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In schools, nothing matters more than the quality of the teachers and leaders. When students have great teachers, they learn dramatically more than they do with less-effective instructors. When schools have great leaders, their students excel, even when they start behind. Yet too often, policies and management practices in K-12 education stand in the way of great teaching and leadership.
Our work in this area focuses on policies and approaches to recruiting, selecting, evaluating, developing, compensating, and retaining high-performing teachers and leaders. Follow links to the left to see our work in these areas. Below, we highlight a few recent works.
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 Why does every child need consistent access to excellent teachers, and how can we, today, extend the reach of the excellent teachers our nation already has? Public Impact teamed up with designers at Column Five to develop this infographic with the answers. It illustrates four of the more than 20 “reach extension” models that use job redesign and technology to put excellent teachers in charge of every student’s learning. It also highlights the role of extending these teachers’ reach in building an “Opportunity Culture” in which excellent teachers, other educators, and students can excel. See the full inforgraphic here.
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 Even if current reform efforts to recruit more great teachers and dismiss low performers were wildly successful, nearly two-thirds of children still would not have great teachers. But if we add high-performer retention and reach extension, 87 percent of classes could be taught by gap-closing, bar-raising teachers—in a mere half decade. This outcome is within our reach—but only if we vastly expand the opportunities for top teachers.
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 American children deserve the one ingredient we know creates stellar learning results: excellent teachers, consistently. This brief explains why every child needs excellent teachers year after year; how schools can put excellent teachers in charge of more children’s learning while offering new roles to other teachers in which they, too, can be excellent; and what changes policymakers must support to make this possible: speedily improving the identification of excellent teachers, clearing the policy barriers—including inflexible budgets, human resource systems, and operational rules—that keep excellent teachers from reaching more students for more pay and drive those teachers out of instructional roles, and catalyzing the will for schools and districts to put excellent teachers in charge of every student’s learning. We propose bold solutions to create this will—including a new right to excellent teachers and strong financial incentives for excellent teachers to reach more students—and we invite others to add to these ideas.
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 Public Impact has posted brief descriptions of more than 20 school models that put excellent teachers in charge of more children’s learning. The models describe how schools can adjust teaching roles and use technology to reach every child with excellent teachers—the 20 to 25 percent who make well over a year of progress each year on average with their students. Public Impact will add examples and detail, including job descriptions, evaluation rubrics and financial considerations. All will be available for free on OpportunityCulture.org. Models were made possible by Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The Joyce Foundation, and the Colorado Legacy Foundation.
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 In Fordham’s new book Education Reform for the Digital Era, Bryan C. Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel’s opening chapter proposes that “digital education needs excellent teachers and that a first-rate teaching profession needs digital education.” In the digital future, teacher effectiveness will matter even more than it does today. While the roles of teachers and other adults will change dramatically, what will increasingly differentiate outcomes for schools, states, and nations is how well responsible adults carry out the more complex instructional tasks. At the same time, technology has enormous transformative potential to extend the reach of excellent teachers to vastly more students, to help teaching attract and retain the best, and to boost the effectiveness of average teachers. To realize that promise, though, the nation needs new staffing models, significant policy changes, and a stronger dose of political will to change. Read the chapter here, and watch Bryan Hassel on a webcast of the release event here. The authors also penned a related commentary that appears here.
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 [pdf] Instead of just trying to recruit more great teachers, what if we could reach dramatically more children with the great teachers we already have? This report explores ways we could redesign teachers’ roles and use technology to give millions more students access to the best teachers.
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In this post for the Innosight Institute’s Education Blog, Bryan Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel argue that “schools – and nations – that excel in the digital age will be those that use digital tools both to make teaching more manageable for the average teacher, and to give massively more students access to excellent teachers.” While digital learning can help solid teachers become more effective, one of its greatest promises is to enable top teachers – those whose students already achieve well over a year’s worth of growth – to educate more students by freeing up their time, allowing them to teach students who are not physically present, and capturing their teaching prowess by recording videos or helping develop smart learning software. |
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 [pdf] One of the biggest challenges in education today is identifying talented candidates to successfully lead turnarounds of persistently low-achieving schools. Evidence suggests that the traditional principal pool is already stretched to capacity and cannot supply enough leaders to fix failing schools. But potentially thousands of leaders capable of managing successful turnarounds work outside education, in nonprofit and health organizations, the military, and the private sector. If only a fraction of those leaders used their talents in education, we could increase the supply of school turnaround leaders significantly. In this report prepared by Public Impact for the University of Virginia’s Partnership for Leaders in Education, Julie Kowal and Emily Hassel explore lessons about when and how organizations in other sectors import leaders – including how they tempt people away, train them, and foster their success – to inform efforts by state and local leaders to import talent for failing schools.
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