By Public Impact, May 12, 2022

As districts seek innovations to bolster student academics and bring support and joy to students and teachers, the Opportunity Culture model continues to spread and produce results, even in another challenging pandemic year.

Each year, Public Impact analyzes Opportunity Culture data to improve its materials and its work with schools and districts. With the overarching goal of reaching all students with high-growth learning, Public Impact has expanded the Opportunity Culture initiative’s participating schools (including those committed to but not yet implementing Opportunity Culture designs) by 50 percent each year, on average—helping schools and districts make changes that educators love, with increased career opportunities and support.

As the Opportunity Culture Dashboard shows in its 2021–22 update:

• 55 sites—primarily districts, plus a smaller number of charter management organizations—now are part of the Opportunity Culture initiative.
• Those sites include more than 640 schools that are implementing, designing, or committed to launch Opportunity Culture designs; 93% of those now in the design or implementation phases are eligible for Title I funding.
• Nationally, Opportunity Culture sites now reach over 120,000 students with excellent teaching…
• and they reach over 4,500 teachers with advanced roles or on-the-job support and development on teaching teams.
• For extending their reach through Opportunity Culture roles, over 1,180 teachers earned more:
  • a total of $11.9 million in extra pay in 2021–22 alone
  • and $41.6 million since Opportunity Culture implementation began.

In the annual, anonymous Opportunity Culture survey, educators continue to express strong confidence about Opportunity Culture implementation in their schools—despite many taking the survey during the height of stress from the Omicron surge. Ninety-eight percent of multi-classroom leaders said they want Opportunity Culture roles to continue in their schools; 94 percent of staff in all Opportunity Culture roles agree that teachers in Opportunity Culture are held to high professional standards for delivering instruction. See the dashboard for more survey results.

In Opportunity Culture sites, each participating school forms a design and implementation team of teachers and administrators that determines how to use Opportunity Culture roles to reach more of their students with excellent teaching. The design teams reallocate school budgets to permanently fund substantial pay supplements for those in Opportunity Culture roles and for teacher resident salaries, in contrast to temporary grant-funded programs.

The foundational role is that of a multi-classroom leader, or MCL—a teacher with a track record of high-growth student learning who leads a small teaching team for substantially higher pay. An MCL’s team may include team reach teachers, who—critically in a time of teacher shortages —directly teach more students, typically without raising instructional group sizes, for more pay. This avoids filling a portion of teacher vacancies with long-term substitutes. Research-proven paraprofessional tutoring, guided by MCL-led teachers, fills the gap. To learn more about Opportunity Culture schools and these and other roles, designed to maximize both student learning growth and educators’ paid career opportunities, see OpportunityCulture.org. Read the results of third-party studies of Opportunity Culture implementation here.