Our Initiatives
The Educator Prep Program and District Working Group is a group of teacher preparation programs and school systems in the Dallas-Fort Worth region that are committed to collaborating in order to improve the effectiveness of the educators our region’s students have access to.
Key Objective
Fuel continuous improvement
Fuel continuous improvement and collaboration among organizations, specifically Educator Preparation Programs and districts that aim to attract, prepare, develop and retain excellent and diverse teachers.
Current Focus
Participants of the working group landed on using 2018-2019 to understand and work together to remove barriers that disparately impact teachers of color from entering the profession and having a strong start. This area of collaboration resonated for several key reasons:
- - The growing body of research that points to the positive impact of teachers that reflect their students backgrounds.
- - Even though we see across the region that the Black teacher population more closely reflects the proportion of Black students, the Latinx students are vastly underrepresented in their teachers.
- - In the state, the percentage of candidates of color is higher in quick-start alternative certification programs(which often do not require any practice teaching) than our traditional teacher preparation program pathways; therefore reducing barriers to having a strong start that could benefit those candidates and increase the accessibility to preparation program options that include more practice teaching.
Initiative Leader
Ana Hernandez, Manager, Best in Class
Please contact Ana to learn more: Ana.Hernandez@commitpartnership.org