Opportunity Culture Fellow Bobby Miles, a multi-classroom leader for an eighth-grade science team in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, will share his views on Tuesday, November 10, as a panelist at the launch event for the Teach Strong Campaign, a national partnership convened by the Center for America Progress to elevate and modernize the teaching profession. Click here for information about attending. The panel is moderated by Amanda Ripley, author of the New York Times bestseller The Smartest Kids in the World, and includes former Rep. George Miller of California, senior education advisor at Cengage Learning; Mary Cathryn Ricker, executive vice president of the American Federation of Teachers; and Peggy Brookins, interim president and CEO of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards.
Miles, named Teacher of the Year in 2013, teaches and leads at Ranson IB Middle School, a school with an 84% economically disadvantaged population that is part of the Project L.I.F.T. zone of very high-need, historically low-performing schools. In 2014-15, Ranson, using roles like Mr Miles’s throughout the school, achieved a student growth score in the top 1 percent of schools in North Carolina, and Mr. Miles’s science team posted extremely high growth. As a multi-classroom leader, he continues to teach while leading a team of three other teachers and two paraprofessionals, co-teaching, coaching, planning, and collaborating with them, for higher pay, and is personally accountable for the results of the entire team’s 421 students. In Project L.I.F.T., multi-classroom leaders, or MCLs, earn a supplement of $13,000 to $23,000—50 percent of the average teacher salary in North Carolina—and that supplement comes from reallocating school budgets, not temporary grants.
Read Miles’ blog post about being accountable for 421 scholars, first published on RealClearEducation.com.
Public Impact is one of the national organizations that make up the Teach Strong Campaign. Strong teacher leadership is critical to Teach Strong’s goals, and the campaign is using many of the elements of the Opportunity Culture Virtuous Cycle to describe a shared vision for the teaching profession.