Contact: Lisa Clarke, lclarke@nbpts.org
The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards is excited to announce that the organization has been awarded $14.2 million via the competitive 2022 Supporting Effective Educator Development (SEED) program.
This support will fund the National Board’s project From the Margins to the Center: Supporting Teacher Diversity, Quality, and Retention. The project has a specific focus on engaging and supporting educators of color, advancing the National Board’s priority to make Board certification accessible to all educators.
“We at the National Board are so excited about the momentum that this three-year grant provides our organization,” said Peggy Brookins, NBCT, President and CEO of the National Board. “These funds will allow us to support large numbers of educators on their National Board journeys, which will in turn put more accomplished teachers in classrooms around the country, address the teacher shortage, and increase equity in education.”
The project is designed to improve student learning, teaching effectiveness, and support advanced certification for teachers, with a focus on teachers of color and teachers in high-need schools. The project will systematically tackle three pressing teacher workforce challenges: (1) ensuring quality by having teachers undertake professional development to advance their instructional practices that best support student learning; (2) increasing retention by keeping well-prepared teachers in the profession, particularly in high turnover demographics such as teachers of color and teachers serving in high-need schools; (3) improving diversity by supporting teachers of color in their careers. At the heart of the project is a sustained and intensive approach to teacher support that is culturally responsive, meaningful, standards based, data-driven, and classroom-focused.
Over the three years of this grant, the National Board will directly serve 1,500 teachers in partnership with 10 communities. Through supporting these teachers, this project will positively impact the learning of more than 90,000 students.
The SEED grant program is a $60 million US Department of Education program that includes 22 new three-year grants to address the teacher shortage and help ensure long-term investments in teacher preparation and development programs across the country. This $60 million brings the Biden-Harris Administration’s additional support for teachers through Fiscal Year 2022 grant competitions to more than $285 million.
For more information about the SEED program, visit the US Department of Education website here.
About the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (www.nbpts.org):
The founding mission of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards is to advance the quality of teaching and learning by: maintaining high and rigorous standards for what accomplished teachers should know and be able to do; providing a national voluntary system certifying teachers who meet these standards, and advocating related education reforms to integrate National Board Certification in American education and to capitalize on the expertise of National Board Certified Teachers. Recognized as the “gold standard” in teacher certification, the National Board believes higher standards for teachers means better learning for students.