Public Impact

  • Home
  • Who We Are
  • What We Do
  • Media
  • Blog
  • Contact
  • Subscribe
Innovation. Excellence. Service. Impact.
  • Opportunity Culture
  • Teachers & Principals
    • Teacher Leadership
    • Recruit, Select, and Keep Education Talent
    • Competencies of High Performers
    • Evaluating Teacher and Leader Performance
    • Teacher and Leader Compensation
    • Professional Development for Educators
  • Turnarounds
    • Turnarounds Within Schools
    • Restarts by Charter Operators
    • Innovation Zones
  • Funding
    • School Funding
  • Charters
    • Charter School Authorizing
    • Scaling Up Quality
    • Restarts in Failing Schools
    • High Market Share Cities
    • State and Federal Charter School Policy
    • Help for Charter Schools
    • Serving Students with Highest Needs
  • More Topics
    • Big Ideas for Education
    • Entrepreneurship in K-12
    • Parents and Community
    • Philanthropy in Education
    • Special Populations
    • Technology in Schools
    • Assessment and Data

Three More N.C. Districts to Launch Opportunity Culture with New State Funding

written by Sharon Kebschull Barrett on January 31, 2019

In the latest round of funding for the state’s Advanced Teaching Roles pilot, the North Carolina State Board of Education awarded grants to three districts that will implement Opportunity Culture roles—Halifax County and Hertford County in eastern North Carolina and Lexington City Schools in Davidson County.

These rural and small-town, high-poverty districts struggle with academic success and attracting and retaining teachers. They will use Opportunity Culture roles, which have produced outstanding student growth elsewhere, to provide intensive support to all teachers, paid career advancement and a stronger teacher pipeline.

The national Opportunity Culture initiative, founded by Public Impact, extends the reach of excellent teachers and their teams to more students, for more pay, within schools’ recurring budgets. The Advanced Teaching Roles pilot, begun in 2016, was intended to improve student learning outcomes by allowing excellent teachers to reach more students by leading a teaching team and taking accountability for all of the team’s students, and receive salary supplements for these advanced teaching roles, with models that can be replicated statewide.

Halifax and Lexington City will design their Opportunity Culture plans this spring for implementation in fall; Hertford County Schools will spend the next year planning for implementation in fall 2020. Public Impact will assist these districts in planning and early implementation.

Multi-Classroom Leadership is the foundation of an Opportunity Culture. Each school’s design and implementation team, which includes teachers, uses Multi-Classroom Leadership and other roles to reach more students with high-standards, personalized instruction—one hallmark of great teachers.

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 supplements averaging 20 percent (and up to 50 percent) of teacher pay, within the regular school budget. The school design teams reallocate school budgets to fund pay supplements permanently, in contrast to temporarily grant-funded programs. Funding from the Advanced Roles pilot will not be used for pay supplements, but for planning and implementing Opportunity Culture and associated professional development.

In the 2017–18 school year, Opportunity Culture schools in North Carolina—the largest implementation state so far, with about 80 schools—outpaced the state results in student growth. While only 27 percent of non-Opportunity Culture schools in North Carolina exceeded student learning growth targets, nearly double that—53 percent—of Opportunity Culture schools exceeded growth.

In early 2018, researchers at the Brookings Institution and American Institutes for Research released a study showing the effect Opportunity Culture multi-classroom leaders can have: Teachers who were on average at the 50th percentile in student learning gains, and who then joined teams led by multi-classroom leaders, produced learning gains equivalent to those of teachers from the 75th to 85th percentile in math and from the 66th to 72nd percentile in reading in six of seven statistical models. Nearly three-fourths of the schools in the AIR-Brookings study were Title I; nearly all of the schools in Halifax, Hertford and Lexington City are Title I.

Founded and led by Public Impact, which is based in the Chapel Hill, N.C., area, Opportunity Culture now includes more than 25 districts in nine states (not all are yet publicly announced).

“We are thrilled that these three districts will receive support from the state to make a proven, major difference for their teachers and students,” said Stephanie Dean, vice president of strategic policy advising at Public Impact. “We look forward to helping their educators design an Opportunity Culture model that fits each school’s context and needs.”

