Featured Teachers and Leaders Resources
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.
Blended learning that combines digital instruction with live, accountable teachers holds unique promise to improve student outcomes dramatically. This brief explains how schools can use blended learning to encourage improvements in digital instruction, transform teaching into a highly paid, opportunity-rich career that extends the reach of excellent teachers to all students and teaching peers, and improve student learning at large scale. We call this a “better blend”: combining high-quality digital learning and excellent teaching.
This two-page report speaks directly to excellent teachers and those aspiring to excellence to introduce the concepts of an Opportunity Culture and its benefits for teachers and staff, explaining why they should advocate for new school models and policies that support an Opportunity Culture. A related slide presentation for school and district leaders, with speaker notes or without, helps them explain what teaching and learning could look like in an Opportunity Culture.
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.
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. Read more…
Teachers: If you are an excellent teacher or one who aspires to excellence, this two-page report explains how schools can use redesigned jobs and career paths to help you stay enthusiastic about teaching, reach more students, and lead your peers, for more pay. With input from teachers and other experts, Public Impact has published numerous school models that offer different possibilities for time use and role flexibility, making the best use of great teachers’ valuable time and returning the respect you deserve by paying more for reaching more students with excellence.
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. Read more…
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. Read more…
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.
In this blog post for the Innosight Institute (now the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation), 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.
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.
A recent national push to use performance evaluations for critical personnel decisions has highlighted the shortcomings of our current systems and increased the urgency to improve them dramatically. This report, written with support from the Joyce Foundation, summarizes best practices and research from other sectors into six steps for education leaders who want accurate, reliable, and meaningful information about educators’ performance. Read more…
This report, written with support from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, identifies four common strategies employed by other sectors to disproportionately retain high performers and discusses how committed education leaders could begin applying these strategies right now. Read more…
The complete recipe for Singapore’s educational success is not public, but one element stands out: the development and thorough use of performance-linked “competencies” to measure, reward, and develop teacher performance. This report, written with support from The Joyce Foundation, explores Singapore’s successful teacher evaluation and development system—recognized by its education leadership and teachers as effective and fair. Read more…
Could redesigned K-12 teacher tenure actually improve student learning? Could it help to grow the size and power of an elite teaching corps that reaches far more children? This paper examines lessons from higher education and the civil service and applies fresh thinking to offer new “elite” and “inclusive” tenure designs and a framework for policymakers who want to make tenure meaningful. Today, K-12 tenure is granted to nearly all teachers, with almost no criteria, and within the first few years of teaching. As a tool to strengthen our nation’s schools and children’s prospects, tenure has failed. The culture of tenure and costs of associated pay scales also have created a nearly universal glass ceiling for the best teachers. But discussions about tenure nearly always fall into the “keep it or scrap it” camps. This paper inserts level-headed thinking into the K-12 tenure debate. A brief presentation, prepared for the Joyce Foundation, outlines key findings
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.
Many have suggested that charter schools can be key agents in leading dramatic improvements in public education. However, the small number of highly-successful charter schools and charter management organizations currently in operation throughout the country will have to grow much faster in order to meet this challenge. To achieve that growth, they also will need a strong supply of great teachers and leaders. This report, for the Center for American Progress, by Christi Chadwick and Julie Kowal, looks at six leading charter management organizations (CMOs) – Green Dot, High Tech High, IDEA, KIPP, Rocketship, and YES Prep – and the strategies they have implemented to build the supply of high quality teachers and principals in their schools. The paper also presents barriers and challenges that still remain for these CMOs, as well as promising opportunities to support more rapid future growth. A brief presentation, prepared for the Joyce Foundation, outlines key findings.
The job of “teacher” in most schools today remains centered on full-time classroom responsibilities that are defined by the location, timing, and schedule of the school day and a one-teacher-per-classroom model. But particularly in today’s budget climate, interest in quality-focused job redesigns is increasing among forward-thinking state, district, and charter school leaders. In this report, prepared by Julie Kowal and Dana Brinson for the Center for American Progress, we profile two organizations—the Rocketship Education network of charter schools and the Fairfax County, VA school district— that have redesigned the job of teacher to provide new types of leadership opportunities and let great teachers reach larger numbers of students. A brief presentation, prepared for the Joyce Foundation, outlines key findings. Read more…
Performance pay, hard-to-staff incentives, and other special payments combined make up only 1% of the teacher pay “pie” nationally. With school budgets tight, the prospects of new, long-term infusions of funds for alternative forms of teacher compensation are bleak. For districts and states eager to reform teacher pay, then, the only viable, sustainable strategy is to “re-slice the teacher compensation pie”—reducing the amount of funding that goes to reward master’s degrees, experience beyond the first five or so years, and other qualifications that research suggests are unrelated to student learning. This presentation shows how re-slicing—whether modest or bold—could dramatically increase the resources available to pay teachers for their contributions to student learning.
Public Impact has developed a series of resources designed to support school turnarounds. The series includes guides and toolkits that help select turnaround leaders and teachers based on the competencies–or patterns of thinking, feeling, speaking, and acting–that enable them to be successful in turnarounds.
As evidence continues to pile up about the central importance of effective teaching, states nationwide are rethinking how they define and measure the effects individual teachers have on educational outcomes. In this slide deck, Public Impact sets out some guiding principles for states entering this design process, including: (1) defining a teacher’s “effect” as the product of her level of effectiveness and her reach: the number of students she affects; (2) defining teacher effectiveness based on student learning outcomes and behaviors linked to outcomes; (3) using rigorous research about top teachers – not focus groups or expert opinion – to determine what behaviors to include in the definition; and (4) examining deeper competencies – such as achievement orientation – not just more easily observable teacher behaviors. States can play a central role in driving strong measures of teacher effectiveness by requiring measures that truly differentiate performers; shining a bright light on how different districts and schools are doing on improving effectiveness; creating a state-mandated “floor” for teacher evaluation systems; and driving an ongoing effort to improve the definition and measurement of teacher effectiveness. This presentation was prepared with the support of the Joyce Foundation as part of a larger project examining ways to reform teacher evaluation, tenure and other systems to achieve more “selective retention.”
[pdf] This report summarizes the results of recent research and practice on how to improve teacher supply, distribution and evaluation systems. The overwhelming finding is that our current practices and policies provide inadequate support for high quality teaching. Most teachers are trained, selected, placed, evaluated and compensated under staffing models that were not built to ensure that teachers, especially those with the neediest students, are effective at promoting student learning. The report offers ten national imperatives to create a teacher management system that truly works for students: 1) improve the pipeline; 2) identify effectiveness; 3) screen effectively; 4) hire strategically; 5) pay for contribution; 6) support new hires; 7) develop advanced skills; 8) reconsider tenure; 9) rework retirement; and 10) leverage talent.
Visit Our OpportunityCulture.org Website!
Subscribe to Public Impact RSS Feed