Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) has announced a gift of $40 million from two Harvard Business School alumni who prefer to remain anonymous in support of endowed scholarships for students in its new Teaching and Teacher Leadership (TTL) master’s program.

The largest gift in the school’s history includes $30 million to provide scholarship support for 40 master’s candidates each year and $10 million to serve as a matching gift aimed at bolstering financial aid for teachers at HGSE.

The TTL Program, which emerged from HGSE’s seven-year effort to reimagine and redesign all its master’s programs, will welcome its first cohort of students in the fall. Focused on foundational knowledge and evidence-based practice, the program also will build on the legacies of the school’s Teacher Education master’s program and the Harvard Teacher Fellows Program.

“We’re currently seeing our education system strain under the weight of an unprecedented two-year global pandemic—a pandemic that laid bare many persistent inequities that have long blocked opportunity for too many students,” said HGSE dean Bridget Long. “This gift allows HGSE to build on our history of innovative programs that seek to prepare our graduates to lead the kind of transformative learning experiences that expand opportunity, support student achievement, and change lives and communities. It enables us not only to prepare the equity-focused, effective teachers all students need and deserve but also to develop and share knowledge about how to train and support high-quality teaching in the complex world of the twenty-first century.”

(Photo Credit: Getty Images/Drazen Zigic)