Halifax County Schools (HCS), led by Superintendent Eric Cunningham, has 10 schools and 178 teachers. They serve about 2,560 students, of whom about 84 percent are black, 6 percent American Indian, 4 percent white and 4 percent Hispanic. One hundred percent of the students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. The district suffers from a teacher turnover rate of 29 percent and academically struggling students.”We are grateful to be awarded the grant to partner with Public Impact in the Opportunity Culture model,” Cunningham said. “This grant will allow our district to develop a strategic and sustainable model to compensate teachers who work above and beyond to meet the needs of our students. The mission of HCS is to create a positive and supportive learning environment. This partnership is a big step in building teacher capacity—a critical component to raising student achievement. Halifax County Schools is well on the way of becoming a lighthouse school district for all students.”

Hertford County Public Schools, led by Superintendent William T. Wright, Jr., has seven schools and 190 teachers.
They serve about 2,900 students, of whom about 79 percent are black, 4 percent Hispanic, and 13 percent white, with about 98 percent eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. The district is focused on creating its own educator pipeline given its annual teacher turnover rate of 20 percent and a three-year average rate for administrator turnover of 19 percent.”Hertford County Public Schools is honored to be chosen as a recipient of funding to support the state’s Advanced Teaching Roles pilot,” Wright said. “The Opportunity Culture initiative is directly aligned with our district’s strategic goals in the areas of operational efficiency, teaching and learning, and talent acquisition and development.  Hertford County Public Schools, working in conjunction with Public Impact, is impacting lives positively by increasing student learning through the development of excellent teachers, in keeping with our district’s motto by being ‘All In for Learning’.”

Lexington City Schools, led by Superintendent Anitra Wells, has seven schools and 181 teachers. They serve 3,200 students, of whom about 30 percent are black, 35 percent Hispanic, and 22 percent white, with about 93 percent eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. Its teacher turnover rates are as high as 36 percent (middle schools); it competes for teachers with Charlotte, Winston-Salem, and Greensboro—three of the state’s largest districts—all of which are able to offer higher salary supplements and a broader range of teacher and leadership opportunities.“We are extremely excited and humbled to have been selected for this grant opportunity,” Wells said. “This grant will enable us to utilize our most effective teachers to help support other teachers as we focus on growing every child, every day, in every classroom.  Our students deserve the best, and this model will ensure that they each get exposure to the best instructional strategies and staff available.  We, in Lexington, have challenged ourselves to meet every child where they are and support them in reaching their maximum potential. This model helps us in staying true to that goal.”

In the first phase of the Advanced Roles pilot, the school districts of Vance County, Edgecombe County, and Charlotte-Mecklenburg, all of which use Opportunity Culture, were three of the first six districts selected. In addition, Guilford County Schools and Cabarrus County Schools have introduced Opportunity Culture schools.

Multi-School Leadership: Tools to Extend Excellent Principals’ Reach

written by Sharon Kebschull Barrett on June 12, 2018

An Opportunity Culture extends the reach of excellent teaching—what about doing the same for excellent schoolwide leadership? Public Impact, which founded the national Opportunity Culture initiative, today releases a set of practical materials on Multi-School Leadership: How to extend the reach of excellent principals by having them lead a small group of schools, for more pay, funded within the budgets of their schools.

Multi-school leaders (MSLs) are excellent principals with a record of high-growth student learning who lead a small group of two to eight related or closely located schools. They lead a collaborative team of their schools’ principals while typically continuing to lead one school in the group directly.

The cornerstone of Multi-School Leadership is instructional leadership within each school by multi-classroom leaders. Together, these create a leadership career path with multiple levels, all focused on instructional excellence, frequent guidance and support for teachers and principals, and keeping great educators working directly with students.

These new roles also allow paid, full-time residencies for both aspiring teachers and principals—entirely within schools’ regular budgets. (Public Impact will be publishing more on residencies in the near future.)

 


New Multi-School Leadership Materials

Multi-School Leadership model; summary

Job descriptions: Multi-school leader, principal, instructional assistant principal/principal resident, operations manager\Other tools: MSL Schedule Specifications, MSL Critical Design Decisions

More: Look for selection guidance, tools for managing multiple schools, and more—coming soon!


 

Benefits of Multi-School Leadership

  • Reach more teachers and their students with excellent leadership
  • Let outstanding principals advance with higher pay, while continuing to lead instructional excellence
  • Help all principals and teachers continuously improve their leadership and instruction
  • Retain principals longer by helping them handle the job well and succeed with students
  • Build a strong pipeline of excellent instructional leaders, with a career path for development

 

How Do Multi-School Leaders Lead?
Multi-school leaders:

  • Lead their team of school principals to review data for each school and for the schools overall to identify the best approaches to achieve student success.
  • Guide each school’s top instructional leader in key elements of instructional and administrative leadership.
  • Observe and give feedback, coach, and lead performance data analysis and problem-solving throughout the multi-school team.
  • Rotate working in person in the schools they lead, connecting personally with teachers, staff, and families.
  • Take accountability for student learning, teacher satisfaction, and other outcomes in all schools led. Multi-school leaders earn supplements above principal pay, typically 10 to 40 percent, depending on spans and budgets. All pay supplements are funded within the total budgets of the schools in the group.

