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Opportunity Culture® News and Views

1st Opportunity Culture® Case Study: Extending One Teacher’s Reach

by | June 17, 2013

In Public Impact’s Opportunity Culture school models, schools use job redesign and technology to reach more students with excellent teachers, for more pay, within budget. As districts and schools around the country consider implementing their own Opportunity Cultures, they want real-life examples of just how others have already done so.

Today, we begin a series of case studies that provide in-depth looks at how districts, charter schools, and other programs have begun using Opportunity Culture models or experimented with similar means of expanding teachers’ impact on students and peer teachers. In the studies, we will describe new programs, including personal descriptions of teachers involved. We will also analyze how well the programs stack up to the five Reach Extension Principles, which call for reaching more students with excellent teaching, higher pay, sustainable funding, job-embedded development opportunity, and enhanced authority and clear accountability for great teachers.

In our first study, Leading Educators: Empowering Teacher-Leaders to Extend Their Reach by Leading Teams, we profile Anna Lavely of Kansas, who participates in Leading Educators’ two-year fellowship aimed at developing the leadership of already-excellent teachers.

In the News: Opportunity Culture® Appearances

by | June 14, 2013

RETHINK: Planning and Designing for K-12 Next Generation Learning: iNACOL (the International Association of of K-12 Online Learning) and Next Generation Learning Challenges created this toolkit to help district, charter, and school leaders when they are just beginning to consider and design next-generation programs and schools, with personalized, competency-based, and blended learning. The toolkit includes links to many Opportunity Culture publications and tools, including some on staffing models, financial sustainability, and change management. Go here for our full list of Opportunity Culture’s school design tools, which we update often.

Q&A: Meet an Opportunity Culture® Excellent Teacher

by | June 5, 2013

Meet Romain Bertrand: middle school math teacher and Opportunity Culture enthusiast. As this school year winds down, he’s already thoroughly looking forward to the next—when he will become a Multi-Classroom Leader® at Ranson IB Middle School, taking accountability for the learning results of 700 students. At Ranson, a Project L.I.F.T. school in Charlotte, N.C., Bertrand sees the opportunities of its new Opportunity Culture—to extend the reach of excellent teachers to more students, for more pay, and develop other teachers—giving him and others exactly the sort of recognition and respect he says teachers now sorely lack.

Bertrand grew up in Avignon, in the south of France, the son of teachers who both went on to become principals. After teaching middle school math in France for five years, he came to the U.S. through the Chapel Hill, N.C.-based VIF International Education, which placed him in Charlotte, teaching seventh- and eighth-grade math for five years. “It became obvious after 10 years of teaching that I finally found my groove, and I saw that I could consistently get my students to enjoy math and become passionate about it, and to grow,” says Bertrand (relaxing at right with his children).

Bertrand began working with Teach Charlotte, a six-week summer teaching academy, where he coached teachers, which prepared him for his current job at Ranson IB Middle School as a facilitator. That led to his role on the school design team at Ranson, tasked with redesigning the school to implement an Opportunity Culture in the 2013-14 year. Put a charming French accent in your head, and read what he said to Public Impact’s Grace Han in a May 28 interview:

In the News: Opportunity Culture® Appearances

by | May 31, 2013

Recent Opportunity Culture appearances:

Schools Test New Ways to Deploy Teachers: How Project L.I.F.T. schools in Charlotte are creating an Opportunity Culture to attract and retain top teachers. This includes a bit about L.I.F.T. teacher Romain Bertrand–watch this space next week for an Q&A with this excellent teacher who can’t wait to see an Opportunity Culture in place that allows him to stay in the classroom and extend his reach to many more students.

Opportunity Culture: Not All Pay Raises Should Be Alike: A brief look at what’s happening in Alabama and the need to keep great teachers in the classroom.

How (and Why) Teachers Should Get Started with Blended Learning: A look at the infographic recently produced to accompany the report Improving Conditions & Careers: How Blended Learning Can Improve the Teaching Profession, part of the Digital Learning Now! Smart Series, which Bryan Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel, Public Impact’s co-directors, wrote with John Bailey of Digital Learning Now! and Carri Schneider and Tom Vander Ark of Getting Smart.

3 Nashville Schools Create Paid Student Teacher Role

by | May 22, 2013

In Public Impact’s Opportunity Culture school models, we envision roles for a variety of support staff who help excellent teachers and teams extend their reach to more students. Examples include learning coaches, digital lab monitors, assistant teachers, and tutors. These staff members don’t work in isolation, but as critical parts of their teams.

