State Policies to Reach Every Student With Excellent Teachers

Brief [pdf] | Checklist [pdf]

To ensure that every student has access to excellent teaching consistently, states and districts must help excellent teachers extend their reach to far more students, directly and by leading teaching teams, and earn far more, within budget. How can states craft the policies to support this?

Public Impact explains how in this checklist and brief. These update our earlier working paper Seizing Opportunity at the Top, based on our experience collaborating with several districts and hundreds of teachers and administrators, and analysis of their states’ policies. States must get these policies right for the sake of the outstanding and committed teachers in schools implementing Opportunity Culture models—and their students.

When schools create an Opportunity Culture for teachers and students, they allow excellent teachers to extend their reach for more pay,  within budget, and create new roles and in-school time for all teachers to learn on the job from the best, contribute to excellence immediately, improve their teaching skills, and pursue career advancement.

Once policymakers commit to reaching every student with excellent teaching consistently, they can focus on the policies needed to enable an Opportunity Culture statewide, presented in these publications in six categories:

• Making the Opportunity Culture Commitment
• Identifying and Developing Teaching Excellence
• Flexibility to Staff Schools
• Flexibility for Instructional Delivery
• Accountability and Feedback for Results
• Rewarding and Retaining Excellent Teachers

See the checklist for a quick rundown of the policies—separated by those urgently needed for pilot districts or schools and optimal policies to support a successful statewide scale-up—and complete details on them in the brief.

See the table below for a quick preview.