4 Great Examples of Teacher Voice: Opportunity Culture Columns
What is it actually like to be a teacher-leader in an Opportunity Culture school? You can read the Opportunity Culture website to understand how an “OC” school works, and you can watch videos of teachers and administrators talking about why they love their jobs, what their roles are like, and other aspects of creating an Opportunity Culture.
For more in-depth looks at various aspects of an Opportunity Culture,…
What Happens When Charter Schools Achieve Scale
In Early Lessons from Newark’s Experience with Charter Schools, commissioned by Startup:Education, a Public Impact team led by Juli Kim considers the issues and lessons from a school district where the charter sector has grown so large that its effects on traditional schools are impossible to overlook. The Newark school district, long under control of the state of New Jersey, faces challenges driven in part by strong parent demand for high-performing schools and the rapid…
Instead of Ineffective PD, Try Redesigning Teacher Roles
TNTP’s new report The Mirage sheds light on the nation’s failure to advance strong professional learning for U.S. teachers. The report includes a call for redesigning schools to extend the reach of great teachers. TNTP President Dan Weisberg’s Ed Week quote on the report is right—to give teachers a real shot at professional learning that works, the nation “ought to be testing whether there are other models…
Free, In-depth Training Materials for Teaching-Team Leaders
With advice and feedback from the first multi-classroom leaders (MCLs) in the Opportunity Culture initiative, Public Impact has created a free set of in-depth training sessions uniquely suited to the MCL role. The sessions may also benefit other teacher-leaders who lead teams and develop colleagues on the job.
Multi-Classroom Leadership is the most popular model chosen by school design teams implementing <a href="http://opportunityculture.org/" target="_blank"…
Opportunity Culture Lessons from the First Two Years
In our companion post, Opportunity Culture Outcomes: The First Two Years, we shared student, teacher, and design outcomes from the first two years of Public Impact’s Opportunity Culture initiative, which so far has affected more than 30 schools, 450 teachers, and 16,000 students.
The outcomes are promising—better student growth, higher pay, strong teacher satisfaction. However, some pioneering districts, schools, and teachers achieved better, faster results than others. Strengths…
Opportunity Culture Outcomes: The First Two Years
This post first appeared in Education Next.
Maybe it’s because we’re turning 50 in the coming year and have together been pondering the plight of the poor and their lost human potential since we were 20. But we’re weary of hearing education reformers pretend that just changing policies and management systems—name your favorite—will put an excellent teacher in every classroom. Even though most of us have spilled voluminous ink on those topics.
What…
Syracuse Schools Build on First Opportunity Culture Year
After a year of piloting new staffing models that extend the reach of excellent teachers and their teams to more students, for more pay, the Syracuse City School District, in partnership with the Syracuse Teachers Association, has expanded its Opportunity Culture initiative in 2015–16 to four more schools. The initiative began in 2014–15 in four of the highest-need schools in Syracuse, which is New York’s fifth-largest school district.
“In the SCSD we…
How to Build an Opportunity Culture: New, Free Toolkit
Extend the reach of excellent teachers and their teams to many more students, for more pay, within available budgets. Provide much more on-the-job, school-day collaboration, planning time, and support to teachers. When a district decides it wants to do this, then what?
Big changes demand big help, and we’ve just released our free Opportunity Culture Toolkit, which walks districts and schools through all the phases of building an…
How to Hire Great Teachers and Teacher-Leaders: Free Toolkits
In an Opportunity Culture, districts and schools offer new roles that extend the reach of excellent teachers and their teams to more students, for more pay, within recurring budgets and without forcing class-size increases. The new roles put districts in a much stronger position to hire great teachers—but only if they recruit and select well.
We’ve posted two new toolkits to make that work easier, walking human resources officers and principals through…
Texas Launches Statewide Opportunity Culture Initiative
The Texas Education Agency (TEA) has made Texas the first state to support multiple districts in creating an Opportunity Culture, joining the national initiative designed to extend the reach of excellent teachers and their teams to more students, for more pay, within recurring budgets.
The Big Spring Independent School District, an eight-campus district in a town of about 28,000 people in west Texas, is recruiting for its first year of implementation in the 2015–16 school year,…
RealClearEducation.com Launches Opportunity Culture Series
On RealClearEducation.com today, Multi-Classroom Leader (MCL) Kristin Cubbage of Ashley Park Pre-K-8 in Charlotte, N.C., contrasts the support teachers get in an Opportunity Culture school to the support in typical schools—and issues a call to action to policymakers, administrators, and her fellow teachers:
“No school has enough administrators to coach every teacher. In a regular school, the average teacher receives three to…
Indianapolis District Lays Opportunity Culture Groundwork
Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS) is joining the Opportunity Culture initiative to extend the reach of its excellent teachers and teams they lead to more students, for more pay, within budget. With the support of Public Impact, IPS will lay the groundwork by June for up to six schools to opt into piloting Opportunity Culture staffing models, to reach many more students with great teaching and create career paths for teachers to join teams, advance their…
Op-Ed: N.C. Must Invest to Magnify Great Teachers’ Impact
“North Carolina will never make the educational strides it needs until the best educators have far greater impact for a lot more pay,” say Public Impact’s co-directors in an op-ed in Saturday’s Raleigh News and Observer.
Noting that the state’s General Assembly “rightfully added 6 percent focused primarily on early-career teachers’ base pay,” Bryan C. Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel point out that other states also increased salaries for teachers, and likely…
Opportunity Culture in the News: Real Clear Education, NPR
Looking for an overview of an Opportunity Culture, and an example of multi-classroom leadership in action? These could get you started:
- Today, Public Impact co-directors Bryan and Emily Hassel kick off a monthly series of posts on Real Clear Education by Opportunity Culture educators. They explain the concepts behind an Opportunity culture as background to the series, which…
What Makes an Opportunity Culture Different?
When Public Impact launched the Opportunity Culture initiative, we were clear on the goal: reach as many students as possible with excellent teaching. As our team worked with teachers and principals, we committed to a second goal: provide outstanding, lasting, well-paid career opportunities to educators.
As researchers, we saw many pay and career path programs fall short of those goals–and still see too many today. Too often, pay programs fail to provide opportunities for teachers to…