Publications

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.

Too often, “teacher leadership” roles intended to attract and retain teachers—especially great ones—and close student learning gaps fail to produce the intended impact. This two-page brief offers a quick list of the common pitfalls of designing such roles, and a chart of the 12 essential factors for creating high-quality, lasting teacher-leader roles.

For superintendents in collective bargaining districts who wonder how an Opportunity Culture could work, Syracuse, N.Y., educators have advice on working with unions. This vignette details the collaboration between the Syracuse district administration and union in launching an Opportunity Culture, highlighting actions to consider and critical moments in the process.

This brief summarizes and discusses state policies needed to support evaluation and accountability in an Opportunity Culture. A companion practical guide details management and administrative changes at both the state and district levels. Seizing Opportunity at the Top II explains all the policies states should address as more schools implement an OC for teachers and students.