NEWS

PRH Education & NCTE Support Educators of Color with $25,000 Donation to EC-EOC Award Program

In support of the Black Lives Matter movement, and in recognition of the urgent need to recruit and empower educators of color, Penguin Random House Education (PRHE) and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) have reimagined their annual Teacher Awards program for 2020, which they began co-sponsoring and administering last year.

This year, in lieu of distributing grants for its two competitions, the National Teacher Award for Lifelong Readers and the Maya Angelou Teacher Award for Poetry, which honor teachers’ creativity in successfully instilling a lifelong love of reading and poetry in their students’ classrooms, PRHE and NCTE jointly will make a 25,000 donation on behalf of both award programs to the Early Career Educator of Color Leadership Award Program (EC-EOC), which supports early-career teachers of color, as they build accomplished teaching careers in literacy education.

This initiative is part of Penguin Random House’s longstanding and wide-ranging corporate Social Responsibility funding, which supports and collaborates frequently with NCTE, for whom EC-EOC has been an active program for twelve years.

This dual donation will double the number of teachers who can be accepted into the program next year.

Those eligible for the EC-EOC program are practicing pre-K to university-level literacy educators of color, who are in the first five years of a paid teaching career, and who aspire to make literacy education their ongoing vocation. (“People of color” refers to historically underrepresented groups: African American, American Indian, Asian American, Latinx, and Pacific Islander).

To acknowledge the efforts of those teachers who have applied to either of the prior PRHE-NCTE award programs, each qualified applicant will receive an all-expenses-paid virtual-access ticket to the NCTE Annual Conference in November, along with free e-book access to up to ten Penguin Random House books of their choice for one year.

Penguin Random House Education and NCTE are committed to recognizing and supporting educators doing innovative literacy work within their schools and local communities, and are honored to support emerging educators of color, as they embark on their careers to inspire a love of reading in the next generation of students and readers.

Educators interested in applying for this program should contact NCTE at leadershift@ncte.org. The application for the 2021 program will be available online at https://ncte.org/awards/ncte-early-career-educator-teacher-of-color-leadership-award/.