UNC School of Education receives second Frank Murray Leadership Recognition Award

The UNC School of Education is the first program to win the Frank Murray Leadership Recognition for Continuous Improvement award twice.

The Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation selected the School of Education as one of nine programs to receive the recognition in 2024.

“In educator preparation, this award really recognizes a kind of excellence in continuous improvement,” Diana Lys, the assistant dean for educator preparation and accreditation in the education school, said.

Matt Vanover, vice president for communications and government affairs for CAEP and a part of the committee that chose programs for the award, said the School of Education was chosen from a pool of providers accredited over the past year. 

He said there were many standards for each of the schools to fulfill in order to qualify for the award, and it was not an easy bar to set.

“These folks actually had the data and they had no stipulations or areas for improvement,” Vanover said.

Winning the award in 2024 was very different from the first time in 2019, Lys said. In 2019, the award only focused on specific teacher education programs. This time, she said the award recognized all the programs within the school.

“It was also very exciting because we had more faculty involved in that, more students, more alumni, more really exciting stories of how we bring evidence back into our programs in order to improve them and keep them really on the cutting edge,” she said.  

Jessica Amsbary, the School of Education's Master of Education for Experienced Teachers program coordinator, said the school's programs have come a long way since 2019. She said the school is continuously updating and improving.

“It's really a matter of keeping up with our goals and trying our best to meet them and making new goals and looking at data they collect for us,” she said.

After winning the award for the first time in 2019, Lys said the School of Education didn’t know if they would be able to win again.

“I think one always hopes that you'll be able to kind of replicate something,” she said. “But knowing the that this most recent review would be more complex, and because of the different programs that were involved, and that we hadn't done it in that way at Carolina in some time, I wasn't sure if we would be able to.”

Lys also said that she couldn’t have won the award without the faculty and students in the program, saying she was truly blessed with faculty whom she could meet and discuss program goals with.

Vanover said that he thinks the award recognizes the great work that the people at the School of Education are doing.

“We want new teachers to come in and really begin making a difference in the lives of every child when they get in that classroom, so that every child regardless of their area code, their race, their religion, whatever, that they have a teacher in front of them who can really differentiate instruction [and] be able to give them the tools to be successful,” he said.

Although the School of Education is small, Lys said they can still do high-quality education preparation. She said the school has a mission to serve all of North Carolina's educational programs, and the award acknowledged that mission.

“It's about our faculty, students and our partners,” she said. “This is a collaborative piece of work, and it's a pretty darn good one too.”  

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