Publications

This short slide deck with brief speaker notes provides a useful overview for educators, policymakers, and anyone else interested in dramatic improvements in education of why students and educators need an Opportunity Culture, how it works, the research supporting it, what states and districts can do to support it, and a list of more resources.

What if all teachers could achieve excellent student learning results by getting the right leadership and support? This guide presents examples of career paths that make this possible—using multi-school leaders, multi-classroom leaders, and other roles for teachers, who can collaborate, improve, and excel on teams led by multi-classroom leaders. Teachers and principals in all these paths reach more students with excellent teaching and earn more for it, within schools’ budgets.

Opportunity Culture multi-school leaders (MSLs) are excellent principals with a record of high-growth student learning who lead a small group of two to eight related or closely located schools for more pay, funded within the budgets of their schools.

How do Opportunity Culture multi-classroom leaders fit into a typical week all their duties? This video and vignette follow Okema Owens Simpson, a middle school multi-classroom leader, through several typical days in which she provides what her teaching team needs most.

Scott Nolt and Caitlyn Gironda pioneered blended-learning classes in their North Carolina district, extending their reach to more students by teaching two groups of students during the same class period—when one group was in class with the teacher, the other worked online from home or in a lab, switching the next day. Despite receiving less in-class time with their teachers, students showed strong growth and learned other crucial skills.

State and district leaders have a chance under ESSA (the 2016 Every Student Succeeds Act) to use their new funding flexibility to take a new approach that focuses on excellence for teachers, and students.

This two-page guide helps schools and districts implementing Opportunity Culture school models and roles interpret the five Opportunity Culture Principles. The principles help schools ensure that roles extending the reach of excellent teachers and principals to far more students, and to their colleagues, are sustainable and effective.

In the most successful Opportunity Culture schools, principals lead an instructional team of multi-classroom leaders. Other principals can emulate their approach using this set of tools, which helps principals plan for and lead a schoolwide team, along with tools for principals new to an Opportunity Culture school.

Pioneering Multi-Classroom Leaders Erin Burns, Ashley Jackson, Russ Stanton, and Karen Wolfson each took accountability for up to 500 students and led teaching teams toward higher growth and personalized learning for all those students. In these vignettes and accompanying video, they discuss their views of their roles, actions they took to lead their teams, mistakes they made, and how they recovered.