The 2025 North Carolina Education Innovation Lab represented a landmark moment in the future of our state’s education landscape. For a decade, the Lab has fostered an environment where stakeholders, policymakers, and business leaders have collaborated to create a shared vision of Educator Innovation. From these conversations, a network of research, policies, and programs has emerged, leading to real, meaningful, and lasting change for North Carolina’s educators, and more importantly, our students.
Education transformation takes a focused, strategic, and persistent effort in order to achieve world-class results. That’s why the goal of the 2025 North Carolina Education Innovation Lab was to reflect on a decade of Educator Innovation progress, then identify, promote, and support the next steps toward making our state First in Education over the next ten years – as always, with your help!
A Decade of Innovation, A Lifetime of Impact
Meet Tim and Ava. Both grew up in North Carolina, and both went to the same high school just ten years apart. But while Tim graduated in 2015, Ava is flipping her tassel in 2025. And while their school building may look exactly the same on the outside, the inside has been completely transformed by the Educator Innovation Plan.
How are the ways that schools and classrooms organized presenting barriers to students like Tim? And what have we done about it for students like Ava? Watch this video, and the framing videos at the beginning of each section, to find out.
The Educator Innovation Plan
BEST NC’s President & CEO Brenda Berg delivers opening remarks at the 2025 North Carolina Education Innovation Lab, discussing the past, present, and future of the core components of the Educator Innovation Plan, BEST NC’s comprehensive set of policy and program initiatives designed to make North Carolina “First in Education.”
Advanced Teaching Roles
Dr. Tom Tomberlin, Senior Director of Educator Preparation and Licensure for the North Carolina Department of Instruction discusses the first piece of the Educator Innovation Plan, Advanced Teaching Roles in North Carolina, and how this initiative is already transforming school staffing structures and compensation models across the state.
The New NCPFP
Dr. Lauren Lampron, Director of the NCPFP discusses the next piece of the Educator Innovation Plan, the New North Carolina Principal Fellows Program, its history, evolution, the current landscape in North Carolina. and how the New NCPFP is reinventing how school leaders are chosen and prepared in our state.
TeachNC
Gab Barnes of TEACH.org presents on TeachNC, North Carolina’s top-to-bottom teacher recruitment initiative, and the next piece of the Educator Innovation Plan. Launced in 2019, TeachNC is an media campaign and online portal with everything an aspiring teacher needs to get started with their career in the classroom.
Educator Pay
Over the last decade, North Carolina has made significant progress when it comes to educator pay. Between 2014 and 2018, North Carolina invested over $1 billion in raising teacher pay; and the state saw the largest investment in principal pay between 2017 and 2019, reimaging the school leadership equation to account for their performance.
Principal Pay
BEST NC’s Vice President of Policy and Engagement Maureen Stover speaks with Dr. Kelly Anne Mudd, principal of Martin Millennium Academy in Tarboro about the importance of North Carolina’s unique school leadership compensation model, its history, and the effects this nation-leading approach has had on staffing in North Carolina’s most underserved schools.
Teacher Pay
BEST NC’s Vice President of Policy and Engagement Maureen Stover speaks with Leah Carper, 2022 NC Teacher of the Year and Director of Stakeholder Engagement for Guilford County Schools, about the importance of a sustained focus on teacher pay in North Carolina, recommendations from BEST NC’s updated Teacher Pay policy brief, and anecdotal evidence for the necessity of Advanced Teaching Roles.
An Innovative Approach
to Teacher Preparation
and Recruitment
David Donaldson, Founder and Managing Partner at the National Center for Grow Your Own, talks about the unique benefits teacher apprenticeship programs present for the states that implement them with fidelity, his own role in Tennessee’s nation-leading apprenticeship effort, and North Carolina’s potential position as a apprenticeship innovator.
Panel:
Teacher Apprenticeship,
the Next Innovation
BEST NC’s President & CEO Brenda Berg sits with Dr. Felicia Brown, Director of Human Resources for Wayne County Public Schools, David Donaldson with the National Center for Grow Your Own, and John Loyack, Vice President of Economic Development for the North Carolina Community College System to discuss the benefits of and barriers to teacher apprenticeship in North Carolina.
Policymaker Perspective
Representative David Willis of the 68th NC House District, Chair for the Education Appropriations and Education K-12 Committees, sits with Brenda Berg to discuss the legislative landscape as it pertains to implementing teacher apprenticeship and related innovations in North Carolina over the next decade.