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Emily Ayscue Hassel
Co-President
Emily Ayscue Hassel is Co-President of Public Impact®. As a passionate advocate for recognizing and elevating human talent, she provides strategic leadership and oversight to work on school redesign and other approaches to achieve dramatic improvement in pre–K to grade 12 learning results and educator satisfaction. Hassel is the lead designer of the Opportunity Culture® initiative, which has produced dramatic learning gains of nearly an extra half year annually in third-party studies and has doubled to tripled schoolwide high-growth learning rates of schools in numerous states. The initiative uses over 25 years of cross-sector, K–12 and international Public Impact research that she led, and nearly 15 years of design data, to help schools and their educators reach more students with excellent teaching and provide paid residencies and apprenticeships, on-the-job support, increased collaboration, and paid career advancement—funded sustainably. Hassel’s co-authored works include numerous visionary pieces pressing the nation to recognize, reward, and better tap the tremendous teaching talent U.S. schools already have, in addition to hundreds of practical tools and materials to help educators redesign their schools for instructional and leadership excellence, and higher pay. She co-developed and led numerous innovations grounded in research and data with collaborative cross-functional teams and educator and administrator input, including design standards for school certification correlated with dramatic gains in student learning and teacher satisfaction. Hassel was a Pahara-Aspen Teacher-Leader Fellow, and previously worked as a consultant and manager for the Hay Group in Boston and Charlotte. Hassel received her undergraduate, law, and master’s in business administration degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she received numerous awards for her leadership and served on the North Carolina Law Review.
Example projects: Hassel co-authored hundreds of works on the core Opportunity Culture design, as well as papers and tools on special education teacher leadership, the adoption of high-quality instructional materials and other instructional excellence approaches, financially sustainable high-dosage tutoring, the concept of one principal leading multiple schools, and many more innovations embedded in teacher-led teams. She co-authored, with Bryan Hassel and others, a series of vision papers inviting the nation to engage in reaching all students with high-growth learning: Opportunity Anew (federal strategic staffing and HQIM policy); 3X for All: Extending the Reach of Education’s Best; Opportunity at the Top; Seizing Opportunity at the Top: How the U.S. Can Reach Every Student with an Excellent Teacher; Seizing Opportunity at the Top II: State Policies to Reach Every Student with Excellent Teaching; An Excellent Principal for Every School: Transforming Schools into Leadership Machines; Paid Educator Residencies, within Budget; ESSA: New Law, New Opportunity; Teacher Tenure Reform; Measuring Teacher and Leader Performance; Excellent Teaching for Every Young Child: Opportunity Culture in Early Childhood Education; Closing Achievement Gaps in Diverse and Low-Poverty Schools; Reaching All Students with Excellent STEM Teachers; Giving Every Student Access to Excellent Teachers: A Vision for Focusing Federal Investments in Education; the chapter on rethinking school staffing in the book Getting the Most Bang for the Education Buck; “Creating a ‘tutoring culture’—for all, by all,” in EducationNC; “Team Teaching Is the Best Use of ESSER Funds to Boost Student Learning after COVID” in The 74; ; “The Big U-Turn: How to bring schools from the brink of doom to stellar success” for Education Next; Try, Try Again: How to Triple the Number of Fixed Failing Schools; Importing Leaders for School Turnarounds; Going Exponential: Growing the Charter School Sector’s Best; the Public Impact series Competencies for Turnaround Success; School Restructuring Under No Child Left Behind: What Works When?; and Improving Teaching Through Pay for Contribution for the National Governor’s Association. Other work includes Picky Parent Guide: Choose Your Child’s School with Confidence; Choosing the Right Preschool eBook for TheSavvySource.com; and Learning Point Associates’ Professional Development: Learning from the Best, a toolkit for education leaders on designing and implementing effective professional development based on award-winning schools and districts in the U.S.