This brief shares the lessons that Public Impact and our partners have learned from our work with these schools in their early stages of Opportunity Culture implementation. It summarizes nine overarching lessons, offers our solutions for assistance providers, schools, and districts, and gives examples of actions that Public Impact, our partners, and some schools and districts have taken.
Technology and Rural Education
An Opportunity Culture for Teaching and Learning
To understand an Opportunity Culture, start here: For excellent teachers and those aspiring to excellence, and for administrative or education policy leaders, this brief provides an overview of how an Opportunity Culture can help teachers have the well-paid, empowered profession they deserve—while helping many more students succeed.
Metropolitan Nashville’s Innovation Zone Case Study
Better-prepared new teachers, more adults in every classroom, more small-group instruction, more adults caring for every student—how can a school wrap all that up in one package? Three Metropolitan Nashville Opportunity Culture schools are trying a novel approach with paid, yearlong student teaching positions. In this case study, Public Impact examines this “aspiring teachers” program and its early implementation.
Reaching All Students with Excellent STEM Teachers
In the U.S., STEM subjects—science, technology, engineering, and math—face urgent needs for great STEM teachers and well-educated students. An Opportunity Culture can help by extending the reach of excellent STEM teachers already in our schools and creating a teaching profession that attracts and retains these teachers through higher pay, within regular budgets, and multiple advancement opportunities.
Teacher Pay and Career Paths in an Opportunity Culture
To help all students reach their potential, district leaders must ensure that every student has consistent access to excellent teaching. Opportunity Culture compensation and career path structures help make that possible, and this guide shows how.
A New Civil Right
District administrators can use these materials as an exercise in rethinking the standard school set-up, and professors in business, public policy, or education schools, or teacher or leader preparation programs, can use these with their classes.
Rocketship Education Case Study
This case study details how Rocketship, a pioneering, rapidly expanding charter school network, planned to refine its blended-learning model in the 2013–14 year.
Touchstone Education Case Study
This is one in a series of case studies looking 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.
Charlotte, N.C.’s Project L.I.F.T.
Public Impact’s second Opportunity Culture case study explains the “truly different” things that Project L.I.F.T. did to redesign four schools using Opportunity Culture models and principles.