THE federal TEACH grant was intended to serve as an incentive for high-achieving college students to teach high-need subject areas in schools serving low-income students.
But a decade after the program was created, about two-thirds of the students who began teaching prior to July 2014 have seen their grants turn into debt.
A U.S. Department of Education study points to the grant recipients themselves, citing failure to meet program requirements.
Some of the students took teaching jobs in subject areas that did not qualify as high-need.
Others failed to comply with recertification requirements. Some of the blame also is placed on colleges, for using TEACH grants to meet student financial aid needs instead of meeting the federal grant program’s objectives.
But the bottom line is that thousands of classroom teachers now are faced with paying off loans they never expected — as much as $4,000 for each year of borrowing, plus interest.
And nearly half of those students insist they satisfied program requirements and should have had their loans forgiven.
A Government Accountability Office report in 2015 acknowledged that 2,252 recipients had their grants mistakenly converted to loans from August 2013 through September 2014.
FedLoan Servicing, which has administered the program for the federal government since that time, has been accused of converting grants in error and refusing to address problems. Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group, sued the federal Education Department last week, seeking records on the TEACH grant. In the GAO report, education officials placed the blame for errors on ACS, the company that administered the program prior to FedLoan.
If ACS sounds familiar — it should. Affiliated Computer Systems was IBM’s partner in a botched welfare privatization deal approved during Gov. Mitch Daniels’ administration.
That effort ended with a canceled contract, dueling lawsuits, astronomical legal costs and much heartbreak for low-income Hoosiers who — in some cases — lost access to the assistance they were entitled to receive. Xerox acquired ACS in 2010, then spun it off as Conduent in early 2017.
The TEACH grant still is available. In announcing new online degrees available in the fall, IPFW officials note students might be eligible for the awards in the early childhood field.
But the experience of previous grant recipients suggests they should be cautious — or their grant might turn out to be a debt.
This was distributed by the Hoosier State Press Association. Send comments to [email protected].
