Public Impact

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Public Impact News & Views

Welcome to the Public Impact blog, offering news and views from the Public Impact team. Questions or concerns? Contact editor Sharon Kebschull Barrett.

5th-Largest U.S. District Explores Extending Excellent Teachers’ Reach

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At Public Impact, we and our partners provide districts and charter schools with support in implementing models to extend excellent teachers’ reach based on the Opportunity Culture Reach Extension Principles. But we hope others can do this without outside support, and we publish all our models and design tools for free—and continue to add materials—to make that possible. In Nevada, we’ve found what may be the first district to go it alone, using our materials.

Clark County, home of Las Vegas, is making plans to launch the new job roles of its Project Reach-Extended 10 in fall 2014, as the district grapples with both crushing budget deficits and a strong commitment to improve learning outcomes for all 311,429 of its students.

The Clark County School District (CCSD) aims to provide a variety of job roles and career advancement opportunities for its teachers who extend their reach, paying them more through reallocated dollars, not special grants—thereby creating a sustainable program.

“Out of the 18,000 teachers in our district, we know we have so many who could have a greater impact on student achievement,” says Staci Vesneske, chief human resources officer. “We just need to create opportunities for them to do so.”

[Read more…]

Indiana Charter Board Encourages Dramatically Different Models

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As Public Impact focuses on its Opportunity Culture initiative—reaching more students with excellent teachers, making sustainably higher pay a reality, and providing job-embedded development—we’ve noted a few examples of charter school networks using redesigned jobs to make this possible.

Rocketship Education, Carpe Diem, and KIPP Empower have been on the cutting edge of using new school models to “extend the reach” of great teachers. Newer CMOs building reach into their models include the members of the Opportunity Culture Charter School Network: Foundations College Prep in Chicago, Ingenuity Prep in Washington, D.C., Touchstone Education in Newark, N.J., and Venture Academy in Minneapolis.

But why haven’t we seen more innovators? The Indiana Charter School Board (ICSB) asks this question in its recent request for applications, developed with support from Public Impact, inviting new models with strong potential to accelerate student success.

The board requests that applicants consider dramatically different school designs, including those that use “staff roles, technology, compensation structures, and/or other aspects of school design and/or implementation to enable the school to reach more students with excellent teaching” in a financially sustainable way.

[Read more…]

National Charter School Network Forms to Extend Teachers’ Reach

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As Public Impact continues our Opportunity Culture quest to reach more students with great teachers, we’re seeing both district and charter schools come on board. In the charter sector, a disproportionate amount of activity is by new charter school organizations.

But these new school providers can’t just ask the school next door—or even the charter school next door—how to make reach models that combine job redesign and technology successful for students and teachers. They need each other. So we formed the national Opportunity Culture Charter School Network.

The network’s four founding members are Foundations College Prep in Chicago, Ingenuity Prep in Washington, D.C., Touchstone Education in Newark, N.J., and Venture Academy in Minneapolis. Each will start as a single school, with hopes for big growth. After they establish success with students, they collectively plan to scale up to serve tens of thousands of students. They join more established charter networks, such as Rocketship Education, already engaged in extending the reach of teachers, and paying more, without increasing instructional group sizes.

These new-start schools want great student learning, and they want to be free from permanent dependence on philanthropy to close charter funding gaps. School founders are open to financially sustainable school models that extend the reach of excellent teachers, pay teachers more, and turbocharge teacher development.

[Read more…]

In the News: Report on Teacher Pay and the Recession

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In a new report on the effects of the recession on teacher salaries in 41 major school districts, the National Council on Teacher Quality found that teacher raises for experience and market forces like inflation were one-third to one-half of what they were at the beginning of the recession.  Eighty percent of the districts studied had a total pay freeze or pay cut in at least one school year between 2008-09 and 2011-12–although none had a cut or freeze every year, and eight districts showed positive salary growth each year between 2008-09 and 2011-12. See the report for details on how the districts adjusted pay in the face of tight budgets.

One way districts could respond is by employing an Opportunity Culture: See our “Paying Teachers More” page to understand how Opportunity Culture models could increase excellent teachers’ pay up to approximately 130%, without increasing class sizes and within available budgets. In some variations, schools may pay all teachers more, sustainably. Combining these and other sustainable models to extend the reach of excellent teachers and promote excellence by all instructional staff may produce even greater savings to fund teacher pay increases and other priorities, while producing excellent student outcomes.

How Blended Learning Can Improve the Teaching Profession

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DLN C&C coverHow can blended learning make things better for teachers? See Improving Conditions & Careers: How Blended Learning Can Improve the Teaching Profession, part of the Digital Learning Now! Smart Series, which Bryan Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel, Public Impact’s co-directors, wrote with John Bailey of Digital Learning Now! and Carri Schneider and Tom Vander Ark of Getting Smart.

In the report and accompanying infographic, the authors show how blended learning models, including some of Public Impact’s Opportunity Culture designs, can create better opportunities for teachers through more differentiated job models, more time for teacher collaboration, and meaningful teacher development. And the report takes a close look at how an Opportunity Culture uses the benefits blended learning can offer to let excellent teachers:

  • extend their reach in person to more students and to other teachers aspiring to excellence;
  • teach remotely, letting them reach students anywhere and have more flexible careers;
  • have opportunities for “boundless instruction,” expanding their impact by sharing content they create online.

With these possibilities come the need to remove policy barriers to blended learning; the report discusses items policymakers should consider in funding, evaluation, pay/career options, operations, timing and scalability, and performance incentives.

Public Impact®

Chapel Hill, NC
919-240-7955
919-903-8649 fax

We encourage the free use, reproduction, and distribution of our materials, but we require attribution for all use. See here or contact us for more information.

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