Portal Login

Beverley Tyndall

5 Steps to Design Highly Paid Teacher Career Paths

October 29, 2014

To help all students reach their potential, district leaders must ensure that every student has consistent access to excellent teaching. Opportunity Culture compensation and career path structures help make that possible, and the new guide out today from Public Impact shows how.

Teacher Pay and Career Paths in an Opportunity Culture: A Practical Policy Guide shows how districts can design teacher career paths that will keep excellent teachers in the classroom and extend their reach to more students, for more pay, within budget. When districts design these paths, they create opportunities:

  • for excellent teachers to reach more students directly and by leading teaching teams,
  • for solid teachers to contribute to excellence immediately, and
  • for all teachers to receive the support and development they deserve.

The full guide walks a district through the organizing steps and details of designing Opportunity Culture pay and career paths that fit its needs and values. It includes an overview of key Opportunity Culture concepts, graphics and explanations detailing new school models and roles, and assistance for evaluating the impact of different compensation design choices. The steps guide districts to ensuring financial sustainability and designing a complete career lattice.

The summary provides a brief overview and graphics that show how pay and career paths work at a glance.

Teacher Pay and Career Paths in an Opportunity Culture®

October 27, 2014

To help all students reach their potential, district leaders must ensure that every student has consistent access to excellent teaching. Opportunity Culture compensation and career path structures help make that possible, and this guide shows how.

State Leaders: Set These Policies to Enable an Opportunity Culture®

October 15, 2014

What students want--great teachers every year--and what teachers want--career advancement without leaving teaching, on-the-job professional learning and collaboration, and the chance to help more students succeed--come together in an Opportunity Culture®. What's the...

Seizing Opportunity at the Top II

October 14, 2014

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?

Being a Multi-Classroom Leader: “It Is My Dream Job”

July 22, 2014

“I glance at my computer clock; it is already time for the next block and I forgot to eat lunch. When a Frenchman forgets about eating, this is a sign that he loves what he does.”

So says Romain Bertrand, the first multi-classroom leader (MCL) at Ranson IB Middle School in Charlotte, N.C., today in “Expand Your Reach: New-world role combines coaching teachers and teaching students” on Education Next. Walking readers through a piece of a typical day, Bertrand explains how he leads two pods of three teachers and one learning coach (or teaching assistant) each–and is responsible for the learning outcomes of 800 sixth- and seventh-graders.

In an Opportunity Culture, MCLs earn significantly higher pay; in the Project L.I.F.T. schools within Charlotte-Mecklenburg, that means up to $23,000 more, or 50 percent more than average teacher pay in North Carolina. MCLs get to continue teaching while providing on-the-job professional learning for their teams, planning, coaching, and collaborating with them.

Bertrand loves his job–and he wants the world to know, so other teachers can have similar, highly paid opportunities that let them advance while staying in the classroom, reaching more students with great teaching. For more about him, Multi-Classroom Leadership, and the Opportunity Culture schools in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, see:

Leadership Keys: How to Get Great Principals, Use Teacher-Leaders

July 11, 2014

Lacking Leaders: The Challenges of Principal Recruitment, Selection, and Placement, which Public Impact’s Daniela Doyle and Gillian Locke wrote for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, put a needed focus on the importance of finding the best principal for each school. By getting an inside look at the hiring processes of five urban districts around the country, Doyle and Locke highlighted how far short those processes fall, even in districts they deem “ahead of the curve.”

In response, the authors offer six recommendations for district leaders seeking to improve their recruitment, selection, and placement of school principals:

  1. Make the job more appealing—and manageable. Give principals the power to lead, including authority over key staffing decisions, operations, and resources. And give them a cadre of teacher-leaders to share the load today—and fill the pipeline for tomorrow (more on that below).
  2. Pay great leaders what they’re worth. Compensation must be commensurate with the demands, responsibilities, and risks of the job. Principals should earn considerably more than other school staff with less responsibility and should be duly compensated for producing success.
  3. Take an active approach to recruitment. Develop criteria to identify promising candidates inside and outside of the district. Actively seek out those individuals. Woo them when necessary. Identify and prepare internal candidates systematically—and early—and eliminate barriers that discourage high-potential candidates.
  4. Evaluate candidates against the competencies and skills that research shows successful principals demonstrate. Then create rubrics for judging candidates against those competencies. Train raters to use the rubrics effectively.
  5. Design the placement process to match particular schools’ needs with particular candidates’ strengths. Assess schools’ priorities and leadership needs, and develop criteria to assess a candidate’s fit.
  6. Continually evaluate hiring efforts. Develop metrics to assess each stage of the process, particularly in relation to the school results that follow.

