What are the three best reasons to apply for a 2023 AACTE Best Practice Award?
Mercer University’s Tift College of Education will partner with five local school districts on a three-year, $9.6 million U.S. Department of Education grant project aimed at strengthening the teacher pipeline in order to increase and diversify the teaching workforce.
The award is the largest federal grant in the history of the College of Education, which was formed by the merger of Tift College with Mercer in 1986 and is the largest private preparer of teachers and other educators in Georgia.
AACTE is currently accepting entries for the 2023 awards. The AACTE Awards Program recognizes excellence in both member institutions and individuals who have made significant contributions to the field of educator preparation.
For most of the awards, programs and individuals can be either self-nominated or nominated by a third party. The deadline to apply is October 31, 2022. Learn more about the 2023 AACTE Awards, eligibility and criteria.
This weekly Washington Update is intended to keep members informed on Capitol Hill activities impacting the educator preparation community. The views expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect the views of AACTE.
This week, Washington, D.C. welcomed more than 2,000 in-person participants and 1,500 virtual attendees for the annual National HBCU Week Conference. This year’s conference focused on the work the federal government is doing to meet President Biden’s executive order that directed federal agencies to increase their engagement with HBCUs. Under the order, federal agencies must submit plans each year that describe how they are working to increase HBCU participation in their programs. The conference also comes as a group of Florida A&M University students announced they are suing the state’s university system in federal court alleging that the HBCU has not been receiving its fair share of funding for years.
The U.S. Department of Education has announced new awards to help recruit, prepare, develop, and retain a strong, effective and diverse teacher workforce for classrooms across the country through the Teacher Quality Partnership (TQP) grant program. This year’s investment includes 22 new five-year grants totaling $24.8 million through its TQP program. The award recipients represent IHEs and national nonprofits, including three HBCUs and one MSI.
This article was originally published by Prairie View A&M University.
The teacher population in Texas does not reflect its student population. Beverly Sande, Ph.D., plans to change that statistic with $300,000 in funding from Texas Tech University–Texas Education Agency in collaboration with the University-School Partnerships for the Renewal of Educator Preparation (US PREP) National Center. The award will position Prairie View A&M University (PVAMU) to lead innovative efforts to increase diversity among the number of teachers.
This story was produced by The 74, a non-profit, independent news organization focused on education in America.
American students have attended school for nearly 70 years under the U.S. Supreme Court’s historic 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which outlawed racial segregation in public schools. But a new book uncovers a little-known by-product of the case: Educators and policymakers in at least 17 states that operated separate “dual systems” of schools defied the spirit of Brown by closing schools that served Black students and demoting or firing an estimated 100,000 highly credentialed Black principals and teachers.
In Jim Crow’s Pink Slip, scholar Leslie T. Fenwick, tapping seldom-seen transcripts from a series of 1971 U.S. Senate hearings on the topic, writes that the loss of Black educators post-Brown was “the most significant brain drain from the U.S. public education system that the nation has ever seen. It was so pervasive and destabilizing that, even more than half-century later, the nation’s public schools still have not recovered.”
In celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month, AACTE is re-posting an Ed Prep Matters article by student member Rachel Bowman that spotlights Mildred Boveda and David Fuentes, who discuss their heritage and what it means in the world of teacher education.
When Mildred Boveda, associate professor of special education at Penn State University, was filling out some basic forms required for an academic appointment, she came to a question that made her pause:
Which of these best describes your race/ethnicity?
The list went on.
Boveda, an Afro-Latina woman of Dominican descent and complex intersecting identities, had always felt more at home in the Black community. But the erasure of her Latina roots, even just through a checkmark, was not something she could reconcile with.
She checked Hispanic.
Research has shown that addressing unconscious bias will contribute to creating a more equitable society. A team at Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of Education is leading statewide diversity, equity and inclusion training for those who work with people with disabilities — a training that is open to all.
The Partnership for People with Disabilities in the School of Education is collaborating with the School of Education’s Office of Strategic Engagement to lead a six-session online training course on diversity, equity and inclusion this fall, aimed primarily at employees of Medicaid home- and community-based organizations.
Prairie View A&M University students, faculty and staff were on hand bright and early to help welcome students to the first day of school at Aldine ISD’s Impact Leadership Academy (ILA), the district’s first all-boys school. PVAMU is partnering with the ILA to cultivate learning experiences rooted in identity, leadership, community, and activism, all designed to address academic achievement and support social and emotional needs for young Black and Latino male students.
The Pathways Alliance, a coalition of education organizations dedicated to supporting and implementing diverse and inclusive educator preparation pipelines, announces the release of their latest report, “Towards a National Definition of Teacher Residencies.” Based on input from teacher residency programs and other education leaders from across the country, this groundbreaking first-of-its-kind report offers a condensed yet thorough definition to guide policies that can support high-quality residencies to attract, prepare, and retain a robust and diverse teaching workforce. The report was written by the Pathways Alliance Teacher Residency Working Group, co-chaired by the National Center for Teacher Residencies (NCTR) and Prepared To Teach, Bank Street College. The working group participants included state education departments, educator preparation programs, and national nonprofit organizations. In addition, more than 40 organizations gave feedback and reviewed the report and definition.
This May, a group of students in the Texas Christian University’s College of Education took a week-long trip to the Holocaust Museum of Houston as part of the Warren Fellowship program. The trip was a culmination of studying the Holocaust and antisemitism in Jan Lacina’s Literacy Leadership class. Lacina is the Bezos Family Foundation Endowed Chair in Early Childhood Education and associate dean of graduate studies in the TCU College of Education.
“I was compelled to integrate course goals, readings, and discussions about the Holocaust into my Literacy Leadership class because of recent antisemitic acts that took place in Texas,” Lacina said.
Educational institutions must engage with their communities to illuminate the systemic injustices experienced by those hypermarginalized, including people and communities of color.
In the Spring 2022 issue of AAC&U’ magazine, Liberal Education, AACTE member Tania Mitchell reflects on the killing of George Floyd to highlight these structural inequities. She urges those in higher education to rethink how community can be created and how to engage differently within the context of racism, economic inequality, and COVID 19:
“Our community engagement work of colleges and universities should be revealing. It should illuminate the systemic injustices that reify and deepen the marginalization already experienced. Moreover, it should focus on the policies, practices, conditions, and experiences that shape the everyday realities of the poor and people of color.”
Schools across the state held their last classes of the 2021–22 school year , marking the official start of summer for Maine students, parents and teachers. However, about 125 educators didn’t the classroom , as they took part in the first annual University of Maine Educators Institute being held virtually June 22–23.
The theme of this new UMaine Summer University program, developed in collaboration with the Maine Department of Education, is “Supporting Emotional and Behavioral Well-Being in School Communities: From Surviving to Thriving.”
Florida Atlantic University’s College of Education School Leaders Program has been awarded a three-year, $1,039,041 grant from Broward County Public Schools (BCPS) to support two graduate degree programs as part of the Teacher School Leader Equity for Instructional Performance (EQUIP) grant project initiative. BCPS is the sixth largest public school system in the United States and the second largest in Florida.
