Washington, D.C. - Mr. Chairman, I thank my colleague, the Ranking Member of the Committee, and I am pleased to join with Mr. Castle and my other colleagues in supporting this amendment. I want to commend the gentleman from Delaware for his leadership on this very, very important issue.
I think it is vital for our Nation to encourage more and more young people graduating from college to go into the teaching profession, to teach throughout our communities, but also to encourage many of them to go into those communities where they are most needed, where you have many more at-risk youth than others. That is what this particular amendment does, and the Teach for America program is a great example of this idea in action. If you look at its history, you see it is one of making sure that we do do a better job of getting into underserved communities with these young teachers.
By 2010, Teach for America will increase the number of highly accomplished recent college graduates teaching in underserved urban and rural communities in the United States from 3,500 to 8,000, reaching nearly 700,000 underserved kindergarten-12th grade students every day. It recruits at over 500 colleges and universities across the country, and this year 19,000 individuals of all academic majors applied for the Teach for America program. They come from colleges all over the country and are represented with the full geographic diversity of our Nation. I am personally proud to say that 138 seniors from the University of Maryland System applied for the Teach for America program.
And they do a great job of encouraging more people, as I said, to get into the classroom. According to a survey that was taken, 10 percent of those who were accepted into the Teach for America program stated that they would not have considered a career in education if they had not participated in this program.
Currently, 60 percent of Teach for America's 10,000 alumni are working within education to effect fundamental change. Last year's 2005 National Teacher of the Year was a Teach for America alum and is still teaching math in the District of Columbia public school system, the same school system he began in 8 years ago. So we want to encourage these students as they graduate and become teachers to go into these communities and then stay in those communities.
So I think, Mr. Chairman, in closing, I just want to again commend my colleagues on both sides of the aisle for their efforts in this area. I think it is a very, very important initiative and one that I commend to all our colleagues in this House.