What would it take for states to listen to educators and support the talented people they already have in their schools? In Pennsylvania and Mississippi, two nonprofits recently sang the same tune: Support teachers and students through proven staffing redesign. Teach Plus PA and Mississippi First have issued calls to action by their states and districts that set an example for the nation.
Like them, we believe in the talented teachers schools already have, and in the power of staffing redesign to dramatically improve school for both students and teachers.
But in both states—and throughout the country—details matter deeply. States should not provide funding for a “let all flowers bloom” approach. Students and teachers need staffing design with a track record of success, state monitoring of design fidelity, and continuous improvement using data to maintain strong outcomes.
The nation’s 50-plus years of experience show that “strategic staffing,” “teacher leadership,” and “teaming” alone do not get results. Successful staffing models require precise design elements that work together to boost student learning and pay and support teachers more, within recurring budgets.
Since 2013, we have collaborated with schools to extend the reach of excellent teachers and their small teams to more students, for more pay, sustainably—and joyfully. Our Opportunity Culture® staffing models have shown themselves in classrooms to improve learning and educator careers, and align with the recommendations Teach Plus and Mississippi First made.
We examine those alignments here, since both reports highlight Opportunity Culture design.
But first, we congratulate Teach Plus PA and Mississippi First for bringing teacher voices to the fore and forcefully making the case for a commitment by states and districts to support proven staffing redesign—because students can’t wait.
What Teachers Need: Action at Every Level
In The Weight They Carry: Life as a Teacher in Mississippi and Reimagining Teaching: How Strategic Staffing Can Empower Teachers & Accelerate Learning in PA, the organizations began by listening—to surveys of Mississippi teachers and to participants in the PA Needs Teachers 2025 summit. The Teach Plus report, created by its Pennsylvania Policy Fellows, includes many recommendations similar to those of Mississippi First—because while their states look dissimilar in many ways, teacher concerns remain strikingly consistent.
With 19.4% of Mississippi teachers leaving their positions in 2024 and Pennsylvanians concerned also about teacher attrition, the need for major change feels urgent. Working conditions—isolating one-teacher-one-classroom jobs instead of team collaboration, and a lack of time to achieve classroom excellence—plus low salaries combine to push too many teachers out, the reports say.
So, first, we agree with the Mississippi report’s recommendation for an across-the-board salary increase. Public Impact has long supported this, especially when paired with staffing redesign that achieves results for students and pays educators in advanced roles even more—creating a sustainable, well-paid paraprofessional-through-principal career path.
We also second the report’s call for action at every level—not only in Mississippi, but throughout the U.S.: for state legislatures to pilot and evaluate school staffing redesign efforts; for districts to proactively explore staffing redesign; and for state departments of education to support districts in the transition to new staffing design. This aligned and accountable approach, with a dual focus on teacher retention and student outcomes, shows the most promise for widespread, sustained shifts that teachers and students deserve.
Teach Plus PA calls for policymakers to fund staffing redesign pilots and rigorous evaluation of them, or for philanthropists to step up, to cover the cost of the staffing redesign transition and associated professional learning. On a larger scale, it says, Pennsylvania legislators also should consider creating a grant program to fund strategic staffing pilots statewide.
Both reports point to North Carolina’s advanced teaching roles (ATR) program as an example of such a grant program. This funding, for which the majority of chosen districts selected Opportunity Culture design, has demonstrated how a relatively small amount of funding can generate huge student learning success.
Using the 13 years of data we have collected so far, Opportunity Culture design has evolved into certification standards associated with student learning and educator satisfaction. Sixty-two percent of U.S. Title I schools that reached all students with current Opportunity Culture design standards produced high-growth learning schoolwide in 2024–25, compared with 21 percent of Title I schools without Opportunity Culture teams—nearly three times the rate of high-growth learning. North Carolina schools with Certified Opportunity Culture School® status also were far more likely to exceed learning growth expectations schoolwide than schools not using Opportunity Culture staffing designs, 2024–25 data from the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction shows.
Teach Plus PA also calls on schools to engage teacher prep partners in their staffing design process. All state-supported pilots should include teacher resident/apprentice roles. In Opportunity Culture designs, teacher residents and paraprofessionals on Multi-Classroom Leader® teams can boost teacher pipelines for districts, learn on the job from teachers with prior high-growth learning outcomes, and provide student and teaching team support, especially through small-group tutoring. Design matters here, too: Team leaders guide and coach all team teachers, not just residents—a detail critical to high-growth learning schoolwide.
To address implementation complexity, Teach Plus recommends using a proven model, and starting small but expanding rapidly—exactly what Opportunity Culture design does. Districts typically start with a handful of schools, then most scale up fast. Small to medium-size districts can transform all schools by year three, providing a balance between engaging school-level design teams and reaching students and teachers with the benefits.
Teach Plus PA also says districts should support the shifts in mindset and culture needed for redesign success, through strong communication. Transparent, consistent communication has long correlated with school success in Opportunity Culture data.
Both reports say districts should adopt high-quality instructional materials (HQIM) and ensure that teachers are trained to use them. Opportunity Culture teacher-led teams are perfectly suited to supporting new HQIM. Louisiana’s Madison Parish schools tightly entwined implementation of Multi-Classroom Leader teaching teams with new HQIM, and MCL™ teams in Wilson County, North Carolina, led the way on the science of reading.
Additionally, Mississippi First calls on both the legislature and districts to reduce noninstructional burdens on teachers—guaranteeing a duty-free lunch period and eliminating unnecessary tasks. This, too, goes hand-in-hand with Opportunity Culture design principles, which call for providing protected in-school time for planning, collaboration, and development.
Finally, Mississippi First recommends that districts prioritize high-quality professional development for principals, which Opportunity Culture design also makes possible through the Multi-School Leader™ role, in which a successful principal leads a small team of principals, providing support similar to the MCL role.
In our work, based on teacher input, 20 years of research, nearly 15 years of data collection, and 13 years of data analytics nationally, we have seen what schools can do when given flexible-with-guardrail design options to fit their needs.
Rigorous third-party studies have shown that students made about a half year of extra learning growth annually when taught by Opportunity Culture teams, on average. In addition, students in other classrooms in these same schools added over three weeks of learning in one study—a “spillover” that would, over their K–12 years, give them an extra year’s worth of learning.
These schools have paid teachers more, with team leaders who have a record of high-growth learning results, earning supplements averaging 20% of teacher pay, and team teachers and paraprofessionals earning more, too.
To ensure they can keep paying educators on MCL teams more for the long haul, schools reallocate funds within their regular budgets. And they have revamped schedules to give teachers school-day time to collaborate, plan, and analyze student data together, to improve teaching and learning on their teams.
By paying attention to what teachers really want, these staffing models reduced vacancies and turnover—LEAs that tracked their data saw vacancy rates drop 75% to 90% after implementing, and turnover fall by more than 50%—and boosted job satisfaction. In annual anonymous surveys, 97–99% of teacher-leaders want these models to continue, along with 90%+ of teachers on their teams, and are more satisfied with their profession than other U.S. teachers in the 2024 Educators for Excellence survey.
The U.S. feels on the cusp of breaking through, many years after education organizations began decrying the one-teacher-one-classroom model as outdated and ineffective. Statewide grant programs in North Carolina and New Mexico, and private philanthropy support in Oklahoma, which focus on grantees who use designs proven to improve student outcomes, should be just the beginning.
With teacher-led policy efforts, large scale K–12 improvements are finally possible, just as teacher-led teams have created breakthroughs to excellence in schools.