
Rising to Meet This Moment
Atyani Howard & Arthur Mills IV
The New Teacher Center has more than 20 years of success in bringing about positive change for students in the classroom. We, along with our partners, have coached and built up educators in hundreds of school districts across the country to better engage with young people by prioritizing the rich humanity of education. But we also feel the lingering pain, uncertainty, and anxiety of the past few years – from the pandemic to stark societal inequities. We know that despite our efforts, there remains real disparity in education throughout this country.
We will not shrink back from the need. This is an extraordinary time for New Teacher Center to step up boldly. Our revitalized mission, relentless commitment, strategic priorities, and deep intentionality position us as never before to achieve a new vision for education equity.
It has been — and continues to be — a huge and exciting lift for us. Our work remains all the more critical and challenging. We’re redefining what instruction looks like, feels like, and how we can help schools implement it — especially for our prioritized student communities: BIPOC students, immigrant students, multilingual learners, students experiencing poverty, and students with learning differences.
Our platform for change — professional support and care for educators — must be full of integrity and intentionality.
Our students and educators need to see, feel, and believe that we’re fighting to make optimal learning environments — thriving schools where everyone succeeds in heart and mind — the norm.
The building of our Equity Commission is a vital piece of that effort. We call on each other to connect the best of our lived humanity with what works from research and practice. The conversation isn’t about what’s missing from our technical toolkit — we’re working to put humanity at the heart of equitable teaching and learning experiences.
It’s also a natural continuation of NTC’s community-driven approach to our work. Students and educators are well-accustomed to having others come in to “fix” them. Our co-creative model is different. It lifts voices that are integral in finding and strengthening solutions. We lean into partnership as a deep process of discovery, assuming that assets surround us. That vision of being stronger together has helped NTC support almost 19,000 educators and over 2,000,000 students annually.
Our students need us. Our teachers need us. NTC is here to meet this moment and to sustain a movement.
Thank you for being on this journey with us to deliver rich learning experiences for educators and young people.
In partnership,
The Promise of an Open Doorway
Desmond Blackburn, Ph.D
Before former CEO Desmond Blackburn, PhD, departed NTC to take a role in the New York City Department of Education, he took time to reflect on his personal journey and how his experiences as an educator contributed to the sharpening of New Teacher Center’s vision and mission around advancing equity and inclusion among underserved student populations across the country.
Letter from the Board Chair
Dear Friends,
Just months before the pandemic hit, New Teacher Center finalized its new mission — to disrupt the predictability of educational inequities for systemically underserved students by accelerating educator effectiveness.
It was a critical evolution of our work led by our former CEO Desmond Blackburn, PhD. It also established NTC at the forefront of groundswell changes occurring nationwide. As the Covid-19 crisis developed and the nation faced a public reckoning with racial injustice, many entrenched inequities in education became more visible, more heard, and hopefully more understood. Inequitable systems deny an equal share in the richness of the human experience to millions of children period.

What matters now is that we come together to deliver an unprecedented response to meet the needs of our students, educators, families, and communities. The question is, where do we go from here? The answer is simple: Forward.
For more than two decades, New Teacher Center has used coaching as a lever for on-the-ground transformation. Each year, NTC serves millions of students nationwide through thousands of schools in hundreds of districts. We’ve supported tens of thousands of educators to help them build and refine their practices to make measurable, positive impact for students. The results are there.
But our goal is even more ambitious: we aim to make student-centered, equitable education the norm — predictable. That goal requires that we recalibrate our time-tested models.
We’re doing exactly that. Our new branding, launched in 2021, reflects humanity as our beating heart. It’s the foundation upon which we’re building our unrelenting vision for educational equity. Our work is evolving to actualize that mission at every turn.
And that momentum continues to carry us forward, with our co-CEOs Atyani Howard and Arthur Mills IV focused on our ambitious goals for advancing equity and inclusion in the year ahead.
We have prioritized five underserved student groups — BIPOC students, immigrant students, English-language learners, students experiencing poverty, and students with learning differences. While their needs have never been greater, every day we are inspired by their incredible potential and by the realization of impact with our supporters’ partnership. We’re re-imagining approaches to professional learning that honor educators as human beings. We’re sharpening and strengthening our strategies by putting students at the center of our work. And we’re looking far into the future, investing in our people so that the positive change we achieve sticks.
