In the late 1990s, former mathematics teacher, school counselor, and administrator Pat Martin, was hired by corporate-funded educational reform group The Education Trust to focus the school counseling profession on equity issues by helping close achievement and opportunity gaps harming children and adolescents of color, poor and working class children and adolescents, bilingual children and adolescents, and children and adolescents with disabilities. Martin, under considerable heat from Counselor Educators who were not open to her equity-focused message of change, developed focus groups of K-12 students, parents, guardians, teachers, building leaders, and superintendents, and interviewed professors of School Counselor Education. She hired Oregon State University School Counselor Education professor emeritus Dr. Reese House, and after several years of work in the late 1990s they created, in 2003, the National Center for Transforming School Counseling (NCTSC).