</E> The Department strongly encourages commenters to submit their comments electronically. However, if you mail or deliver your comments about these proposed regulations, address them to Donna Sabis-Burns, U.S. Department of Education, 400 Maryland Avenue SW, Room 4B-213, Washington, DC 20202-6335. Telephone: (202) 213-9014. <E T="03">Privacy Note:</E> The Department's policy is to make all comments received from members of the public available for public viewing in their entirety on the Federal eRulemaking Portal at <E T="03">regulations.gov.</E> Therefore, commenters should be careful to include in their comments only information that they wish to make publicly available. <FURINF> <HD SOURCE="HED">FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT:</HD> Donna Sabis-Burns, U.S. Department of Education, 400 Maryland Avenue SW, Room 4B-213, Washington, DC 20202-6335. Telephone: (202) 213-9014. Email: <E T="03">donna.sabis-burns@ed.gov.</E> If you are deaf, hard of hearing, or have a speech disability and wish to access telecommunications relay services, please dial 7-1-1. </FURINF> <SUPLINF> <HD SOURCE="HED">SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION:</HD> <E T="03">Invitation to Comment:</E> We invite you to submit comments regarding these proposed regulations. To ensure that your comments have maximum effect in developing the final regulations, we urge you to identify clearly the specific section or sections of the proposed regulations that each of your comments addresses and to arrange your comments in the same order as the proposed regulations. We invite you to assist us in complying with the specific requirements of Executive Orders 12866, 13563, and 13771 and their overall requirement of reducing regulatory burden that might result from these proposed regulations. Please let us know of any further ways we could reduce potential costs or increase potential benefits while preserving the effective and efficient administration of the Department's programs and activities. During and after the comment period, you may inspect all public comments about these proposed regulations by accessing <E T="03">regulations.gov.</E> To inspect comments in person, please contact the person listed under <E T="02">FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT</E> . <E T="03">Assistance to Individuals with Disabilities in Reviewing the Rulemaking Record:</E> On request we will provide an appropriate accommodation or auxiliary aid to an individual with a disability who needs assistance to review the comments or other documents in the public rulemaking record for these proposed regulations. If you want to schedule an appointment for this type of accommodation or auxiliary aid, please contact the person listed under <E T="02">FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT</E> . <HD SOURCE="HD1">Background</HD> Every student deserves access to well-prepared, qualified, and supported educators who reflect the rich diversity of our nation. To support student success, the Department is committed to recruiting, preparing, and retaining a well-prepared educator workforce that is culturally and linguistically diverse. Well before the COVID-19 pandemic, low wages in the education profession, the cost of high quality educator preparation, inequitable funding practices, poor working conditions, and other factors contributed to a decline in new educators entering the field and high rates of educator attrition. <SU>1</SU> <FTREF/> The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the shortage of education professionals in many communities. <SU>2</SU> <FTREF/> The impact of these factors may be especially challenging in schools that serve a high proportion of Indian students, and they are all key challenges that Tribal leaders have reported during Tribal Consultation. In response, as part of its <E T="03">Raise the Bar: Lead the World</E> initiative ( <E T="03">https://www.ed.gov/raisethebar/</E> ), the Department is working with State educational agencies (SEAs), Tribal education agencies (TEAs), local educational agencies (LEAs), and others to help them recruit and retain highly qualified and diverse educators by expanding access to high-quality and affordable educator preparation, improving compensation and working conditions, providing high-quality new teacher induction, offering ongoing professional learning, providing opportunities for teacher leadership and career advancement, and increasing educator diversity. For additional information on <E T="03">Raise the Bar: Eliminate the Educator Shortage,</E> please see <E T="03">https://www.ed.gov/raisethebar/educators.</E> <FTNT> <SU>1</SU>  Podolsky, A., Kini, T., Bishop, J., & Darling-Hammond, L. (2016). <E T="03">Solving the Teacher Shortage: How to Attract and Retain Excellent Educators.</E> Learning Policy Institute. <E T="03">https://doi.org/10.54300/262.960.;</E> Prince, C.D. (2022). <E T="03">Attracting Well-Qualified Teachers to Struggling Schools.</E> American Federation of Teachers. <E T="03">https://www.aft.org/periodical/american-educator/winter-2002/attracting-well-qualified-teachers-struggling.;</E> Walker, T. (2019). <E T="03">Educators and Parents Reset the Class Size `Debate'.</E> National Education Association. <E T="03">https://www.nea.org/advocating-for-change/new-from-nea/educators-and-parents-reset-class-size-debate.</E> </FTNT> <FTNT> <SU>2</SU>  U.S. Department of Education. (2023). <E T="03">Raise the Bar Policy Brief: Eliminating Educator Shortages through Increased Compensation, High-Quality and Affordable Educator Preparation and Teacher Leadership. https://www.ed.gov/raisethebar/eliminating-educator-shortages-compensation-preparation-leadership.</E> </FTNT> The Professional Development program can help address the unique needs of Indian students by expanding the proportion of educators who share their cultural and linguistic background. Research indicates that Indian teachers have a significant impact on Indian students. Students who have exposure to teachers who represent their background demonstrate improved academic achievement. <SU>3</SU> <FTREF/> While approximately one percent of students were Indian or Alaska Native in school year 2020-2021, 0.5 percent of educators shared this background (for additional information, see <E T="03">https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/clr</E> ). <FTNT> <SU>3</SU>  Olson, L. (2023). <E T="03">Teachers Like Us: Strategies for Increasing Educator Diversity in Public Schools.</E> FutureEd. Washington, DC: McCourt School of Public Policy, Georgetown University. </FTNT> Indian teacher education and retention is an investment in Tribal Nations that strengthens their capacity to address community needs. <SU>4</SU> <FTREF/> When Indian students in the fourth and eighth grade were asked who taught them most of what they know about their Indian history, language, and traditions, they ranked teachers second only to their families. Yet 60 percent of those students had teachers who reported never attending professional development programs aimed at developing culturally responsive instructional practices for Indian students over the past two years. <SU>5</SU> <FTREF/> <FTNT> <SU>4</SU>  Anthony-Stevens, V., Moss, I., Como Jacobson, A., Boysen-Taylor, R., & Campbell-Daniels, S. (2022). Grounded in relationships of support: Indigenous teacher mentorship in the Rural West. <E T="03">The Rural Educator, 43(1), 88-104. https://doi.org/10.35608/ruraled.v43i1.1209.</E> </FTNT> <FTNT> <SU>5</SU>  Rampey, B.D., Faircloth, S.C., Whorton, R.P., and Deaton, J. (2021). <E T="03">National Indian Education Study 2019</E> (NCES 2021-018). U.S. Department of Education. Washington, DC: Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics. </FTNT> The Secretary proposes to revise the regulations in 34 CFR part 263 that govern the Professional Development program to better enable the Department and grantees to ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Preview showing 10k of 67k characters. Full document text is stored and available for version comparison. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━