Publications

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.

Paid Educator Residencies, Within Budget: How New School Models Can Radically Improve Teacher and Principal Preparation details how to create paid, full-time, yearlong residencies for aspiring teachers and principals, within existing budgets.

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.

In this idea paper, Public Impact’s co-presidents, Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan C. Hassel, lay out a vision for how districts can reach dramatically more students with great principals, for much higher pay, within budget—giving principals a career path that keeps them connected to students and schools through Multi-School Leadership. 

In this series of three vignettes, we profile Michelle McVicker, Alison Harris Welcher, and Christian Sawyer’s use of the Multi-Classroom Leadership model that enabled them to create and lead a team of teacher-leaders in their schools in Nashville, Tenn., and Charlotte, N.C.

Policymakers and education advocates can use the Introduction for Policymakers and Advocates slide deck to understand and explain why students and educators need an Opportunity Culture. It provides some background statistics on the history of teaching and pay, and explains how Opportunity Culture career paths are helping address the profession’s challenges today, along with other resources.

In this paper written for the Rural Opportunities Consortium of Idaho, Public Impact examines the challenges that prevent rural schools from providing great teaching, and presents four strategies for increasing access to highly effective instruction in rural Idaho.