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In the News: Opportunity Culture® Appearances

October 11, 2013

Recent Opportunity Culture appearances:

  • The Education Commission of the States recommends our new “Opportunity Culture for All” brief in its October 9 newsletter, saying: “The bad news: Between 1970 and 2010, per pupil spending went up almost 150%, but only 11% went to teachers. Teacher salaries and student outcomes stagnated. There’s a better way, the authors argue. Junk the one-teacher-one-classroom model. Create teaching teams led by one excellent teacher so more kids get exposed. Use digital instruction and paraprofessionals to save money and spend that money on better teacher pay. Be more selective about which teachers enter, which teachers stay.”
  • The recently released e-book Navigating the Digital Shift: Implementation Strategies for Blended and Online Learning, from the Digital Learning Now! Smart Series, includes the paper on “Improving Conditions & Careers: How Blended Learning Can Improve the Teaching Profession,” by Public Impact’s Bryan C. Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel, and John Bailey, Carri Schneider,and Tom Vander Ark. It explains the necessity of creating an Opportunity Culture when using blended learning and why, without that, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to bring personalized blended learning to scale in order to reach every student in every classroom with excellence. As the authors note: “Truly understanding the potential of blended learning leads to the realization that teachers become even more important in a personalized learning environment. This realization, that teaching matters now more than ever, undergirds the “Opportunity Culture” work of Public Impact, which explores how schools can extend the reach of excellent teachers using job redesign and technology and, in doing so, lead to better conditions and careers for teachers.”
  • Romain Bertrand, a Multi-Classroom Leader at Ranson IB Middle School in Charlotte-Mecklenburg whom we profiled in an Opportunity Culture case study, has started a blog about his work in Ranson’s exciting first year using Opportunity Culture models. Update: He also has just been asked to write for his district’s “Teaching & Learning in CMS” blog on his experience leading teams of teachers to implement blended learning–see his first post here.

In the News: Opportunity Culture® Appearances

August 2, 2013

Recent Opportunity Culture appearances:

  • Getting Smart listed Public Impact and our Opportunity Culture initiative in its first annual “smart list” of great policy and advocacy organizations making a difference. The 40 groups on the list “put students first, set the path, and lead the conversation.”
  • EdSurge ran a featured article on our latest case study, on Rocketship Education, discussing how Rocketship’s modifications to its blended-learning model “put teachers in the driver’s seat.” This is the fourth in a series of Opportunity Culture case studies Public Impact published this summer, to great response and high demand; more case studies will be coming this fall and beyond.

Rocketship Education: Bringing Tech Closer to Teachers

July 24, 2013

When Rocketship Education, a pioneering, rapidly expanding charter school network, looked at its results, it could have rested on its laurels. After all, with seven schools in California together ranking as the top public school system for low-income elementary students, Rocketship had proof that its blended-learning model— combining online learning with face-to-face instruction—works.

But next year, Rocketship leaders will fix a disconnect they see between what happens in the online learning lab and the classroom, to give teachers more control over the students’ digital learning and further individualize the teaching.

Instead of reporting to a separate computer lab, fourth- and fifth-graders will move within an open, flexible classroom between digital learning and in-person instruction, with those moves based on their individual needs and the roles that specific teachers are best suited to play—similar to the Opportunity Culture Time-Technology Swap—Flex model and the Role Specialization model.

In the latest Opportunity Culture case study from Public Impact, Rocketship Education: Pioneering Charter Network Innovates Again, Bringing Tech Closer to Teachers, we look at what Rocketship has done so far to achieve its top results, and where it’s headed.

In the News: Opportunity Culture® Appearances

July 19, 2013

Recent Opportunity Culture appearances:

Strong Results at New Higher-Paying, Reach-Extending Charter

July 9, 2013

What do you get when you combine an experienced charter school leader with a new model that mixes multi-classroom leaders and blended learning in a high-need school? At charter management organization Touchstone Education, you get nimble teachers, quick to adjust their models as needed, and some great student results.

“We have learned that the one most important thing we can do to positively impact the learning of a child is to consistently provide them with a great teacher,” says Ben Rayer, Touchstone’s founder and CEO, and former president of Mastery Charter Schools. “In our model, we have reframed what teachers do and how they are developed.”

