Richard Sterling, former director of the New York City Writing Project, is the new executive director of the National Writing Project (NWP). The highly successful and cost-effective teacher-centered writing program is based at the University of California at Berkeley's Graduate School of Education.
Sterling succeeds James Gray, who founded the Bay Area Writing Project in 1974 with 25 Bay Area teachers. Currently over 140,000 teachers now participate each year in the 163 National Writing Project sites worldwide, and over 1.3 million teachers to date have participated in the project's many programs to improve the teaching of writing in the nation's schools.
"I am fortunate indeed," Sterling said, "to be heading a project that has without peer so benefitted the teachers and children of our nation. You can be assured that I will work hard to maintain and enhance the reputation and work of the National Writing Project."
The National Writing Project is now in its 22nd year as a nationwide program. Its "teachers-teaching-teachers" model is considered by many experts to be the national model for similar programs in the sciences, social sciences, and mathematics.
Over the years, the NWP has garnered impressive praise from some of the leading organizations in the U.S. that support educational improvement. The Carnegie Corporation of New York named it "the best large-scale effort to improve composition instruction in this country, and certainly the best on which substantial data are available." And the National Endowment for the Humanities said, "The National Writing Project has been by far the most effective and cost-effective project in the history of the Endowment's support for elementary and secondary education programs." *