A National Training Program for AI-Ready Students

The scale of this national challenge requires meaningful appropriations to raise teacher pay, ensure high-quality training opportunities with sufficient expertise, and sustain a long-term strategy to address deeply-rooted sector challenges. A short-term, one-shot approach will simply waste money and generate minimal impact.

Moreover, the program’s creation necessitates a significant simplification of National Science Foundation application processes to reduce grant application length, burden, and paperwork. It also creates a targeted exception for the NSF to support broader nonresearch activities that are otherwise sector-critical for national scientific and educational endeavors. If enacted, this legislation could help reduce overhead for program administration and redirect more resources to supporting quality state and local implementation vs. program compliance.

Once scaled to all 50 states, the recurring annual costs of the proposed legislation would be $250 million:

• $150 million for DFT Corps member scholarships (5,000 teachers per year)


• $50 million for DFT Corps training sites (one site per state at $1 million each)


• $50 million for Teacher College Innovation Grants (one site per state at $1 million each)

In the first five years, the cost would slowly increase to the total amount, starting at a base $25 million for five states ($15 million for 500 scholarships, $5 million for training sites, $5 million for Innovation grants).

Creating an AI-ready workforce is a critical national priority to maintain U.S. economic competitiveness, mitigate risk of AI primacy, and ensure our citizenry can successfully navigate a complex technology landscape they will graduate into. McKinsey projects that successful integration of AI across more than 63 business use cases would add between $13.6 trillion and $22.1 trillion to the global economy. A recent National Institutes of Health analysis suggests that, for any country to successfully specialize in AI, there must be general preexisting technological capabilities and a strong scientific knowledge base. AI-readiness must be a population-wide goal. Given that 60% of Americans do not complete a bachelor’s degree, AI readiness must begin early in K-12 education and in community colleges.

Estimated return on investment: $250 million represents less than 1.5% of the Every Student Succeeds Act’s last annual appropriation level in 2020, the nation’s primary national education funding mechanism. If this legislation increases the share of economic growth forecasted by effectively harnessing AI by only five percent, we would conservatively add $171 billion to the U.S. economy each year.

The majority of educator training programs are too short, only given during the busy school year, and do not have the opportunity to improve over multiple years within a given school. Early iterations of the National Writing Project, on which this program is based, determined that “although schools may see results from C3WP in a single school year, a longer-term investment may produce a greater impact.” Even if sustained during a school year, researchers have found that “absent a surrounding context that is highly supportive of teacher learning and change, 1 year of PD cannot sufficiently alter instructional practices enough to impact student outcomes.” While earlier evaluation studies saw no impact on student achievement, the National Writing Project is now one of the most lauded and effective educator training models trialed in the United States, made possible by a long-term and consistent investment in professional learning.

A three-year program will allow educators to advance from novice (year 1) to intermediate (year 2) to mentor or facilitator (year 3).By year 4, graduating educators would be prepared to serve as site leaders, dramatically increasing the available talent pool for sustaining and growing DFT Corps sites nationally. Additional time will also enable a local site to improve its own programming and align tightly with multi-year school and district planning.

The DFT Corps is an accelerated investment in the creation of locally led professional development sites, uniquely designed with (1) direct support for current classroom educators to participate; (2) a replicated network model for summer-based, in-service training; and (3) innovation grants to research aligned training improvements and best practices. No current federal program does all three at once for current classroom educators.

Existing teacher training grant programs, such as the Teacher Quality Partnerships or Supporting Effective Educator Development carry strong evidence requirements or incompatible competitive preferences. Given AI is new and little research exists on effective teaching practices, these requirements serve to significantly limit proposals on emerging topics. Grants also vary widely by institution.

Existing educator scholarship programs, such as the Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program, focus mostly on recruitment of new teachers, and only provide small support for existing teachers pursuing or having previously obtained a master’s degree. 40% of U.S. teachers do not have a master’s degree. A targeted national focus on AI readiness would also require several higher-education institutions across states to organically propose training programs to the Noyce program at the same time, with the same model.

AI technology development is moving faster than the education sector can respond. In order to accelerate site creation, reduce application burden, and modernize grant distribution, the DFT Corps program would direct the NSF to:

• Allow nonresearch activities to be funded under the program, including educator salary support


• Remove and centralize all program evaluation requirements away from individual grantees, reallocating evaluation activities to external researchers across sites


• Centrally manage disbursement of DFT salary supplements, potentially via tax credits


• Modernize required data management plan requirements for present-day technology


• Limit total grant application length to 10 pages or less. In other fields, NSF grant applications take investigators over 171 hours to prepare, despite little relation between time invested and actual funding outcomes in some cases. Another study found that 42% of investigators time is spent on administrative and reporting tasks to support the execution of an NSF grant.

Yes, with appropriations. Under new 2023 guidance, the Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program has expanded salary supplement options and enabled two-summer support. An executive action version of this proposal would expand the Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship program via (1) increasing support for Track 3 with lower degree requirements (i.e. Bachelors instead of Masters); (2) stipulating a competitive priority for AI readiness and emerging technology education (defined as: computer science, computational thinking, data science, artificial intelligence literacy across the curriculum); and (3) direct the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy to launch a multi-agency, public-facing communications and recruitment effort for the DFT Corps program, in collaboration with the 50 largest teacher colleges and other participating Noyce program institutions.