Last year, we were honored to partner with more than 437 school districts to serve more than 18,800 educators and 2,234,000 students. We are excited to deepen these relationships and kindle new ones. To all our donors, partners, Equity Commission members, and others who have let us share in their generosity, we appreciate you. Our progress is the product of your investment and belief in us.
Thank you for joining us to center students and advance equity.

Onwards,
Shruti Sehra
Board Chair
Staff Reflections
At New Teacher Center, equity isn’t just a word. It’s a mission. But we didn’t get arrive here without big shifts along the way. We’ve made significant investments in time and spaces to do the slow — and at times chaotic and painful — work of understanding what it means and takes to live into our vision for equity internally and externally.
Throughout all the changes and transitions is an incredible group of people: our staff. We took a moment to capture a few of their reflections on what all of these changes and equity have meant to them and how they’re showing up in light of what’s ahead of us. Thank you to Keisha, Kenny, Lisa and Joyce for their vulnerability, wisdom, curiosity, and honesty.
Deep Roots, New Growth
NTC’s evolution and innovation connect deeply to our origins. From the start, equity serves as a thru line in what we do and how we do it. As we focus our precision on disrupting inequities experienced by millions of students, we’re also building on two decades of human-centered design to lift educators at this pivotal moment. NTC founder and former CEO Ellen Moir joins interim Co-CEO Atyani Howard to talk about NTC’s past, present, and future as a catalyst for proven change.
Community Portraits
Privilege process over product.
While it’s not quite a mantra, we firmly believe that dialogue, planning, problem solving and engagement leads to lasting transformation. NTC doesn’t promote a flagship tool or sellable “thing” — systemic inequities can’t be fixed with an off-the-shelf approach. Instead, everything we do is powered by relationships and coaching.
Every district is different. We believe they deserve to be treated that way. Our deep, multi-layered partnerships across the country focus on meeting unique community needs. We tailor our teams, our strategies, and our on-the-ground work to prioritize local conditions. We lead with listening. Educators, just like students, are whole human beings — they’re not data points. It’s on us as supporters to show up humble, curious, and open-minded.
Our overall reach and scale gives NTC thousands of perspectives across many contrasting situations. It’s ground-truthed data. We’re able to take learnings and enable new custom-fit solutions based on proven models for change. Over time, we’ve developed an inclusive, participatory approach to understand what our partners need and collaborate with them to design support for real people.
Each NTC partnership looks to disrupt old professional development in favor of humanized learning experiences for adults. We believe that is the only way to truly bring transformational, sustainable change to districts and students.
Nationwide, our work is evolving. In some places, we’re going deeper, taking our proven coaching model to tackle new challenges: curriculum implementation, school- and district-wide professional learning systems development, and co-crafting instructional cultures that are inherently and holistically designed to center students. In others, we’re tackling pre-K and early learning to ensure the bridge to lifelong learning starts strong. Everything we do is in service to nurturing educators’ crafts to be amplifiers for equity.
Our partnerships run the gamut: some decades-long and others brand-new. In every instance, we’re evaluating conditions and priorities through a local lens. NTC’s incredible supporting funders form mini-coalitions across regions, bringing more than a commitment to backyard investment. Changemaking innovation comes from collaboration — local and regional funders come together with districts, state departments of education, and other community partners to define clear priorities and goals reflective of their resident expertise.
Here are a few spotlights of NTC’s approach to building local partnerships:
Public Partnership
A Legacy of Innovation
Collaborating for Change
Using Data to Drive Optimal Learning Experiences
Millions of students experience deep-rooted inequities, laid bare and made worse by the traumatic events of the last two years. National data shows students were, on average, five months behind in mathematics and four months behind in reading by the end of the 2020-21 school year, impacting systematically underserved students the most.
The bottom line? A high-quality education experience remains elusive to some of the students who need it the most. Educators taking a student-centered approach while using the right data tools can create optimal environments for learning.
We must equip teachers with appropriate instructional practices so students can access, learn, and build skills from on-grade resources and content. We must also reimagine how we address students’ most pressing needs in alignment with support for educators. Smarter Balanced and New Teacher Center believe an impactful way to optimize student learning is to use many kinds of data to create authentic and complete stories about students that drive educators to make better decisions.
Traditionally, school systems analyze summative data in isolation. This approach provides a limited understanding of students; they’re unique and complex people. Students drop breadcrumbs of data every day through their work — interim assessment performance, behavior patterns, and more. Stitching the summative, interim, and daily data together with student perspectives provides a clearer picture of our students’ unique learner profiles. Such a powerful, holistic view helps us identify the best instructional path forward.
