In an effort to create a “Rhodes Scholarship for teaching,” the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation is launching a fellowship program that promises to attract top students to the teaching profession — and keep them there.

“We’re trying to produce teachers who won’t view teaching as episodes in their lives but as a career,” said Wilson Foundation President Arthur Levine.

The program will offer 33 Leonore Annenberg Teaching Fellowships every year beginning in 2009, each of which will provide a $30,000 stipend for students at four top graduate education programs, including Stanford’s Teacher Education Program (STEP), which was recently recognized as one of the country’s top programs of its kind.

David Haselkorn, director of the Annenberg Fellowship Program, said that Stanford was chosen because of its innovative teaching practices and prior work with high-need Bay Area schools.

Along with granting the fellowships, the foundation is advocating for a series of improvements to education programs.

“The Stanford program is a showcase of good practices, and will be a model for what happens when changes are made [at other schools],” Haselkorn said.

The changes will include increased collaboration with arts and sciences faculty and a third year of post-graduation mentoring for Annenberg fellows, and most importantly, more training time in classrooms during graduate study, something that Levine believes to be very important in the education of young teachers.

“Education schools aren’t strong enough,” Levine said. “Students leave afraid of what will happen to them in the classroom. They need to get out of the ivory tower and into schools.”

Education Prof. Linda Darling-Hammond said that Stanford’s emphasis on classroom experience is one of its biggest strengths.

“We’ve been selected as one of the top teacher education programs in the country in two recent national reports, including one by Art Levine, because of our strong program model which features close relationships with local reform-minded schools and extensive clinical experience for our students,” she said.

Annenberg Fellows will follow their classroom-based graduate study program with three years at a high-need school, during which they will continue to receive strong support and mentoring.

“We are creating a developmental arc that continues for the first three years of teaching,” Haselkorn said. “It will be a much stronger developmental arc that will sustain a full career.”

The Wilson Foundation anticipates that the enhanced preparation and support that Annenberg Fellows receive will lead them to become life-long teachers.

“If they are effective in the first three years, then it is likely that they will want to stay on as teachers,” Haselkorn said. “We hope we can retain a substantial percentage, if not 100 percent of the cohort.”

The Annenberg Fellowships’ focus on encouraging new teachers to make a career in the classroom is fundamentally different from other programs, such as Teach For America, which sees only roughly half of its alumni continue as teachers after their two-year commitments are over.

Teach for America’s Los Angeles Executive Director Brian Johnson, J.D. ‘04, M.B.A ‘04 said that Teach for America has very different goals from the Annenberg program.

“We are building a movement of leaders to close the achievement gap in America,” Johnson said. “The problem is, there are not enough leaders in our society who understand the problem.”

Instead of creating only life-long teachers, Teach for America also hopes to create CEOs, senators, superintendents and other leaders who will be in positions where they are better equipped to eliminate the achievement gap.

“Teach for America is not a teacher development program; it’s a leadership development program,” Johnson said.

The first Annenberg Fellows will be named in the spring of 2009 and will begin their three-year stints in high need schools in 2010.

“We will look for candidates with strong academic records and a desire to make a sustained effort to teach for a career,” Haselkorn said.