Opportunity Culture® staffing and instructional design continues to reach more students and systems, with more than 40 beginning design in fall 2026. Statewide initiatives include New Mexico and Oklahoma.
Sharon Kebschull Barrett
Resuming Results After a Setback: Study Finds Positive Effects in Texas District
A Texas Tech study of Opportunity Culture® implementation in Midland Independent School District finds positive effects with Multi-Classroom Leader® teams on student learning, as much as an extra six months in math for grades 3-5.
Refreshed Design for Special Education: More Tutoring, Multiple Career Paths
A refreshed staffing design guide from Public Impact® uses Multi-Classroom Leader® teams to reach more students with excellent instruction and creates multiple pipelines into special education roles.
Fellowship Nominations Open
We’re excited to announce that the eighth Opportunity Culture® Fellows cohort is in the works! Educators in previous cohorts shared successes with students and peers, how they overcame challenges, and stories about their Opportunity Culture® roles. They advised Public...
State Scale Essentials for Staffing Design: New Brief
With 15 years of experience designing and helping schools use Opportunity Culture® staffing and instructional design, we have learned many of the keys to long-term success for students and educators. Our new two-page brief details the essential elements leaders should...
Surging Instructional Impact and Growth: State of the Opportunity Culture Initiative
Reach, results, relationships, and replicability: Public Impact® staffers can recite these words in our sleep. Those are the big categories in which we measure our progress annually, using over 50,000 design data points from Opportunity Culture® sites...
Congratulating All Certified Schools
It’s a Certified Opportunity Culture School® bonanza! Congratulations to the 38 systems and more than 460 schools that received Certified Opportunity Culture School® status for 2025–26.
Getting certified isn’t a box-checking exercise in compliance; it’s a top way for schools to check reality vs. goals and see where they can improve. Committed to student and educator success, all the schools that earned certified status followed design standards correlated with strong results.
Higher certification levels equal more students reached with excellent teaching and increased small-group tutoring, and more educators reached with support and higher pay—all backed by more than a dozen years of data. Schools meeting the standards and obtaining certified status were two to three times more likely to exceed learning growth expectations schoolwide than schools not using Opportunity Culture® staffing and instructional design.
3 Key Steps for State Policymakers: Our New Journal Article
Nationally, hundreds of Title I schools using Opportunity Culture® staffing design were two to three times more likely to achieve high-growth learning in 2024–25 than Title I schools in the same states not using these designs–outcomes exceeding other national strategic staffing efforts. What would it take for school systems everywhere to see the same results?
A big part of the answer lies in the hands of state policymakers. In the latest issue of State Education Standard, the journal of the National Association of State Boards of Education, Sharon Kebschull Barrett and Bryan C. Hassel of Public Impact® provide three key steps policymakers should take to support all of their districts in redesigning for student success and educator satisfaction.
Can Districts Miles Apart Share Staff Successfully—And Why Would They?
We think of school districts in a steady competition for teacher talent–but what happens when they collaborate to share staff instead?
Listen to our latest Opportunity Culture® Audio podcast to hear how two North Carolina districts, hours apart, worked together when one district needed, but couldn’t find, a high school math teaching team leader with a record of producing high-growth learning.
Research | 2-3X schoolwide high-growth learning nationally, high growth by teaching teams with Opportunity Culture® staffing design
From EdNC, by Sharon Kebschull Barrett, March 30, 2026
New national data shows that schools using updated Opportunity Culture® staffing design standards achieved, on average, two to three times the rate of schoolwide high-growth learning of other schools in the same states in 2024-25. These results extend prior findings across North Carolina. In addition, new third-party research in one district found a full extra half-year of learning in reading and more than an extra third of a year in math for students between 2020 and 2024. Prior third-party research on three districts found more than an extra half-year of learning in math.
The staffing designs create teaching teams that reached over 275,000 students and 10,500 teachers in 2025-26 alone and are expanding in 18 states.