Public Impact News & Views

Read our vision brief: Excellent Teaching for Every Young Child: Opportunity Culture in Early Childhood Education

What if far more children ages 0–5 who are in early childhood education and care settings had consistent access to excellent teaching? In these critical developmental years, young children—especially those who have fewer educational and developmental advantages outside of formal settings—need excellent teaching every year to fulfill their potential.

When children lack access to high-quality early childhood development, they fall further behind their peers with each passing year before entering kindergarten. This deficit leaves wide gaps for K­–12 educators to close, and it starts a vicious cycle of negative and inaccurate perceptions about students’ actual potential to learn and achieve, in school and life.

And what if their teachers and caregivers had highly supportive, on-the-job development and sustainably funded career paths? Early childhood education now is a modest-wage, low-support field with few career options for instructional leadership or on-the-job development. For the great teachers who stay despite that, the usual staffing model limits how many children they reach with their excellent teaching.

We suggest something new:
Increase the reach of excellent early childhood teachers through Opportunity Culture teaching teams

The national Opportunity Culture initiative is already disrupting the low-support, low-option pattern in K–12 schools. Districts and schools using Opportunity Culture models extend the reach of excellent teaching through Multi-Classroom Leadership, in which teachers who have produced high-growth learning lead small teaching teams, for more pay, within schools’ regular budgets.

Multi-classroom leaders could make a difference in early childhood education, too.

In a new vision brief, Excellent Teaching for Every Young Child: Opportunity Culture in Early Childhood Education, Public Impact explains how.

Multi-classroom leaders (MCLs) in an early childhood setting guide their teaching teams on all aspects of instruction and child development, including academic learning and materials selection, whole-child development strategies, and teaching young children behavioral skills in a group

K–12 research showed that team teachers with a typical range of prior student learning growth, who then join MCL teams, produced signifi­cantly higher learning growth among students, equaling that of top-quartile teachers in math and approaching that in reading, on average, according to a 2018 study by researchers from the Brookings Institution and American Institutes for Research. MCLs can bring that same student growth to early childhood learning—across developmental areas.

Why Try Multi-Classroom Leadership in Early Childhood Settings?

• More students can have access to excellent teaching. Those who start behind or who have continuing disadvantages may especially benefit.
• Teachers who excel with young children can earn more and help their colleagues and more children
• Teachers and assistants can learn more about how to help young children develop strong academic, social, emotional, physical and other skills. Coaching for teachers becomes routine, job-embedded, and financially sustainable, and the best teachers keep teaching part of the time.
• Aspiring teachers who are earning bachelor’s degrees, associate degrees, and/or certification can learn while earning a salary in paid residencies under a multi-classroom leader.
• Early childhood programs can help more students learn and develop well. They can provide better jobs, within regular budgets, that attract, keep and develop excellent educators.
• The economy would blossom as more students achieve their full potential.

Read Excellent Teaching for Every Young Child.

How Opportunity Culture Works in K-12

The national Opportunity Culture initiative, founded by Public Impact and now in more than 25 districts in nine states, extends the reach of excellent teachers and their teams to more students, for more pay, within schools’ recurring budgets. Multi-Classroom Leadership is the foundation of an Opportunity Culture. Each school’s design and implementation team, which includes teachers, determines how to use Multi-Classroom Leadership and other roles to reach more of their students with high-standards, personalized instruction—one hallmark of great teachers. Public Impact assists school and district teams in making their plans to ensure high-quality designs that achieve strong teacher satisfaction and high-growth student learning.

Multi-classroom leaders (MCLs) lead a small teaching team, providing instructional guidance and frequent, on-the-job development, while continuing to teach part of the time. The schools redesign schedules to provide additional school-day time for teacher planning, coaching, and collaboration. MCLs typically lead the introduction of more effective curricula, instructional methods, classroom management, and schoolwide culture-building.

Accountable for the results of all students in the team, multi-classroom leaders earn substantially higher supplements averaging 20 percent (and up to 50 percent) of teacher pay, within the regular school budget. With help from Public Impact, the school design teams reallocate school budgets to fund pay supplements permanently, in contrast to temporarily grant-funded programs.