 

The Foundation: Multi-Classroom Leadership
Multi-classroom leaders:

  • Are teacher-leaders with a track record of high-growth student learning and leadership qualities.
  • Lead a small grade or subject team: co-planning, coaching, co-teaching, and modeling instruction and data analysis for and with the team.
  • Continue to teach part of the time, often by leading small-group instruction.
  • Work with other multi-classroom leaders as a team to help principals lead instruction, behavior policies, and other critical activities affecting learning in each school.
  • Take accountability for student learning, teacher satisfaction, and other outcomes in all classrooms led.

Because multi-classroom leaders co-lead instruction schoolwide, other changes in schoolwide leadership roles to allow multi-school leadership become possible. Research indicates that multi-classroom leadership helps teams of teachers produce substantially higher student learning growth than in typical schools, forming a strong foundation for adding multi-school leadership, too.

Opportunity Culture now includes more than 20 districts in nine states. See the Opportunity Culture Dashboard for more details.

Meeting the Personalization Challenge with New Roles + Blended Learning

written by Sharon Kebschull Barrett on May 24, 2018

Amid all the buzz about personalizing learning, what can we learn from schools getting great results? In Public Impact’s new report with the Clayton Christensen Institute, Innovative Staffing to Personalize Learning, we analyzed eight schools and school networks that are not only personalizing learning, but also getting strong learning results with disadvantaged students.

What’s different about these schools compared with the norm? New staffing models combined with blended learning. In these schools, blended learning does not replace teachers. Instead, blended learning augments the ability of multiple adults to understand and meet the needs of individual students in a collaborative workplace.

Research about Public Impact’s Opportunity Culture initiative has already shown positive student learning gains in district schools where multi-classroom leaders lead small, collaborative teaching teams, many of which use digital tools to keep track of student progress. But what about these other efforts?

[Read more…]

Public Impact’s Opportunity Culture in the News

written by Sharon Kebschull Barrett on May 14, 2018

What’s new with Opportunity Culture? Recent news coverage highlights the growth and successes of Opportunity Culture, an initiative of Public Impact:

Jessica Smith (left) leads a teaching team as a multi-classroom leader in Indianapolis Public Schools.

Guilford school board wants flexibility to help 9 low-performing schools: Jessie Pounds of the News & Record reported on the expansion of Opportunity Culture into nine schools in Greensboro, N.C., with the district planning for more. “I am really grateful that we have taken a very significant step in hopefully providing much needed support and resources,” said Guilford County Schools board member Byron Gladden.

How long should teachers work before receiving tenure? In a discussion of tenure in California, Education Dive reporter Amelia Harper notes the need to develop teachers as leaders: “Administrators can use professional development to develop teacher leaders or can work with organizations, such as Public Impact to implement models in which teachers oversee and support teachers in multiple classrooms. By doing so, they can help make more of their teachers tenure-worthy, whether they receive tenure in their state or not.”

3 Vance schools set to launch Opportunity Culture initiatives: Miles Bates of the Henderson (N.C.) Daily Dispatch reports on the expansion of Opportunity Culture schools in the Vance County Schools District. “It will provide us with the opportunity to expose excellence in teaching to all of our children and will be great support for our teachers,” said Principal Marylaura McKoon. “It really is a win-win situation. It will do good things for our school.”

Teachers kept quitting this Indianapolis school. Here’s how the principal got them to stay: Chalkbeat reporter Dylan Peers McCoy reported on the exciting news that after years of high turnover, Opportunity Culture was making a difference in teacher retention at Lew Wallace Elementary. When he surveyed his students this year, Principal Jeremy Baugh said, 97 percent said they planned to return next year. Read about what the team teachers and multi-classroom leaders say about the support they received. “I can’t even imagine doing it without Jessica,” first-year teacher Abby Campbell said about her multi-classroom leader, Jessica Smith. “I would’ve been a hot mess.” Education Dive noted the results as well.

Guilford County Becomes N.C.’s 5th Opportunity Culture District

written by Sharon Kebschull Barrett on April 19, 2018

Under Superintendent Sharon Contreras, Guilford County Schools, based in Greensboro, N.C., has joined the national Opportunity Culture initiative to extend the reach of excellent teachers and their teams to more students, for more pay, within schools’ recurring budgets.

