The University
of California has been
awarded nearly $5 million in grant funding to improve teacher education in math
and science, university officials announced this week.

UC Irvine and UC Berkeley were given two of the 12 grants
from the National Math and Science Initiative to implement programs modeled
after UTeach, a successful math and science teacher preparation program at the University of Texas
at Austin.
Grants of up to $2.4 million were awarded following a competition that included
submissions from more than 50 universities nationwide.

“These grants will allow UC to build upon its existing
collaborative efforts to fill an important need — training qualified math and
science teachers for California
classrooms,” UC Provost Wyatt R. Hume said in a press release. “Addressing this
teaching shortage is critical to helping keep California’s economy and communities
strong.”

The NMSI grants will also contribute to UC’s Cal Teach
program and its commitment to quadrupling the number of UC students trained
annually to be math and science teachers from 250 to 1,000 by 2011.