About the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future

NCTAF's Initiatives

2003-2004 NCTAF National Summits

The National Commission on Teaching and America's Future is a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing every child with competent, caring, qualified teachers in schools organized for success. The Commission is co-chaired by Richard W. Riley, former U.S. Secretary of Education and Ted Sanders, past President of the Education Commission of the States. NCTAF's President is Thomas G. Carroll, Ph.D.

In its 2003 report, No Dream Denied: A Pledge to America's Children, NCTAF finds that high teacher turnover and attrition have become a national crisis that is undermining teaching quality in too many of our schools. To address this crisis, NCTAF calls for a national effort to improve teacher retention by 50 percent by 2006. To reach this goal NCTAF proposes three strategies:

• Organize schools for teaching and learning success, by creating small professional communities of teachers focused on what research tells us about how children learn
• Insist on high quality teacher preparation, accreditation, and licensure.
• Create rewarding professional career paths that include mentored induction of novice teachers and rewards for accomplished teaching.

These strategies build on NCTAF's original recommendations in What Matters Most: Teaching for America's Future (1996). This report, which placed the issue of teaching quality at the center of the nation's education agenda, outlined three principles that continue to define NCTAF's mission: 1) what teachers know and can do is the most important influence on what students learn; 2) recruiting, preparing, and retaining good teachers is the central strategy for improving our schools; and, 3) school reform cannot succeed without creating the conditions in which teachers teach well. Based on these principles NCTAF called for a national initiative to provide every child with competent, caring, qualified teachers in schools organized for success by 2006.

NCTAF's research-based reports and subsequent work with states and districts have stimulated a wide array of initiatives to improve teaching, thousands of news articles and editorials, and dozens of pieces of legislation.

Much of this progress has been facilitated by the creation and development of NCTAF partnership networks at state and local levels, as well as partnerships with other national education reform organizations. The NCTAF state coalition network was established in 1996 in order to strengthen the work of, and forge connections among, states that are committed to making comprehensive improvements in teaching quality. In the last five years, the state coalition network has grown to include 23 states: Alabama, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin. More information about the state partnership network and the achievements of the 23 NCTAF coalition states may be found from our State Coalition Network.

Throughout its history, NCTAF has received generous support from AtlanticPhilanthropies, AT&T Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Wallace Foundation, and Washington Mutual.