 

(See Education Week‘s look at the report here.)

Public Impact has long focused on the importance of school leadership, especially when districts attempt to turn around failing schools—check our list of resources below.

And we see real promise for bettering the conditions for principals—making the role more appealing and strengthening the much-discussed, truly important pipeline of future leaders—through our Opportunity Culture work. Opportunity Culture schools extend the reach of excellent teachers to more students, for more pay, within budget. One way to do this is by creating the multi-classroom leader (MCL) role—in which an excellent teacher continues to teach while leading a team of teachers, with plenty of school-day time for planning, collaboration, and providing daily on-the-job professional learning to the team.

MCLs can help principals tremendously. These teacher-leaders mean principals no longer bear sole responsibility for the leadership and evaluation of all teachers in the building. And while most MCLs take the job because they want to continue teaching, some will find the principal role appealing, creating a pipeline of future principals experienced as instructional leaders.

We all know how much school leaders matter. Let’s put some remedies into action—starting with these.

See more about Multi-Classroom Leaders:

Doing the Math on Opportunity Culture®’s Early Impact

June 24, 2014

As we’ve noted in previous posts, schools continue to join the Opportunity Culture initiative, eager to work with teachers on redesigning their teaching roles and career paths. As the first year of implementation in Opportunity Culture pilot schools wound down, we looked at the impact of just the 31 leading-edge schools who had joined the initiative by April. (Six more high schools joined in May but are not included in these figures, as they hadn’t yet had a chance to make their Opportunity Culture plans).

What can we project for these 31 schools by the time they implement their models fully, over three years?

* About 15,000 students reached consistently by excellent teachers and their excellence-focused teams each year

* About 450 teachers earning far more in new roles that let teachers focus on what they do best, learn from excellent teacher-leaders, and advance without leaving the classroom**

* Almost $4 million in extra teacher pay annually in just these 31 implementing schools

* About 80,000 new, additional hours total for planning, collaboration, and on-the-job learning during school hours annually—180 more hours per teacher, per year

* About $290,000 to $900,000 in additional lifetime pay, in current dollars, per teacher (this number will be more than $1 million as some schools implement wider-span teacher-leader roles)

* About $130 million total additional pay if all 450 teachers (or others like them) remain in these uniquely financially sustainable career advancement models for 35 years. Within budget.

See more below. And see Projected Statewide Impact of “Opportunity Culture” School Models to see how an Opportunity Culture can affect a state’s economy as well—to the tune of billions of dollars in state domestic product increases.

These are the numbers for just 31 schools. Imagine the numbers when a whole nation has schools in which teachers lead, learn on the job, help more students excel, and get paid for it—forever.

Opportunity Culture® Schools: Showing N.C. How to Keep Teachers

June 23, 2014

For these CMS teachers, change doesn’t mean exodus: In Friday’s Charlotte Observer, reporter Ann Doss Helms checked back in with Charlotte-Mecklenburg (CMS) teachers who’d been in the news in the past year over their frustrations–reflected across North Carolina classrooms–with teacher pay turmoil in the state. Helms wrote:

After a year of frustration with low pay and challenging conditions, teachers Marie Calabro, Dave Hartzell and Justin Ashley have packed their boxes and left their jobs.

Despite talk of a teacher exodus from North Carolina, though, these three aren’t leaving the state–or even Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools.

Calabro, who organized sidewalk rallies for teachers, and Hartzell, featured in an Observer article on teacher pay, both switched schools to take higher-paying “opportunity culture” jobs that keep them in classrooms. The House and governor’s budget plans call for expanding that approach, which CMS is pioneering.

The article gives a glimpse of Public Impact’s long-term vision for our Opportunity Culture work–that an Opportunity Culture’s sustainably funded, higher-paid teaching and career opportunities will change who enters teaching, who stays, and how much more impact excellent teachers can have in their careers. Allowing great teachers to reach more students can kick-start the virtuous cycle of selectivity, opportunity, and higher pay.

Pilot schools already saw one effect of an Opportunity Culture on the front end of their implementation, as they were flooded with applications for the new positions; CMS now can see the beginnings of another effect, in keeping its great teachers from leaving the state for a higher-paid teaching job.

