2027 State Teacher of the Year Winners & Finalists

Of the 50 states tracked, 21 have named a winner, 12 are at the finalist stage and eight have a programme underway; nine have no announcement recorded. The tracker recognises 151 educators across several stages, rather than state winners alone. Its educator-level records include 95 finalists, 30 regional honourees, 17 state winners and nine entries labelled “final_cohort”; these are distinct from the state-level progress counts.

September accounts for 10 of the 14 published K-12 News announcement stories, compared with two each in July and August. Those stories cover eight states, so the concentration describes the publication’s coverage, not the announcement calendar for all 50 states. The headlines also show different schedules: Florida named its winner in July, while Missouri announced regional honourees in July, semifinalists and finalists in August, and its winner in September.

Programme structures include regional recognition and intermediate selection rounds. Missouri’s headlines describe regional, semifinalist, finalist and winner stages; Iowa’s describe regional honourees and a state winner. Colorado’s finalist announcements appeared in three September stories covering different districts. Across the 34 states with recorded cohort sizes, the median is five and the range is one to 16. Because the tracker includes different recognition stages, those figures should not be read as a like-for-like comparison of state finalist groups.

English & literacy has the most recorded subject entries, with eight, followed by science with five. Arts & music, special education and world languages each have four; career & technical education and mathematics each have three. Grade-level data identify only two elementary educators, while the Hawaii winner headline names a high school educator. That evidence is too limited to establish recurring grade-level patterns or compare grade-level representation across states.

K-12 News tracks State Teacher of the Year announcements using information published by state education departments and the organisations responsible for administering state programmes.

Programme structures differ between states. Some states identify traditional finalists, while others recognise regional Teachers of the Year, final cohorts or category winners before selecting the overall state honoree. For that reason K-12 News preserves the terminology used by individual state programmes while bringing the information together in one national tracker.

Only publicly identified educators found through official programme sources are included. A state with no listed finalists does not necessarily mean the state has no finalists; it may mean the 2027 cohort has not yet been publicly announced or located.

Data last reviewed: September 22, 2026