What’s Happening

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.

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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.

As learning growth results continue to come in across the U.S. for the 2024–25 year, educators in many high-growth schools may find their celebrations tinged with an edge of dread. They and their students worked so hard for their results—but what now?

Many organizations, not just schools, find sustaining high performance just as hard as achieving it. In schools, the challenges include:

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When Carlsbad Municipal Schools Superintendent Gerry Washburn joined his New Mexico district, it was facing high teacher vacancies and low student success—and a lot of low morale. A chance conversation with Ector County, Texas, Superintendent Scott Muri showed Washburn a new option—Opportunity Culture^® school redesign.

Determined to get their design and implementation of new staffing roles right, Washburn and his strong team of district leaders brought multiple parties on board early, including union representation and school board members as well as educators. In a short time, they watched schools begin to soar and lead the state: “I’ve been stunned at the acceleration that we’re seeing.”

With this design, schools have an answer to the often-denigrating question of why anyone would want to be a teacher, he said.

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Interested in hearing more about the Opportunity Culture^® initiative? Check out the podcasts we’ve been on this year:

Redesigning school staffing for student success: On The Education Gadfly Show, Public Impact Co-President Bryan Hassel discusses with host Mike Petrilli how Opportunity Culture^® redesign of school staffing can boost both teacher retention and student success.

On the Ten-Minute Top Ten podcast from the Georgia Partnership for Excellence in Education, Ashley Williams and Bryan Hassel of Public Impact discuss with host Matthew Smith how Matthew Smith how staffing redesign allows school districts to transform teaching and learning–for higher pay, within regular school budgets.

On the Learning Can’t Wait podcast from Fullmind, Kendall King and Bryan Hassel of Public Impact join host Hayley Spira-Bauer for an in-depth look at all things strategic school staffing, from student results to teacher satisfaction to remotely located leadership.

Just as Opportunity Culture^® models were announced as the only “research-based” designs that New Mexico districts can adopt in the state’s new “Innovative Staffing” program, we saw the latest state data showing notable results in Carlsbad Municipal Schools:

⭐Highest growth in the state in the literacy proficiency rate among medium-size schools: Desert Willow Elementary, an 18.4% change from the previous year;

⭐Fourth-highest growth in the math proficiency rate among large schools: PR Leyva Intermediate, a 6.5% change from the previous year;

⭐Tenth-highest growth in the math proficiency rate among medium-size schools: Cottonwood Elementary, a 9.1% change from the previous year;

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In a new interview with Whiteboard Advisors, Ector County ISD Superintendent Emeritus Scott Muri reflected on how the district turned its student results and teacher recruitment and retention around.

Muri explained how using Opportunity Culture^® redesign fit into his biggest focus, human capital.

“The strategy was what I call “strategy braiding”—helping people see how multiple efforts connect to the same outcomes for kids. That included redesigning the traditional teacher role through Opportunity Culture, where teacher-leaders split their time between teaching and coaching peers. We restructured compensation with stackable pay—our highest-paid classroom teacher now earns $132,000—and we built multiple pipelines: our own educator preparation program, paraprofessional-to-teacher pathways, and fully funded residencies with local universities.”

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Congratulations to Person County Superintendent Rodney Peterson, named on October 9 as the 2026 A. Craig Phillips North Carolina Superintendent of the Year!

The national superintendent of the year will be named in February at the national conference of the American Association of School Administrators.

As the award announcement noted, the district is planning to “continue building systemic solutions that transform student achievement across the district.” Under Peterson’s leadership, Person County Schools went through a fast-track design process in the spring to begin using Multi-Classroom Leader^® teaching teams this year, to extend the reach of excellent teaching to more students through Opportunity Culture^® staffing design.

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North Carolina schools with Certified Opportunity Culture School^® status were two to three times more likely to exceed learning growth expectations than schools not using Opportunity Culture^® staffing design, 2024–25 data from the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction shows.

Of all 258 schools with certification, 48% exceeded growth targets, compared with 25% of all schools in the state without these staffing designs.

Of the 222 Title I schools with certification, 43% exceeded growth targets, compared with 21% of Title I schools in the state without these designs.

The certified schools were also significantly less likely to fall short of growth expectations than comparable schools.

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