As Helms wrote about teacher Dave Hartzell:

N&O Editor Calls Opportunity Culture® Solution a “Symphony”

June 9, 2014

Calling school models in an Opportunity Culture a simple, harmonious solution, Editorial Page Editor of The (Raleigh, N.C.) News & Observer highlighted the work of Public Impact and Co-Directors Bryan and EmilyAyscue Hassel in his column yesterday.

In Let NC’s top teachers teach—and earn—more, Barnett said:

“With all the angst and alarm over the General Assembly’s approach to K-12 education, hearing Bryan Hassel talk about how to create more effective schools is like listening to a symphony. He has a solution. It’s simple and harmonious and won’t cost more than we should be spending anyway.“

Embracing the Opportunity Culture concept—which extends the reach of excellent teachers and their teams to more students, for more pay, within regular budgets—Barnett noted:

“The Hassels’ approach would not be cheap at first for North Carolina. They say the state needs to raise its average teacher pay 10 percent or more to reverse the backsliding that has sent the average pay sliding to 48th in the nation. But after that, schools could reallocate funds between extra support staff and great teachers teaching more students without increasing school district budgets.

Compare the teacher response to the Charlotte experiment with the statewide situation in North Carolina. While teacher applications piled up for the Charlotte pilot schools, low pay and low morale statewide are fueling an exodus and a looming teacher shortage.”

As North Carolina grapples with this, the governor has proposed sustainable career pathways that districts and their teachers can design. The Senate proposed large average base pay increases. We at Public Impact hope that now the state House, Senate, and governor can work together to bring both of these to reality, and fund education at a level that lets North Carolina ensure a competitive workforce and robust economy.

As Barnett concluded:

“The General Assembly and the governor are responding by offering a boost in pay. Hassel says that helps, but it’s only paying good and bad teachers more to do the same job. What should happen is more pay for good teachers and a winnowing of low performers.

In addition, Bryan Hassel says, the state should be adding teacher assistants, not cutting them by half as proposed in the state Senate’s budget. The teaching profession is virtually alone, he notes, in asking teachers to work in isolation doing many tasks involving a range of skills. Why have great teachers sidelined to tend to sick or unruly students or to monitor cafeterias and bus lines?

North Carolina is in an educational crisis and if it continues the state will lose many excellent teachers. It’s time to support top teachers by making a substantial change in how they are employed and what they can earn.”

Courage Gap? Action Gap? Not at These Schools

May 22, 2014

At the Education Writers Association conference in Nashville on Tuesday, I listened to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan reiterate his belief that “education is the civil rights issue of our generation.”

On that, we at Public Impact couldn’t agree more.

He also talked about the outrage over our nation’s achievement gaps and worries about opportunity gaps. The country has, he said, a “courage gap” and an “action gap.”

We’d like to direct his attention to some teachers and leaders showing both courage and action.

In Opportunity Culture pilot schools, teachers are taking action, redesigning their schools to extend the reach of great teachers and their teams to more students, for more pay, within current budgets. Their leaders are showing courage by finding ways to make these redesigns possible within state rules and tight budgets. Creating Opportunity Culture schools means letting go of traditional one-teacher-one-classroom mindsets—and opening the door to career paths that let great teachers lead while continuing to teach, to opportunities for great teachers to reach more students directly with their inspiring instruction, and to opportunities for all students—not just a lucky few—to get excellent teaching, consistently, from teachers who get the pay and respect they deserve.

Where are those schools? Several were right under Duncan’s nose yesterday—in the iZone in Nashville. Schools in Cabarrus County, N.C., and Syracuse, N.Y., plan to implement their own Opportunity Cultures this fall. And in Charlotte-Mecklenburg (CMS), four schools participated in the pilot this year—to be joined by 17 more this fall, and by nearly half the schools in the district by 2017–18.

The pilot schools’ learning results will start rolling in this summer, with more robust data from more than 30 schools nationwide next year. But CMS Superintendent Heath Morrison saw one significant result already that led to his January decision to scale up from those first four pilots: Enthusiastic teachers, in a state where teacher enthusiasm may be at an all-time low. The pilot schools were swamped last year with applications for these Opportunity Culture jobs, even in high-poverty schools. Despite the hard work of implementing something completely new, teachers’ enthusiasm continues (see what they’re saying here).

What makes an Opportunity Culture different enough to resonate so profoundly with teachers and district leaders?