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State Leaders: Set These Policies to Enable an Opportunity Culture

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What students want—US map (3)great teachers every year–and what teachers want–career advancement without leaving teaching, on-the-job professional learning and collaboration, and the chance to help more students succeed–come together in an Opportunity Culture. What’s the missing piece? State policies to back up schools and districts and their educators committed to reaching many more students with excellent teachers and their teams, for more pay, within budget and without forcing class-size increases.

In the just-released Seizing Opportunity at the Top II policymakers’ checklist and full report, Public Impact takes the lessons we’ve learned in working with teachers and leaders in districts in four states and distills them into the “urgent” and “optimal” policies a state needs to enable pilot and statewide Opportunity Cultures. See the two-page checklist for a quick policy overview, then use the full brief for details on crafting new policies.

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Doing the Math on Opportunity Culture’s Early Impact

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As we’ve noted in previous posts, schools continue to join the Opportunity Culture initiative, eager to work with teachers on redesigning their teaching roles and career paths. As the first year of implementation in Opportunity Culture pilot schools wound down, we looked at the impact of just the 31 leading-edge schools who had joined the initiative by April. (Six more high schools joined in May but are not included in these figures, as they hadn’t yet had a chance to make their Opportunity Culture plans).

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How a State Could Achieve Major Gains in Learning, Pay, Economy

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For several years, we’ve been asking teachers and districts to imagine: Imagine schools and a profession where all teachers can improve their teaching, be rewarded for getting better, and reach more students with excellent instruction—by creating an Opportunity Culture for teachers and students. Districts are responding: As of spring 2014, four districts nationally are piloting Opportunity Culture models, and one, Charlotte-Mecklenburg, is taking its pilot efforts to scale based on recruiting results and demand from schools.

But what if a whole state reimagined the teaching profession and pursued an Opportunity Culture for all?  What benefits might accrue for students, teachers and the state as a whole?

Using North Carolina as an example for analysis, Public Impact ran the numbers—and the results weren’t small.

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Public Impact’s Op-Ed: Be Bold on Teacher Pay

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Public Impact’s co-directors, Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan C. Hassel, have a message for North Carolina’s leaders in their op-ed published in The (Raleigh, N.C.) News and Observer: To transform this state, aim higher.

The Hassels’ op-ed, “N.C. must be bold on increasing teacher pay,” calls for “audacious, achievable goals”: Noting the Opportunity Culture work being done in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools to improve teachers’ jobs and pay them more, the Hassels call on North Carolina’s leaders to transform the state by extending that work and focusing on needed priority and policy changes that would create a surge in student learning, grow the state’s economy, and increase teachers’ career earnings.

More coming soon from Public Impact’s Opportunity Culture work: Watch for an announcement on the second N.C. district to join Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in the Opportunity Culture initiative (see more about an Opportunity Culture in other districts here), and watch for a policy brief next week detailing the economic benefits to North Carolina and its teachers discussed in the op-ed.

In the News: Multi-Classroom Leadership

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The Opportunity Culture website is chock-full of materials to explain how our school models–such as Multi-Classroom Leadership and Time-Technology Swap–work. You can read the detailed models themselves, financial details about the models, broader overviews such as An Opportunity Culture for All or materials specifically for teachers–or you can just work your way through everything listed on the Tools for School Design Teams page to get the whole Opportunity Culture shebang.

And our case studies show how schools are just beginning to implement this work. We’ll have many more coming that get into the nitty-gritty as schools gain some experience with their new models, which design teams of teachers and administrators adapt to fit each school’s needs.

Meanwhile, though, Christina Quattrocchi at EdSurge fills in one piece of that nitty-gritty this week, in How to Teach 800 Middle Schoolers. She walks readers through the workweek of Romain Bertrand, a multi-classroom leader at Ranson middle school in Charlotte who incorporates blended learning into his math team, to help understand how Bertrand extends his reach to many, many more students than the one-teacher-one-classroom mode.

You can also read one of Bertrand’s blog posts on EdSurge, Reaching 800 Students with a Stylus and an iPad, to hear his thoughts on how thoughtful use of tech tools in the classroom can make a difference in many ways. Check out his entire blog to learn more about first-year implementation joys and challenges in his team.

Watch: How to Get Great Teaching to More Students

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How can more students have access to excellent teachers? Increasing class sizes is one way, but we have many other options, Public Impact’s co-director, Bryan C. Hassel, said at Thursday’s “Expanding Access to Great Teachers” discussion at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute–watch it below.

Bryan joined Michael Hansen of the American Institutes for Research, author of “Right-Sizing the Classroom: Making the Most of Great Teachers,” Jean-Claude Brizard, senior advisor at the College Board, teacher and instructional coach Linda Donaldson Guidi, and Michael Petrilli, Fordham executive vice president.

Using Opportunity Culture models, districts are extending great teachers’ reach to more students now, without bigger classes, Bryan noted–and in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, for example, teacher-leaders make $23,000 more than the salary schedule with these models, which give all teachers opportunities for career advancement without having to leave the classroom.

But policymakers need to clear the barriers to extending great teachers’ reach, he said–and rather than focusing on the percentage of excellent teachers a district has, how about asking districts and schools to report the percentage of students who have an excellent teacher in charge of their instruction?

Watch the discussion, and read more here, here and here.

1st Opportunity Culture Case Study: Extending One Teacher’s Reach

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In Public Impact’s Opportunity Culture school models, schools use job redesign and technology to reach more students with excellent teachers, for more pay, within budget. As districts and schools around the country consider implementing their own Opportunity Cultures, they want real-life examples of just how others have already done so.

Today, we begin a series of case studies that provide in-depth looks at how districts, charter schools, and other programs have begun using Opportunity Culture models or experimented with similar means of expanding teachers’ impact on students and peer teachers. In the studies, we will describe new programs, including personal descriptions of teachers involved. We will also analyze how well the programs stack up to the five Reach Extension Principles, which call for reaching more students with excellent teaching, higher pay, sustainable funding, job-embedded development opportunity, and enhanced authority and clear accountability for great teachers.

In our first study, Leading Educators: Empowering Teacher-Leaders to Extend Their Reach by Leading Teams, we profile Anna Lavely of Kansas, who participates in Leading Educators’ two-year fellowship aimed at developing the leadership of already-excellent teachers.

Leading Educators’ fellows are currently spread out over 65 schools in Kansas City and New Orleans. A fellow’s school district or CMO must commit to placing the fellow in a role in which he or she leads a team of other teachers to meet the fellow’s standards of excellence; teaches students; and facilitates a teaching team’s collaboration and planning. After intensive training and visits to schools with a record of closing the achievement gap, fellows create yearlong projects that focus on leading other teachers and raising student achievement, designed and implemented by fellows to meet their schools’ needs.

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