An Extraordinary 2019

19 Reasons Our 2019 Was Another Extraordinary Year

What an extraordinary 2019 for the NC State College of Education! Browse our achievements from the past year below. Items listed are in no particular order.

• Times Higher Education ranked us No. 84 in the world on its list of best colleges for education degrees, an improvement of eight spots from last year.
• We welcomed 54 new students to the North Carolina Teaching Fellows at NC State program — the largest entering cohort of Teaching Fellows in the state this fall. With 74 total Teaching Fellows, NC State is home to the largest group of Teaching Fellows in North Carolina.
• We celebrated extraordinary educators throughout the fall, including nearly a dozen of our alumni who won national, statewide and districtwide awards for their work in K-12 schools in 2018-19 during our first EdTalks: A Celebration of K-12 Education, which about 600 people attended. All of our alumni and other educators were also recognized at NC State Athletics’ Nov. 16 Educator Appreciation Day football game. And you honored the extraordinary educators in your lives through your stories and gifts during American Education Week.

• We expanded our Wolfpack WORKS literacy initiative to provide support to over 200 first-, second- and third-year K-2 teachers in 16 high-need public school districts in North Carolina thanks to a three-year, $12,266,816 grant from the N.C. Department of Public Instruction, the largest grant awarded to the college since records have been kept.
• We launched several new initiatives to provide more opportunities for our students to engage globally, including the Global Educators Program, College of Education Global Presenter Award and College of Education Global Award. We also had our first student to study abroad in Prague for a full semester this fall, and we partnered with NC State Prague to offer a course specifically for education students, which will first be held in spring 2020.
• With 28 grants awarded from external sources totaling $30,287,540 in funding, our faculty set a new record for the dollar amount in grants awarded in a single year for the second year in a row.

• For the third straight year, we opened a new academic year with an increase in new student enrollment. In addition to increasing our new student enrollment by 20% over the previous year, we welcomed 10 new faculty members.
• Our Northeast Leadership Academy (NELA) principal preparation program was honored as a primary reason why NC State University won the prestigious 2019 Economic Engagement Connections Award, the top prize at the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities Annual Meeting.
• We celebrated the opening of the Belk Center for Community College Leadership and Research*, which we began planning in the summer of 2018 after receiving a $10.86 million grant from the John M. Belk Endowment. In its first year of operation, the Belk Center engaged all 58 of North Carolina’s community colleges a total of 285 times through various research and initiatives.
• We achieved our highest-ever ranking in the U.S. News & World Report’s rankings, tying at No. 45 among all graduate colleges of education in the country and No. 32 among public colleges of education. The publication also ranked our principal preparation program No. 22 in the nation in the Educational Administration and Supervision specialty category.

The We Teach for NC trip was possibly the greatest trip that I’ve ever been on that offered enriching, educational experiences. It helped me see how schools that typically don’t have as many students or as many resources have come up with different strategies to prepare their students effectively.

– Giovanny Hernandez ’21

Mathematics Education Major

• Twenty-four undergraduate students participated in our first We Teach for NC cultural immersion trip last spring, which aims to pair outstanding future educators with the school systems that need them most. They traveled to Eastern North Carolina to meet with K-12 students, teachers, administrators and community leaders; understand the unique educational needs of these areas of the state; and consider how they might make an impact in a high-needs school.
• We were a supporter of the DRIVE (Developing a Representative and Inclusive Vision for Education) Summit, which was held in early December on NC State’s campus and hosted by Gov. Roy Cooper’s office in partnership with North Carolina Business Committee for Education and The Hunt Institute. Several of our faculty, staff, students and alumni helped organize the summit or participated in panel discussions about ways to support the recruitment and retention of a sustainable pipeline of black and Latinx teachers and school leaders in North Carolina.
• We partnered with Johnston County Public Schools and Johnston Community College to establish a dual enrollment program and pilot a first-of-its-kind program that allows Johnson County residents to complete an Associate in Science (Teacher Education Concentration) degree and matriculate to the College of Education to complete their bachelor’s degree before returning to the area to teach.

• Our first residency-licensed teachers completed Pathway to Practice NC, our 100% online, joint state-approved Educator Preparation Program with UNC-Chapel Hill. We also added new training modules to allow residency-licensed teachers to work towards full licensure in elementary or special education thanks to a $200,000 grant from the State Employees’ Credit Union Foundation. 
• We named Alumni Distinguished Graduate Professor of Literacy Education Hiller A. Spires, Ph.D. an associate dean and the executive director of our Friday Institute for Educational Innovation. As executive director, she will provide strategic direction and leadership for the Friday Institute, including expanding and sustaining its success and operation in North Carolina and beyond.
• We heard from several prominent speakers at various events throughout the year, including former U.S. Secretary of Education John King Jr., author and Children’s Day Founder Pat Mora, Valencia College President Sandy Shugart, and James L. Moore III, the vice provost for diversity and inclusion and chief diversity officer at The Ohio State University.

• An independent report published in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society found that we are the largest producer of doctoral graduates in mathematics education in North Carolina and the fifth largest producer in the country among 205 institutions. In the same report, peers ranked our doctoral mathematics education program No. 12 in the nation. 
• Our faculty were cited as experts over 60 times by media outlets across the state, nation and world, including Time, CBC Radio, the Associated Press and the Christian Science Monitor. 
• We grew our alumni family after awarding 485 students with bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees during our May and December graduation ceremonies.

*In planning