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About Us

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Our Mission

Teachers talk in pairs

The National Board Resource Center is located at Stanford University and operates under the direction of the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education. Our primary mission is to offer support to educational systems and teachers around National Board certification, one of the most widely-recognized and important milestones for a professional educator in the US. We especially seek to open access for candidates who are often underserved in the teaching profession, including teachers of color and teachers working in low-income and/or rural communities. To meet this mission, we offer: 

  • direct candidate support through an open-enrollment, all virtual candidate support program led by top quality professional learning facilitators and Nationally Board Certified Teachers (NBCTs) in each certificate area
  • training and guidance for schools, districts, and other educational agencies to build and run local candidate support programs
  • partnerships with schools and districts across the country to facilitate cohort-based support programs
  • a certification cohort specifically for California teachers of color, sponsored in partnership with the California Teachers Association

Our History

The National Board Resource Center was founded in 1998 under the guidance of Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond. When Dr. Darling-Hammond arrived at Stanford University in 1998 there were only 6 National Board Certified Teachers in the San Francisco Bay Area. Believing that what teachers know and can do is the most important influence on what students learn, she set out to capitalize on the expertise of those six. In collaboration with Misty Sato, an expert teacher and then−Stanford doctoral student, she helped bring them together and led them through the formative years of establishing a center at Stanford whose mission was to support candidates for National Board certification.

Since the early days in Dr. Darling-Hammond's living room, the National Board Resource Center has expanded to establish new support programs for candidates and professional learning facilitators, conduct research on the effects of Board certification, and develop resources to share with National Board programs around the state and the country.