11 States, 150K+ Students, Positive Educator Feedback: 2022–23 Opportunity Culture® Results: June Opportunity Culture® Newsletter

by | June 1, 2023

The June newsletter includes updates from the Opportunity Culture® Dashboard; a welcome to new Opportunity Culture® Sites; tools and resources; Opportunity Culture® news, and more.

11 States, 150K+ Students, Positive Educator Feedback: 2022–23 Opportunity Culture® Results

As the Opportunity Culture® Dashboard shows in its just-released 2022–23 update, the Opportunity Culture® initiative keeps growing and reaching many more students—while paying teachers more. And at Public Impact®, new data helps us keep learning how to help Opportunity Culture® schools get even better! 

Each year, Public Impact®, which founded the national Opportunity Culture® initiative, analyzes Opportunity Culture® data and survey results. With the overarching goal of reaching all students with high-growth learning, Public Impact® helps schools and districts make innovative staffing changes that educators love, with increased pay, career opportunities, and support. 

As the Opportunity Culture® Dashboard shows in its 2022–23 update:

  • 60 sites—nearly all traditional districts—now are part of the Opportunity Culture® initiative. 
  • Those sites include more than 800 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. (See our welcome to the newest implementing sites below!)
  • Nationally, Opportunity Culture® sites now reach over 150,000 students with excellent teaching…
  • and they reach over 5,400 teachers with advanced roles or on-the-job development and support on teaching teams. 
  • Over 1,600 Opportunity Culture® educators earned more:
    • a total of $16.4 million in extra pay in 2022–23 alone
    • and $57.9 million since Opportunity Culture® implementation began. 
    • MCL supplements averaged 21% of average pay.

In the annual, anonymous Opportunity Culture® survey, educators continue to express strong confidence about Opportunity Culture® implementation in their schools. Ninety-seven percent of educators in the Multi-Classroom Leader role and 87 percent of all staff in Opportunity Culture® roles said they want these roles to continue in their schools; 95 percent of staff in all Opportunity Culture® roles agreed that Opportunity Culture® teachers 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 students with excellent teaching. The design teams reallocate school budgets to permanently fund pay supplements for those in Opportunity Culture® roles and for teacher resident salaries, in contrast to temporary grant-funded programs. In addition to these supplements, the Opportunity Culture® initiative continues to support higher pay for all teachers, where budgets allow.

The Multi-Classroom Leader, or MCL, role forms the foundation. MCLs are teachers with a track record of high-growth student learning who lead a small teaching team for substantially higher pay. An MCL’s team may include those in Team Reach Teacher (TRT) roles, 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. The team gets support and MCL-guided tutoring from advanced paraprofessionals in the Reach Associate role. Third-party studies have found that, on average, teachers who joined MCL teams moved from producing 50th percentile student learning growth to 77th percentile student learning growth in both reading and math. The gains equate to an extra half-year of learning for students each year, on average.

Read the full newsletter…

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