Through the Opportunity Culture initiative, Public Impact is committed to making effective reach extension a core, enduring part of education reform, and to increasing the number, variety, and success of reach extension efforts across the country.
To catalyze and enable implementation, in 2012 Public Impact began identifying, linking, and documenting sites whose leaders are committed to prototyping and scaling successful reach extension initiatives and building an Opportunity Culture. Sites may be districts, states, charter networks/CMOs, or other collections of schools.
Public Impact:
- Links identified sites in a national network of organizations, so that you know who else like you is doing this important work
- Documents sites’ work and shares lessons learned on OpportunityCulture.org
- Provides design and implementation assistance through regularly updated materials posted on OpportunityCulture.org
We and our many partner organizations also provide consulting services to help with initial school and job design, community engagement, and changes in human resource systems, finance systems, and technology. Many sites will organize these changes for themselves or with local consultants—visit OpportunityCulture.org often for free, updated tools to help your team.
Implementation sites include:
- Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools’ Project L.I.F.T., a zone of schools within a large urban school district seeking dramatic improvements in student learning in the next five years.
- The Opportunity Culture Charter School Network, initially made up of four charter management organizations building their school designs to extend the reach of excellent teachers and create an Opportunity Culture: Foundations Prep, Ingenuity Prep, Touchstone Education, and Venture Prep.
- Metro Nashville Public Schools’ Innovation Zone, created in the summer of 2011 to turn around low-performing schools by engaging in strategic redesign.
- The Indiana Charter School Board, an authorizer encouraging new charter schools to consider dramatically different models that show strong potential to accelerate student success, and spotlighting OpportunityCulture.org’s innovative models as a resource.
- Clark County (Nevada) School District, the nation’s fifth-largest district and home of Las Vegas, working to launch new job roles in fall 2014 through its Project Reach-Extended 10, based on Opportunity Culture designs.
To add your district, state, or charter network or schools to this list, please visit our feedback page and tell us your plans for extending the reach of excellent teachers and building an Opportunity Culture in your schools.
To learn more about what we are looking for in sites, see our site selection criteria.
And see our complete set of tools for school design teams. Visit our feedback page to let us know how you’re using these tools and give us your feedback.
