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The Department has moved to 135 Santilli Highway in Everett. The Department's office and Licensure Welcome Center are open. The new location has free parking and is a short walk from the Wellington station on the MBTA's Orange Line.
For Immediate Release
Thursday, November 19, 2015
Contact:Jacqueline Reis, 781-338-3115

Massachusetts Receives $4 Million Grant to Improve Educator Preparation

MALDEN - The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education announced today that it will receive $4 million over three years to improve educator preparation programs across the Commonwealth. The agency is one of five entities nationwide to receive the grant, which is from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The Department will use the grant to launch Elevate Preparation: Impact Children (EPIC), through which ESE will work the state's 71 initial teacher preparation programs with the goal that by 2022, first-year teachers prepared by those providers will show results equivalent to peers in their third year of teaching. This is especially critical given that first-year teachers are more likely to be assigned to teach the Commonwealth's most vulnerable students. With help from the grant, ESE will seek to:
  • Deepen the quality of and extend teacher candidates' training in the field,
  • Promote and support data-driven analysis of graduates' outcomes so that education preparation providers have the information they need for continuous improvement, and
  • Integrate the efforts of educator preparation providers and partners to meet the increasing demand for high-quality, diverse educators.
"Given that improvement in teacher performance is steepest at the beginning of an educator's career, advancing individual teacher readiness holds great promise for making a long-term impact on students," said Elementary and Secondary Education Commissioner Mitchell D. Chester. "I look forward to working with our preparation providers as partners to better serve Massachusetts students." Jack Gillette, dean of the Graduate School of Education at Lesley University, also welcomed news of the grant. "The three intervention areas outlined in the grant each have the potential to jumpstart and/or strengthen provider continuous improvement processes by providing key resources that providers are challenged to get on their own," he said. Other recipients of the grant are Teacher2, led by the Relay Graduate School of Education in New York; the National Center for Teacher Residencies; University-School Partnerships for the Renewal of Educator Preparation at Texas Tech University; and TeachingWorks at the University of Michigan. For more information on educator preparation in Massachusetts, go to Educator Preparation. ###



Last Updated: November 19, 2015



 
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Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education
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