Public Impact’s well-honed process and quality monitoring tools help your district and schools efficiently design, implement, and maintain your Opportunity Culture to achieve the learning results you seek. Our unique School Excellence Portal makes it easier.
Our technical assistance includes helping you:
Wisely
Collaboratively
& Improve
Results
Design Wisely
We work closely with your district design leader to ensure that principals and other district leaders understand the Opportunity Culture concepts and design process.
We facilitate a series of sessions to guide your team of district leaders in establishing Opportunity Culture parameters and processes. Our team provides tools to aid decision making, lessons learned, and examples from other sites, and provides analysis and recommendations based on your local context.
We facilitate a series of sessions to help your school design teams clarify their goals for Opportunity Culture and construct school plans and schedules to meet those objectives. This work includes financial analyses to ensure that school plans are sustainably designed within current budgets.
Implement Collaboratively
We provide extensive recruitment and selection support and tools, and train district personnel on the behavioral event interview technique to select candidates who display the competencies needed for success in these valuable, high-potential roles. We also publicize job openings to encourage those interested in Opportunity Culture to apply to your district.
We provide summer training sessions to help Opportunity Culture educators prepare for success in their new roles and school models. During the school year, we offer professional learning sessions to help your educators succeed, timed to address topics and needs likely to arise throughout the year.
Monitor & Improve
We conduct site visits during the first year of implementation to interview staff in a variety of roles. We share our findings with school leaders and provide coaching sessions to help them strengthen their school’s implementation.
At a minimum, we assess student and teacher outcomes and conduct school staff surveys, and share our findings with district and school personnel to help improve implementation. Our data analysis team can also customize a deeper data analysis at your district’s request.
Our online portal allows us to provide your district with a virtual planning and communications platform to support essential activities, give rapid, personalized feedback on implementation, ease the collection of data for analysis of outcomes, and provide educators with curated information and resources.
Achieve Learning Results
After initial design, states, districts, and schools can maintain access to the School Excellence Portal’s premium resources and quality monitoring tools for a low cost. Public Impact and our national funders invested in this resource to help you ensure long-term strong student learning outcomes and educator satisfaction.
Contact Public Impact to start designing your Opportunity Culture!
Possible Sources of Funds
Keeping in mind the many demands on a district’s funds, we strive to provide high-quality support and guidance at a reasonable cost. Public Impact and our national funders subsidize work with districts by funding free and low-cost materials to aid Opportunity Culture design and educator implementation, data analysis to determine what approaches work in schools and districts, and other aspects of support that we do not charge to districts.
Districts have used a variety of funding sources to engage Public Impact’s support, such as:
- Grants from local or regional philanthropies
- Title I and Title II allocations
- Competitive state grants
CALDER’s rigorous third-party study of Opportunity Culture meets ESSA requirements for an evidence-based intervention for schools in need of improvement, so districts and schools can use federal funds to support Opportunity Culture design.
Sample Design Year Timeline
Months | Activity |
---|---|
August - September | Information Sharing and Planning |
October - February | Design Phase: Design Sessions with District Design Team Design Sessions with School Design Teams |
March - May | Recruitment and Selection |
Summer | Training for Opportunity Culture educators |
Sample Phase-In to Achieve 100% Implementation
Districts typically begin Opportunity Culture design in a set of 5 to 15 schools, then add schools each year. Public Impact’s approach is to continue our technical assistance engagement until your district reaches 75 percent implementation. During those years, we taper our support as your district develops the structures and capacity to lead school design work and professional learning.
District phase-in varies, but the below table illustrates suggested pacing for districts of varying size.
District Size | Yr 1 | Yr 2 | Yr 3 | Yr 4 | Yr 5 | Yr 6 | Yr 7+ |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Very Small District (1-14 schools) | 5 | All remaining | |||||
Small District (15-29 schools) | 5 | 10 | All remaining | ||||
Medium District (30-74 schools) | 8 | 15 | 20 | 20 | All remaining | ||
Large District (75-174 schools) | 10 | 15 | 30 | 40 | 40 | 40 | |
Extra-Large District (175+ schools) | 10 | 15 | 30 | 40 | 40 | 40 | 40 |