In general, virtual charter schools have had poor outcomes. A 2015 study from CREDO (the Center for Research on Education Outcomes) found that, on average, students enrolled in online charter schools lost 180 days of learning in math and 72 days of learning in reading compared to similar students in brick-and-mortar schools.

But virtual schools have the potential to give students access to high-quality instruction regardless of time and place, and to allow students to speed up or slow down based on their interests and needs. And when we scanned the field for virtual charter schools with positive learning results, we found a few. What can others learn from them to make virtual school success the rule, not the exception?

In Meeting the Potential of a Virtual Education: Lessons from Operators Making Online Schooling Work, Public Impact’s Daniela Doyle and Ismael Hernandez-Cruz highlight the experience of two nonselective virtual charter schools making online schooling work for their students—Idaho Distance Education Academy (I-DEA) and New Hampshire’s Virtual Learning Academy Charter School (VLACS). While neither school is an exact demographic mirror of traditional public schools in their states (discussed in the report), both outperform their states in reading and math proficiency, among other positive outcomes. (For more on how these schools were selected to highlight, see What Is Virtual School “Success”? in the report.)

Doyle and Hernandez-Cruz identified four lessons and four recommendations for virtual charter schools.

Lessons:

• Strong teaching (still) drives student success—Just as in traditional schools, teacher selection is crucial. No computer program, no matter how great, can replace an excellent teacher.
• Personal connections are key—“We can’t do anything else that we’re doing without that foundational connection,” Jason Bransford of I-DEA said of efforts to form relationships with each student’s entire family. Likewise, VLACS ensures connections to students and families through a deliberate and intensive system of advisors.
• Student learning must be the center of school design—Both schools have incorporated elements of personalized learning by designing their programs around what students need to succeed, with VLACS in particular creating a very flexible, personalized experience.
• Schools set high expectations for students and families—Both make clear from the moment of enrollment that they do not offer an easier education than traditional schools, setting and communicating high expectations even if doing so leads some families to go elsewhere.

Recommendations:

• Be sure to incorporate the same elements that drive student success in brick-and-mortar schools—in many instances, great schools are great for the same reasons, regardless of setting.
• Identify and adjust to what is truly different about online schooling—for example, focus on elements such as effective online engagement and communication, and support and develop teachers in those areas.
• Use the unique opportunities online schooling offers—take advantage of the opportunity to truly meet students’ individual needs.
• Innovate, don’t just automate—focus on using technology in new ways that better meet the needs of all students.

The field needs more research to broaden and deepen its understanding of online schools’ success. For these two schools, a deeper analysis of how different student groups fare over time relative to their peers might shed more light on their successes and challenges. Finding and studying other online schools achieving promising results would also provide more insight. Meanwhile, these two schools illustrate practices that others can put into action for their students.

About VLACS

• Open since 2008, VLACS serves nearly 400 full-time middle and high school students and more than 13,000 part-time students from New Hampshire, plus about 100 tuition-paying out-of-state students.
• Students can enroll at any time.
• Rather than earning credits, they focus on mastering competencies.
• Students choose from learning “journeys,” including courses, projects, career badges, experiences, teams, and an early-college option.
• Students work with advisors to set an appropriate learning pace to master competencies and can accelerate or slow down as needed.

About I-DEA

• Open since 2004, I-DEA now enrolls about 700 full-time students in grades K–12.
  I-DEA tends to enroll lower rates of students of color than the state overall but enrolls a similar rate of low-income students.
• I-DEA offers considerable flexibility, but also requires students to participate in live online classes at set times twice a week.
• I-DEA follows a calendar, with classes starting and ending at set times during the year.
• I-DEA offers students access to college-level courses, and on average, 20 percent of students graduate from high school with a two-year college degree.

In Better Together: Why Charter School Champions and Parent Advocates Should Partner to Better Support Students with Disabilities, Public Impact issues a call to action for charter champions—including charter associations, city-based education organizations and other reform organizations that see charters as an integral piece of a thriving system of public schools—to form and deepen partnerships with parent advocates to expand access to more quality educational options for students with disabilities.

See coverage of this report in a new article in The 74: Parent Power: To Improve Special Education in Charter Schools Tap Students’ Original Advocates — Their Families — Report Says

The report, which highlights examples from around the country, shows how charter schools, their champions, and parents can innovate to achieve stronger outcomes for students with disabilities through more effective collective advocacy, access to quality school options and equitable policies. The Public Impact policy team explains why such partnerships are needed, what forms they might take and how to get started.