These positions typically have shorter workweeks than teachers (40 hours or less versus teachers’ actual average of 50 to 55) and are narrower in scope, making pay lower. The pay differential allows a district to provide substantially higher pay for teacher-leaders—proven excellent teachers who take full responsibility for leading their teams. Under the leadership of these excellent teachers, other teachers and support staff can learn and succeed.

If you think that sounds like a great environment for student teachers to learn great teaching from the start, the iZone initiative of Metro Nashville Public Schools (MNPS) agrees. Beginning in 2013–14, MNPS is creating a paid one-year “aspiring teacher” role targeting student teachers, available at three schools in the iZone.

How City-Based Groups Can Support Ed Tech Quality

by | May 15, 2013

In A Better Blend, we explained how schools can boost student outcomes from digital learning by combining it with staffing models that allow excellent teachers to both reach more students and help good teachers excel. Digital learning holds great promise—but only if we combine its power to personalize learning with the power of excellent teaching.

What else could increase the chances of high-quality technology use in our schools? Public Impact has written two reports out this week for CEE-Trust (the Cities for Education Entrepreneurship Trust) showing how city-based funders and reformers can help, by catalyzing and scaling up high-quality blended learning in their cities.

In the News: Opportunity Culture® Appearances

by | May 10, 2013

Opportunity Culture recent appearances in the press and elsewhere:

The full guidelines for the latest round of the Investing in Innovation (i3) grants are out, and they include strong encouragement from the U.S. Department of Education to design, validate, and scale up innovations that extend the reach of excellent teachers. The competition requires applicants to address one of a handful of “Absolute Priorities,” one of which is improving teacher effectiveness. Applicants can meet this priority by “extending highly effective teachers’ reach to serve more students” (see full language in the guidelines). They can also address “creating career pathways with differentiated opportunities and roles for teachers or principals, which may include differentiated compensation.” Those are right up an Opportunity Culture’s alley–so if you’re looking for resources on to meet that priority, check out all the materials on OpportunityCulture.org; see our complete list of tools to help understand an Opportunity Culture and design Opportunity Culture schools.

Indiana Charter Board Encourages Dramatically Different Models

by | May 8, 2013

As Public Impact focuses on its Opportunity Culture initiative—reaching more students with excellent teachers, making sustainably higher pay a reality, and providing job-embedded development—we’ve noted a few examples of charter school networks using redesigned jobs to make this possible.

Rocketship Education, Carpe Diem, and KIPP Empower have been on the cutting edge of using new school models to “extend the reach” of great teachers. Newer CMOs building reach into their models include the members of the Opportunity Culture Charter School Network: Foundations College Prep in Chicago, Ingenuity Prep in Washington, D.C., Touchstone Education in Newark, N.J., and Venture Academy in Minneapolis.

But why haven’t we seen more innovators? The Indiana Charter School Board (ICSB) asks this question in its recent request for applications, developed with support from Public Impact, inviting new models with strong potential to accelerate student success.

National Charter School Network Forms to Extend Teachers’ Reach

by | May 8, 2013

As Public Impact continues our Opportunity Culture quest to reach more students with great teachers, we’re seeing both district and charter schools come on board. In the charter sector, a disproportionate amount of activity is by new charter school organizations.

But these new school providers can’t just ask the school next door—or even the charter school next door—how to make reach models that combine job redesign and technology successful for students and teachers. They need each other. So we formed the national Opportunity Culture Charter School Network.

The network’s four founding members are Foundations College Prep in Chicago, Ingenuity Prep in Washington, D.C., Touchstone Education in Newark, N.J., and Venture Academy in Minneapolis.

In the News: Report on Teacher Pay and the Recession

by | May 7, 2013

In a new report on the effects of the recession on teacher salaries in 41 major school districts, the National Council on Teacher Quality found that teacher raises for experience and market forces like inflation were one-third to one-half of what they were at the beginning of the recession. Eighty percent of the districts studied had a total pay freeze or pay cut in at least one school year between 2008-09 and 2011-12–although none had a cut or freeze every year, and eight districts showed positive salary growth each year between 2008-09 and 2011-12. See the report for details on how the districts adjusted pay in the face of tight budgets.

One way districts could respond is by employing an Opportunity Culture: See our “Paying Teachers More” page to understand how Opportunity Culture models could increase excellent teachers’ pay up to approximately 130%, without increasing class sizes and within available budgets. In some variations, schools may pay all teachers more, sustainably. Combining these and other sustainable models to extend the reach of excellent teachers and promote excellence by all instructional staff may produce even greater savings to fund teacher pay increases and other priorities, while producing excellent student outcomes.