The proposed DFT Corps mirrors a long-running evidence-based model, the National Writing Project (NWP), which has trained over 95,000 teachers in high-quality writing instruction across 2,000 school districts since 1974. Three independent evaluation studies over multiple years across 20 states found “positive and statistically significant effects on student achievement” across all measured components of writing. The evidence base supporting NWP is “unusually robust” for education research, employing randomized-controlled trials and meeting ESSA Tier 1 evidence criteria. A recent replication study in 2023 focusing on rural schools found positive results on “on all attributes measured,” a similar priority for the proposed DFT Corps program.

DFT Corps sites would directly involve researchers in computer science, data science, artificial intelligence, or other technology-focused departments, in collaboration with schools of education, which otherwise rarely collaborate. DFT Corps programs would also include eligibility to fund industry advisors to aid design and updates to training curriculum. External evaluations from cross-state research teams would support content reviews and reduce administrative burden for otherwise duplicated in-house evaluation work.

Similar to the Robert Noyce Scholarship program, the DFT Corps program would waive tuition costs and provide scholarship funds in exchange for a multi-year teaching commitment. Each year’s participation in the program would extend an educator’s teaching commitment by two additional years. A 2013 evaluation of the Noyce program found this model worked, with longer retention rates compared to new teachers graduating from the same institutions.

Recodes a nine-month profession to annual pay, and annual expectations: A primary change advanced by the DFT Corps is converting the typical teacher job from a nine-month term to an annual salary, similar to lawyers, doctors, and other high-prestige professions. In a recent RAND report on why teachers wanted to leave the profession, salary was the #2 reason, hours worked outside the school day the #3, and total hours worked was the #4. Teachers are promised a flexible and part-year job on paper, when the reality is very different. Nine-month pay challenges are so extreme that several U.S. banks host articles on “surviving the summer paycheck gap.” Many teachers take second (non-academic) jobs. And the popular #NoSummersOff hashtag gained a significant following amongst educators pre-pandemic. Concurrently, the rate of technology and curriculum changes demand more professional learning time than is typically given by schools and districts. Summer professional learning is often optional and highly variable across states. Our expectations are far too low for one of our most critical knowledge jobs. DFT Corps members would be paid during the summer for intensive study to update curriculum, plan content, and incorporate new education research on how students learn. Full-time summer work would remove pressure for administrators to “squeeze in” short, one-day professional development sessions during the school year, which study after study has demonstrated are a waste of time and money. Many current classroom educators to the former U.S. Secretary of Education continue to question these existing PD approaches. 

Creates a leadership ladder: Leadership opportunities for classroom educators are few and far between. Teaching is often described as a “flat” profession, and nearly half of educators leaving the field point to a perceived lack of leadership or decision-making opportunities as contributing factors. Concurrently, new teachers who have the opportunity to collaborate with teacher-leaders within their own school generate stronger academic gains for their students. The DFT Corps would create state-wide leadership opportunities at Corps summer sites that do not disrupt school-year teaching, allowing educators to remain in the classroom during the other nine months of the year but still access visible leadership and mentor roles during the summer.

Leverages peer-based learning: Beyond the opportunity to positively impact students and student learning, 63% of educators report that strong relationships with other teachers are a top reason for staying in the classroom. The DFT Corps would leverage peer-based professional development over multiple years, reallocating the summer months to joint study and creating stronger educator networks statewide. One of the DFT Corp’s precedent peer-based models, the National Writing Project, “has a legacy as being the best professional development model for K-12 teachers” precisely due to a targeted focus on peer exchange. In post-training interviews, researchers found that educators “immediately changed several of their teaching practices and felt a renewed sense of enthusiasm towards the teaching of writing after participating in the NWP… a renewed sense of authority that quickly transferred to agency, these teachers possessed the self-efficacy to share what they knew and had learned with other teachers, administrators, district leaders, fellow graduate students, and most importantly, the students who would enter their classrooms in the fall.” 

Builds needed prestige for the profession: The DFT Corps program forwards a reinvigorated national prioritization of the education field. In the information economy, educators are one of our most critical professions, and a greater determinant of gross domestic product than any individual semiconductor or algorithm. Under a DFT Corps communications rollout, teaching would be separated from any prior stereotypes of “caretakers,” positioned instead as essential to the economic, technology, and security fabric that advance societal progress. Research consistently suggests that low prestige of the profession pushes high-achievers away from teaching, is closely correlated with both falling preparation and retention, and may even directly affect student achievement. In China, where educators have long enjoyed high prestige for their profession, researchers found that an expansion of the country’s Free Teacher Education program helped to increase application competitiveness, extend retention rates, and enhance self-identity for program participants in a pre-publication evaluation study. In a 2018 “Global Teacher Status Index,” China was the only country to score 100 while the United States scored under 40 points. The United States is falling behind in our education culture, and we have little time to make up for lost ground.

This proposal builds upon and suggests specifications for multiple sections of the NSF AI Education Act, introduced by Senators Cantwell and Moran, with additional detail and focus on the teacher workforce. Specifically, this proposal provides suggested priority areas, research goals, and expanded eligibility for K-12 education grants stipulated in Section 10 (“Award Program for Research on AI in Education”); stipulates an alternative mechanism, implementation plan, and authorization amount for Section 11 (“National Science Foundation National STEM Teacher Corps”), with critical directives to NSF to enable program administration and reduction of application burden; and modifies Section 8 (“NSF Outreach Campaign”) to include public mobilization of the educator workforce.

The long-term vision for this proposal also extends beyond the NSF AI Education Act and suggests a new mechanism for federal education support in the Every Student Succeeds Act.