Teaching Excellence, a teacher training program in Texas, will receive $790,000 from the Walton Family Foundation to help diversify the teaching workforce and expand the reach of its mentoring work, the philanthropic organization announced today.

The money will be used to train 620 teachers over the next two years, with at least 70 percent being teachers of color. To help recruit these educators, 220 scholarships will be created to help with the costs of this year-long certification program. The funding will also go toward creating other strategies for diversifying and retaining teachers, as well as creating more school partnerships to expand placements for the Teaching Excellence cohort of educators.

The program has trained more than 2,450 teachers and has found that its teachers stay in the classroom longer and see better test results from their students than colleagues in nearby schools who don’t go through the program, according to state data collected by Teaching Excellence.

Less than 20 percent of the nation’s teachers are people of color, though the percentage of students of color is expected to reach 56 percent by 2024, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

Read the full article about Teacher Excellence by Kate Stringer at The 74.