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.
State-level action and support is key to getting excellent teaching to many more students fast–and kids can’t wait. They need better learning, and for that, they need well-supported, well-paid teachers. As the leaders of Mississippi First and Teach Plus highlight in their reports, The Weight They Carry: Life as a Teacher in Mississippi and Reimagining School Staffing: Recommendations from Teach Plus MS Policy Fellows, Mississippi faces not a generic “teacher shortage” but a specific teacher retention crisis.
In our latest audio piece, Angela Bass, executive director of Mississippi First, Grace Braezeale, the director of research and K-12 policy who wrote Mississippi First’s report, Sanford Johnson, executive director of Teach Plus Mississippi, and Policy Fellow Sharon Buckhanan share what they hear from teachers throughout the state about the conditions leading to burnout and to great teachers leaving the profession altogether—and their hopes for how things could change for teachers, students, and parents if schools start using Opportunity Culture® teaching teams, proven to increase student learning and provide job-embedded, in-depth support for teachers.
It’s been a month of learning from several superintendents, who’ve come on the Opportunity Culture® Audio podcast to share their thoughts about staffing design in their districts.
When Superintendent Scott Muri left his high-performing school district for Ector County, Texas, the president of the Ector County Independent School District (ECISD) board said he wondered whether Muri had “lost his mind” when he applied for the job, and Muri acknowledged that it would be a monumental challenge.
Indeed, upon arrival in summer 2019 in Odessa—known for oil wells and high school football—Muri was faced with 16 of the district’s 45 schools receiving an F from the Texas Education Agency, and four more graded a D—along with 350 teaching vacancies for its 34,000 students.
But by 2024, the district was named the K–12 Dive District of the Year, and 2025 found Muri testifying about the district’s turnaround before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions.
It's been a busy Opportunity Culture® week! From big research about student results in Texas to superintendents recognized for their impressive implementation to Title II options for funding redesign, the Opportunity Culture® initiative is making a splash. New...
With state funding in New Mexico and North Carolina and private funding in Oklahoma, 25 schools systems will join the national Opportunity Culture® initiative in 2026, extending the reach of excellent teaching to more students, for more pay, within regular budgets. The initiative’s staffing designs have boosted student learning and reduced vacancies nationally.
In a new report, The Weight They Carry: Life as a Teacher in Mississippi, education policy nonprofit Mississippi First recommends addressing the state’s ongoing teacher shortage in part by improving compensation through both an across-the-board pay increase and redesigned school staffing models that allow teachers to advance and receive substantial pay supplements without having to leave the classroom.
The report highlights Opportunity Culture® models, which are in their first year of use in the Jackson, Mississippi, school district. Opportunity Culture® design can help address the compensation pressures teachers face; Public Impact, which founded the Opportunity Culture® initiative, has also consistently called for higher pay overall for educators. Collaborative Multi-Classroom Leader® teams can also address some of the concerns teachers have about unmanageable workloads, and the distributed leadership inherent in schools using these teams both reduces the burden on principals and strengthens leadership pipelines.
It all began with a fateful ride in a Chevy Suburban.
In 2022, Carlsbad, New Mexico, educators went on a Texas fact-finding mission to the Midland and Ector County school districts, checking out how they had restructured their staffing.
The trip was sparked by Carlsbad Deputy Superintendent LaVern Shan, a former Ector County principal who had begun to hear from colleagues there about Opportunity Culture® staffing models—and how they never wanted to be a principal anywhere that didn’t use them.
When she went back to see what all the fuss was about, Shan said she thought, “This is crazy. There is no way this would work. But I watched the data. I watched their vacancies. I’ve watched how things changed.”
Shan shared what she saw with Superintendent Gerry Washburn, and they took the 2022 trip with educators, school board members, and union officials.
“It gives me chills thinking about it,” Cottonwood Elementary School Principal Donna Johns said. “Right from the beginning, I was like, this is what we need. This is exactly what we need. …
In its new state of education report, SCORE (State Collaborative on Reforming Education) recommends elevating excellence in teaching as Tennessee’s most powerful investment, highlighting the use of Opportunity Culture® models to do so.
In a panel discussion tied to the report’s release on Wednesday, 2026 Tennessee Superintendent of the Year Annette Tudor, the director of schools for Bristol Tennessee City Schools, spoke about how Opportunity Culture® roles are making a difference for her district.
“We are partnering both with SCORE and Opportunity Culture to offer strategic staffing opportunities for our teachers as an incentive to keep them in the classroom…We’re seeing great success with that,” Tudor said.
When Charlie Butler returned to his hometown to become superintendent of the Madison Parish School District in northeastern Louisiana, he was looking for innovative ways to help the persistently low-performing system. With help from a state “instructional coherence cohort,” the district combined the support of Opportunity Culture® teaching teams with a focus on the implementation of high-quality instructional materials to address longstanding issues—and quickly started to see successes for both students and educators.
In the latest from Opportunity Culture® Audio, district and state leaders describe how they worked together to make it happen.