PRHE, NCTE Reimagine Teacher Awards Program

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 cosponsoring 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—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. The dual donation will double the number of teachers who can be accepted into the program next year, the organizations said.

Those eligible for the EC-EOC program are practicing pre-K to university-level literacy educators of color in the first five years of a paid teaching career and who aspire to make literacy education their ongoing vocation. Each qualified applicant will also 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. Educators interested in applying for this program should contact NCTE at leadershift@ncte.org. The application for the 2021 program will be available online.