Case Study: How Charlotte Zone Planned Opportunity Culture Schools
In late 2011, Denise Watts, a Charlotte-Mecklenburg zone superintendent, approached Public Impact for help meeting the goals she had as executive director for the new Project L.I.F.T., a $55 million public-private partnership to improve academics at historically low-performing, high-need schools in western Charlotte, N.C.
“If we didn’t try something truly different to change education, many of my students were not going to graduate,” Watts says.
Public Impact’s second Opportunity Culture case study, Charlotte, N.C.’s Project L.I.F.T.:…
Indiana Charter Board to Applicants with Innovative Models: Apply Today
How can a charter authorizer encourage innovation while also holding applicants and schools to high standards of quality? The Indiana Charter School Board first tried to do this in spring, and it’s giving applicants another chance today, as it releases its guidelines for the fall cycle of proposals. The board wants applicants to consider proposing dramatically different school models.
Letters of intent are due July 12, with full applications due August 9.
As…
500 Charlotte School Leaders Hear the Promise of an Opportunity Culture
How could an Opportunity Culture help an entire district, not just a few schools? As the keynote speakers at Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s Leadership Conference on Monday, Public Impact’s Bryan C. Hassel and Jiye Grace Han gave 500 leaders—including principals, assistant principals, and district administrators—a chance to envision a district that reaches every student with excellent teachers and teaching teams, for higher pay, within budget.
Four of Charlotte’s Project L.I.F.T. schools will implement their…
1st Opportunity Culture Case Study: Extending One Teacher’s Reach
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…
Q&A: Meet an Opportunity Culture Excellent Teacher
Meet Romain Bertrand: middle school math teacher and Opportunity Culture enthusiast. As this school year winds down, he’s already thoroughly looking forward to the next—when he will become a Multi-Classroom Leader at Ranson IB Middle School, taking accountability for the learning results of 700 students. At Ranson, a Project L.I.F.T. school in Charlotte, N.C., Bertrand sees the opportunities of its new Opportunity Culture—to extend the reach…
In the News: Opportunity Culture Appearances
Recent Opportunity Culture appearances:
- Schools Test New Ways to Deploy Teachers: How Project L.I.F.T. schools in Charlotte are creating an Opportunity Culture to attract and retain top teachers, at Heartland.org. This includes a bit about L.I.F.T. teacher Romain Bertrand–watch this space next week for an Q&A with this excellent teacher who can’t wait to see an Opportunity Culture in place that allows him to stay in the classroom and extend his reach to many more students.
- <a…
3 Nashville Schools Create Paid Student Teacher Role
In Public Impact’s Opportunity Culture school models, we envision roles for a variety of support staff who help excellent teachers and teams extend their reach to more students. Examples include learning coaches, digital lab monitors, assistant teachers, and tutors. These staff members don’t work in isolation, but as critical parts of their teams.
These positions typically have shorter workweeks than teachers (40 hours or less versus teachers’ actual average of 50 to 55) and are narrower…
How City-Based Groups Can Support Ed Tech Quality
In A Better Blend, we explained how schools can boost student outcomes from digital learning by combining it with staffing models that allow excellent teachers to both reach more students and help good teachers excel. Digital learning holds great promise—but only if we combine its power to personalize learning with the power of excellent teaching.
What else could increase the chances of high-quality technology use in our schools? Public Impact has written two reports out…
In the News: Opportunity Culture Appearances
Opportunity Culture recent appearances in the press and elsewhere:
- The full guidelines for the latest round of the Investing in Innovation (i3) grants are out, and they include strong encouragement from the U.S. Department of Education to design, validate, and scale up innovations that extend the reach of excellent teachers. The competition requires applicants to address one of a handful of “Absolute Priorities,” one of which is improving teacher effectiveness. Applicants can…
5th-Largest U.S. District Explores Extending Excellent Teachers’ Reach
At Public Impact, we and our partners provide districts and charter schools with support in implementing models to extend excellent teachers’ reach based on the Opportunity Culture Reach Extension Principles. But we hope others can do this without outside support, and we publish all our models and design tools for free—and continue to add materials—to make that possible. In Nevada, we’ve found what may be the first district to go it alone, using…
Indiana Charter Board Encourages Dramatically Different Models
As Public Impact focuses on its Opportunity Culture initiative—reaching more students with excellent teachers, making sustainably higher pay a reality, and providing job-embedded development—we’ve noted a few examples of charter school networks using redesigned jobs to make this possible.
Rocketship Education, Carpe Diem, and KIPP Empower have been on the cutting edge of using new school models to “extend the reach” of great teachers. Newer CMOs building reach into…
National Charter School Network Forms to Extend Teachers’ Reach
As Public Impact continues our Opportunity Culture quest to reach more students with great teachers, we’re seeing both district and charter schools come on board. In the charter sector, a disproportionate amount of activity is by new charter school organizations.
But these new school providers can’t just ask the school next door—or even the charter school next door—how to make reach models that combine job redesign and technology successful for students and teachers. They need…
In the News: Report on Teacher Pay and the Recession
In a new report on the effects of the recession on teacher salaries in 41 major school districts, the National Council on Teacher Quality found that teacher raises for experience and market forces like inflation were one-third to one-half of what they were at the beginning of the recession. Eighty percent of the districts studied had a total pay freeze or pay cut in at least one school year between 2008-09 and 2011-12–although none…
How Blended Learning Can Improve the Teaching Profession
How can blended learning make things better for teachers? See Improving Conditions & Careers: How Blended Learning Can Improve the Teaching Profession, part of the Digital Learning Now! Smart Series, which Bryan Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel, Public Impact’s co-directors, wrote with John Bailey of Digital Learning Now! and Carri Schneider and Tom Vander Ark of Getting Smart. Imagine: An Opportunity Culture for Teachers and Students
I spent two years teaching in a diverse, high-poverty school on the northwest side of Chicago. And I was fortunate enough to say that even with the incredible growth my students showed in my classroom—in my second year, students averaged more than four years of growth—I was not the best teacher in the building.
On the contrary, I worked with teachers who were simply amazing—who had dedicated five to 10 years to this profession, who made…