Released September 5, 2024 — Launched in 2019, the National Center for Teacher Residencies’ (NCTR) Black Educators Initiative (BEI) was developed as a direct response to a pressing challenge: research shows that having just one Black teacher in elementary school significantly increases the likelihood of Black students graduating from high school and considering college (Gershenson, et al., 2022); however, Black teachers make up a mere 6% of the public school teaching force (Taie & Lewis, 2022). As the nation’s student population grows increasingly diverse, teacher residencies have emerged as a leading pathway for preparing the next generation of teachers of color. In NCTR’s Network of teacher residency programs, 39% of teacher residents identified as Black during the 2023-2024 academic year (NCTR Annual Report, 2024).
NCTR launched BEI after securing a five-year, $20 million grant from Ballmer Group, with the goal of recruiting, preparing, and retaining 750 new Black educators through its nationwide network of teacher residency programs. This funding empowers NCTR to invest in its Network members that are redesigning their teacher preparation practices, with NCTR’s support, to better serve the needs of Black educators. In Year 4 of BEI, NCTR extended support to seven additional teacher residency programs in three additional states, providing $3.8 million in funding to a total of 27 programs spanning 17 states and the District of Columbia that collectively enrolled 309 Black teacher residents. In total, across the first four years of NCTR’s BEI, grantees supported a total of 978 Black teacher residents.