Touchstone opened its first site in fall 2012, Merit Preparatory Charter School in Newark, N.J. The school started small, with 84 sixth-graders, so it could quickly adjust and learn from its efforts. In its first year, with a student population that is 90 percent low-income and was generally several years behind grade level, Merit Prep Newark showed great growth in reading and science: By March 2013 tests, students already demonstrated two years of growth in reading and 1.25 years of growth in science.

Case Study: How Charlotte Zone Planned Opportunity Culture® Schools

June 27, 2013

In late 2011, Denise Watts, a Charlotte-Mecklenburg zone superintendent, approached Public Impact for help meeting the goals she had as executive director for the new Project L.I.F.T., a $55 million public-private partnership to improve academics at historically low-performing, high-need schools in western Charlotte, N.C.

“If we didn’t try something truly different to change education, many of my students were not going to graduate,” Watts says.

Public Impact’s second Opportunity Culture case study, Charlotte, N.C.’s Project L.I.F.T.: New Teaching Roles Create Culture of Excellence in High-Need Schools, explains the “truly different” things that L.I.F.T. did to redesign four schools using Opportunity Culture models and principles. The study details the steps these schools took and the challenges they faced as they prepared to kick off their Opportunity Culture schools at the beginning of the 2013–14 school year. An accompanying study, Charlotte, N.C.’s Project L.I.F.T.: One Teacher’s View of Becoming a Paid Teacher-Leader, offers a Q&A with an excellent teacher on one design team, now set to take on one of the redesigned jobs as a multi-classroom leader.

In the News: Opportunity Culture® Appearances

June 14, 2013

RETHINK: Planning and Designing for K-12 Next Generation Learning: iNACOL (the International Association of of K-12 Online Learning) and Next Generation Learning Challenges created this toolkit to help district, charter, and school leaders when they are just beginning to consider and design next-generation programs and schools, with personalized, competency-based, and blended learning. The toolkit includes links to many Opportunity Culture publications and tools, including some on staffing models, financial sustainability, and change management. Go here for our full list of Opportunity Culture’s school design tools, which we update often.

In the News: Opportunity Culture® Appearances

May 31, 2013

Recent Opportunity Culture appearances:

Schools Test New Ways to Deploy Teachers: How Project L.I.F.T. schools in Charlotte are creating an Opportunity Culture to attract and retain top teachers. This includes a bit about L.I.F.T. teacher Romain Bertrand–watch this space next week for an Q&A with this excellent teacher who can’t wait to see an Opportunity Culture in place that allows him to stay in the classroom and extend his reach to many more students.

Opportunity Culture: Not All Pay Raises Should Be Alike: A brief look at what’s happening in Alabama and the need to keep great teachers in the classroom.

How (and Why) Teachers Should Get Started with Blended Learning: A look at the infographic recently produced to accompany the report Improving Conditions & Careers: How Blended Learning Can Improve the Teaching Profession, part of the Digital Learning Now! Smart Series, which Bryan Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel, Public Impact’s co-directors, wrote with John Bailey of Digital Learning Now! and Carri Schneider and Tom Vander Ark of Getting Smart.

How City-Based Groups Can Support Ed Tech Quality

May 15, 2013

In A Better Blend, we explained how schools can boost student outcomes from digital learning by combining it with staffing models that allow excellent teachers to both reach more students and help good teachers excel. Digital learning holds great promise—but only if we combine its power to personalize learning with the power of excellent teaching.

What else could increase the chances of high-quality technology use in our schools? Public Impact has written two reports out this week for CEE-Trust (the Cities for Education Entrepreneurship Trust) showing how city-based funders and reformers can help, by catalyzing and scaling up high-quality blended learning in their cities.

In the News: Opportunity Culture® Appearances

May 10, 2013

Opportunity Culture recent appearances in the press and elsewhere:

The full guidelines for the latest round of the Investing in Innovation (i3) grants are out, and they include strong encouragement from the U.S. Department of Education to design, validate, and scale up innovations that extend the reach of excellent teachers. The competition requires applicants to address one of a handful of “Absolute Priorities,” one of which is improving teacher effectiveness. Applicants can meet this priority by “extending highly effective teachers’ reach to serve more students” (see full language in the guidelines). They can also address “creating career pathways with differentiated opportunities and roles for teachers or principals, which may include differentiated compensation.” Those are right up an Opportunity Culture’s alley–so if you’re looking for resources on to meet that priority, check out all the materials on OpportunityCulture.org; see our complete list of tools to help understand an Opportunity Culture and design Opportunity Culture schools.