“Serving students with special needs really well at scale requires a deep understanding of the challenges those students face and an ability to push change at a systems level. Parents bring the former, while charter champions offer the latter. Working together, there’s an opportunity to make real progress,” said co-author Daniela Doyle, vice president for policy and management research at Public Impact.

About 13 percent of U.S. students receive special education services. Research shows that as many as 90 percent of students with disabilities can meet the same achievement standards as other students—with the right accommodations and support.

Charter school champions are poised to address the needs of students with disabilities as a central objective of charter advocacy—quality school options for all. And parent groups have decades of experience advocating for students with disabilities and bring student and family perspectives to policy discussions. Both charter champions and parents of students with disabilities stand to gain more by working together than alone.

Greater collaboration between charter supporters and parent groups representing students with disabilities can lead to innovations and improvements in all levels of education. But first, those partnerships must take shape. Charter champions can take the following five steps to start the process and drive collective action toward improved student outcomes, better school options, and equitable policies.

1. Set ambitious goals for “quality school options for all.”
2. Consider gaps in your work.
3. Identify the parent organizations already working on behalf of students with disabilities in your area.
4. Look for opportunities to connect.
5. Partner more deeply.

Striving for innovation and equity, these groups can accomplish more together than they can alone — they are better together.

Charter schools frequently confront inadequate facility funding, few affordable and suitable buildings, inadequate facility expertise among charter founders, and gradual expansion of enrollment and grade levels that requires more or new space. Charter school facility incubators provide affordable, short-term space for new and growing charter schools.

In a new report, Charter School Facility Incubators: A Case Study of Washington, D.C.’s Innovative Approach to Charter School Facilities, Public Impact takes an in-depth look at the design and operations of Building Pathways, a Washington, D.C.-based charter school facility incubator.

Charter school facility incubators shoulder the responsibility of finding and preparing the space. Incubators should provide a full complement of building management and planning services and set rent payments that are tied to a school’s enrollment and ability to pay during its first years so that school leaders and board members can focus on academic programs, school operations and financial health.

“Facilities incubators can let school leaders keep their focus where it counts—on teachers, students and families,” said co-author Troy Smith.

Only four states have a facility incubator; Building Pathways provides the most well-developed example after providing short- and long-term space to more than 26 charter schools since its inception in 2006. This case study shows its keys to success to help other incubators follow its lead.

The Building Pathways charter school incubator initiative has been a vital component of the growth and success of the charter sector in Washington, D.C. Organizations wishing to create an incubator model in other cities should evaluate whether they can meet the following success factors:

1. High-quality authorizer.
2. Growing, high-quality charter sector.
3. Geographic Proximity of Charter Schools.
4. Stable and flexible funding.
5. Facility Expertise and Local Knowledge.

• James Cerasani, Randolph Elementary, Chicago Public Schools, Illinois
• Casandra Cherry, Phillips Middle, Edgecombe County Public Schools, North Carolina
• Cherie Dixon, LB Yancey Elementary, Vance County Schools, North Carolina
• Frederick Hoffman, Ferndale Middle, Guilford County Schools, North Carolina
• Casey Jackson, Aycock Elementary, Vance County Schools, North Carolina
• Steven Kennedy, Wilson Middle School, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, North Carolina
• Amy Pearce, North Edgecombe High, Edgecombe County Public Schools, North Carolina
• Angela Porter, Hairston Middle, Guilford County Schools, North Carolina
• Christina Ross, Desert Oasis Elementary, Nadaburg Unified School District No. 81, Arizona
• Keisha Wheat, Randolph Elementary, Chicago Public Schools, Illinois

• Kristen Boyd, Aycock Elementary, Vance County Schools, North Carolina
• Elizabeth Meyers, Randolph Elementary, Chicago Public Schools, Illinois
• Jenny O’Meara, Phillips Middle, Edgecombe County Public Schools, North Carolina
• Merrie Conaway, Foust Elementary, Guilford County Schools, North Carolina
• Eric Ward, Harding University High School, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, North Carolina