Researchers at the Brookings Institution and American Institutes for Research released a study in January showing the effect Opportunity Culture can have: Teachers who were on average at the 50th percentile in student learning gains, and who then joined teams led by multi-classroom leaders, produced learning gains equivalent to those of teachers from the 75th to 85th percentile in math, and, in six of the seven statistical models, from 66th to 72nd percentile in reading.

Opportunity Culture, founded and led by Public Impact of Chapel Hill-Carrboro, N.C., now includes more than 20 districts in nine states, including five in North Carolina. Guilford will be the second of North Carolina’s five largest districts to join. See the Opportunity Culture Dashboard for more details about the initiative, which has grown to more than 225 schools since implementation began in seven schools in 2013.

Contreras was also the superintendent in Syracuse, N.Y., when she took the unprecedented step of becoming the first collective bargaining Opportunity Culture district in 2014–15, only the third district in the initiative’s pilot phase.

[Read more…]

Personalizing Learning with Innovative Staffing + Blended Learning: 4 New School Profiles

written by Sharon Kebschull Barrett on April 10, 2018

As part of a deep look at how schools rethink how they are organized to address each student’s needs, Public Impact and the Clayton Christensen Institute today released the second set of profiles of schools and teachers using innovative staffing with blended learning. These profiles, many with accompanying videos, set the stage for an upcoming white paper analyzing the patterns of the schools’ and teachers’ experiences.

We focused on schools or school networks serving disadvantaged populations that achieved better-than-typical student learning and provided students with more personalized experiences while using new staffing models and blended learning.

[Read more…]

Innovative Staffing to Personalize Learning: School Profiles

written by Sharon Kebschull Barrett on March 14, 2018

How can schools begin to address all their students’ individual learning needs? Blended learning is increasingly part of the answer schools consider—but what about a broader rethinking of how schools are organized and staffed?

At Public Impact, we’ve been working with the Clayton Christensen Institute to take a close look at eight schools/school networks around the country using innovative staffing models to personalize learning—district, charter, and private schools. We’ve just published the first of two sets of short profiles of these schools. The profiles, many with accompanying videos, show the challenges they aim to address and their early years of staffing innovations.

In the coming months, we will publish a second set of profiles and a white paper connecting the dots and analyzing the patterns of their experiences.

We focused on schools or school networks serving disadvantaged populations that achieved better-than-typical student learning and provided students with more personalized experiences while using new staffing models and blended learning.

[Read more…]

Next Page »

Public Impact®

Public Impact, LLC
Chapel Hill, NC
919-240-7955

Public Impact encourages the free use, reproduction, and distribution of our materials, but we require attribution. If you adapt the materials, you must include on every page “Adapted from PublicImpact.com; Copyright Public Impact” in the font size specified here.

Materials may not be sold, leased, licensed, or otherwise distributed for compensation. See our Terms of Use page or contact us for more information.

Public Impact is certified as a living wage employer by Orange County Living Wage.

Search

Subscribe

Sign Up for E-News!
 


 
Read Back Issues of our
E-Newsletter

 
Subscribe to our blog with RSS

Follow

New from Public Impact

Employment Opportunities—Coordinators and Interns
Public Impact is seeking candidates for coordinators and interns.

Learning in Real Time—How Charter Schools Served Students During Covid-19 Closures
Profiles highlight how charter schools were able to respond quickly to school closures during the pandemic and continue to serve their students well.

Building an Effective Staff—Profiles of Leaders of Color
Three-part series looks at how being a person of color affected the ways in which successful charter school leaders built schools where students, families, and staff learn, grow, and thrive.

Engaging Families—Profiles of Leaders of Color
Three-part series looks at how being a person of color affected the ways in which successful charter school leaders built schools where students, families, and staff learn, grow, and thrive.

Building a Strong School Culture—Profiles of Leaders of Color
Three-part series looks at how being a person of color affected the ways in which successful charter school leaders built schools where students, families, and staff learn, grow, and thrive.

The Impact of School Restarts—Lessons from Four Indianapolis Schools
Report analyzes how enrollment, demographic, and student performance data changed following the restarts of four charter schools in Indianapolis, IN.

Learning from Project L.I.F.T.—Legacy of a Public-Private School Turnaround Initiative
Report examines successes, challenges, and lessons from a private-public district turnaround initiative.

Public Impact, LLC | 919-240-7955 | Terms of Use | © Public Impact 2000-2021 | Wordpress website design by LeGa Design Group