New Teacher Center Announces Rebranding and New Logo to Put Students and Humanity First

The rebrand reflects its commitment to center students, advance equity in schools, and empower educators with coaching-based professional learning.

Santa Cruz, Calif., July 29, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- New Teacher Center, one of the nation's largest and oldest educator professional learning nonprofits, completed its rebranding effort to align its updated mission, vision, and values.

At the heart of this rebranding is the mission, updated in 2019 under new leadership, to disrupt the predictability of educational inequities for systemically underserved students by accelerating educator effectiveness.

Over 50 million young people — BIPOC students, students with learning differences, students who have recently immigrated, students experiencing poverty, and English-language learners— face systemic barriers that work against them.

Over the last two and a half years, NTC has taken over 20 years of time-tested, research-proven effectiveness to focus its professional learning coaching model on confronting these systemic issues head-on. To honor each student's immense potential, NTC’s programs accelerate and expand effective coaching practices to remap and align school and district ecosystems to sustain success.

"All students are amazingly talented," said CEO Desmond Blackburn. "NTC harnesses educators’ assets, deepens self-knowledge, and strengthens instructional practices while honoring the gifts of the student. We're side-by-side with teachers, instructional leaders, principals, and district administrators to make that happen for all students, especially those who have been systemically underserved. I know from experience how important this is. As the son of Jamaican immigrants, my family instilled in me that education is paramount, but so often educators were not equipped to meet the needs of a student with my socio-economic background."

The rebranding is not just cosmetic. NTC is iterating on using coaching and its proven, time-tested effectiveness to create a new vision. One where school ecosystems deliver ever-present attention to equity, continuous academic success, and social and emotional growth. Every young person feels seen, connected, and academically challenged, and student-teacher trust is unshakable.

To guide efforts and hold the organization accountable, NTC launched a national Education Equity Commission in early 2021. Membership includes students, field leaders, teachers, and system leaders from across the United States. The Commission is a space unlike any other, analyzing the roots of education system design and its purpose so that new solutions are no longer sketched around its edges.

"The real work here is addressing decades of imbalance in instruction, where the technical craft of educating is divorced from the reality that teaching and learning is a human exchange of teacher and student identity," said Chief Program Officer Atyani Howard. "It’s not an either-or. This requires a new design that moves past managing inequities, dismantles systemic issues, and results in justice for all of our students to pursue opportunity and success with rigor and care."

The visual changes in NTC's logo aim to recognize the individual humanity of all the people it touches — students, educators, families, leaders, and communities. The openness of the trio of faces, the soft lines shared between them, and the warm hues flowing generously outside the lines. The colors express both the real and the unreal because humanity is inherently unique to each person. It celebrates teaching and learning as an inherently human endeavor. Each human in the logo is connected but also looks outward to a personal vision.

Today, NTC reaches over 1.8 million students, 25,000 teachers, and 8,000 instructional coaches and leaders each year. The scale and scope of impact reflect two decades of trusting, community-focused partnerships with schools, districts, and philanthropy.

NTC continues to build relationships by leading with listening. Two decades and thousands of perspectives enable custom-fit solutions grounded in research-proven models to truly center students and advance equity.

For more, please visit the new NTC website at www.newteachercenter.org.

CONTACT: Chris Roddy New Teacher Center (831) 600-2200 croddy@newteachercenter.org