Starting last year, Smarter Balanced and NTC are working across three state education departments to connect assessment system data to professional learning opportunities that support student needs and learning. We believe this approach empowers educators to consume, curate, and interpret data and increase school systems’ capacity for impact.
The Delaware Department of Education (DDOE) is working to support a differentiated professional learning experience for a group of six small to mid-sized districts and charter school organizations across the state to engage them in the use of the Smarter Balanced interim assessments. The goal is to create instructional and professional development approaches that build cohesive plans to address student learning across a system.
Through this work, the DDOE will meet the following objectives:
- Strengthen instructional leadership across districts and schools to create multiple generations of educators who understand how to use the interim assessments alongside the standards and curriculum as a tool for educational equity
- Produce deep understanding and ongoing implementation of the interim assessments through standards and curriculum-aligned, job-embedded professional learning opportunities
To date, the unique local context of districts has been an unexpected strength for the professional learning series. The diversity of teams, perspectives, and challenges is powering a rich knowledge-sharing collaboration. Sharing strategies from different classrooms and roles offers the opportunity to create innovative learning experiences and make more focused decisions. Overall, the work demonstrates how professional development’s triangulation with assessment and instructional strategies is not just an effective process — it’s a fast track for moving initiatives forward to iterative and adaptive implementation across district and school teams.
It is well-established that the key driver of student academic performance is a culturally relevant, socially appropriate, and academically challenging experience. Through NTC’s “demonstration of concept” with education departments in California, Hawaii, and Washington, we support a subset of districts and schools in each state using the Smarter Balanced performance tasks for learning. The goal is to create an instructional culture that understands, centers, and teaches to each student’s unique gifts and needs, by focusing on higher order cognitive skills. The work looks different for each state, district, and school in a highly adaptive and localized approach. However, the foundations are the same and attend to cultural competency, learner differences, and data-supported learning pathways.
As part of this work, 100-150 teachers will receive equity- and student-centered instructional professional learning supporting student learning. NTC’s research-proven coaching model provides the base; coaching is grounded in best practices in adult learning theory, focusing on the contextualized application of student assessment data to high-quality instructional materials and job-embedded support. The approach is one of knowledge sharing, collaboration and discovery, supporting:
- Teachers and local education agency leaders to determine what information is needed to connect an interim assessment with instructional practice planning around student progress.
- Development of instructional practices that support student learning of higher order thinking skills often associated with performance tasks.
- Use of performance tasks to assess student learning in more authentic ways that puts thinking and engagement in real world situations and practical lenses.
- A focus on higher order cognitive skills to demonstrate its application to contexts, situations, and the behavior and skill sets needed to achieve success.
Through this demonstration of concept, NTC and Smarter Balanced hope to distill key lessons on how to scale and implement this type of academically-focused professional learning. Together, they will analyze teacher survey responses, pre- and post-professional development lesson plans, and student work. This information will indicate the infrastructure needed at the classroom, school, and local education agency to support the implementation of instructional practices that honor student’s previous learning and experiences as well as focus higher order thinking skills.
Power of Partnerships
2021 Financials
New Teacher Center is deeply committed to fiscal management best practices, prioritizing resources to disrupt the predictability of educational inequities. Our impact and operations strategies work together to ensure sustainability and efficiency in delivering transformational learning experiences for educators and NTC’s prioritized student communities.
NTC has enjoyed five (5) consecutive years of exemplary financial audits conducted by Armanino and Associates, even with increasing operational complexity. With stable finances and a strong balance sheet, our engaging and deep relationships with philanthropic partners align values, vision, and investment to advance our equity-centered mission.
By 2025, NTC aspires to generate $30 million in revenue from its earned fee-for-service portfolio, philanthropic support, and federal grant programs. Together, we will expand our reach, innovate and iterate on our coaching model, and deeply analyze our approach.
Revenue
Revenue
$10.9M | Philanthrophy | $10.9M | |
$7.6M | Federal Grants | $7.6M | |
$6.2M | Fee-for-Service Partnerships | $6.2M |


Expenses
Expenses
$15.2M | Labor | $15.2M | |
$3.3M | Non-Labor | $3.3M | |
$3.4M | Federal Pass-through | $3.4M | |
$1.3M | Investments | $1.3M |

