Project L.I.F.T. News ReleaseCharlotte-Mecklenburg Schools’ Project L.I.F.T., an innovative zone within a large urban school district where leaders are committed to reaching every student with excellence, is the first of five implementation sites in Public Impact’s initiative to extend the reach of excellent teachers and build an Opportunity Culture for teachers and students. In Charlotte-Mecklenburg, N.C., a set of schools working with the nonprofit organization Project L.I.F.T. has been receiving intensive design assistance from Public Impact and its partners to begin extending excellent teachers’ reach in four schools in the 2013-14 school year.
Each school has a design team that designed an approach to meet its students’ needs and teachers’ talents. The teams drew on Public Impact’s school models, developed with significant input and feedback from teachers. These school models enable excellent teachers to:
- lead multiple classrooms,
- specialize in their best subjects and roles,
- use digital learning to free their time to reach more students, plan, and collaborate, and
- employ interactive technology to teach students in multiple schools.
To learn more about what the school design teams have done so far, see the first Opportunity Culture case studies about Project L.I.F.T.: Charlotte, N.C.’s Project L.I.F.T.: New Teaching Roles Create Culture of Excellence in High-Need Schools and Charlotte, N.C.’s Project L.I.F.T.: One Teacher’s View of Becoming a Paid Teacher-Leader.
In Charlotte, Public Impact is working with Education First to guide school teams through the design and implementation process.
The initiative will also include the creation of the L.I.F.T. Academy to provide personalized, intensive support for struggling middle and high school students within the zone. Using a combination of digital learning and in-person instruction, the L.I.F.T. Academy will place an excellent teacher in charge of each student’s learning to help them get on track and then leap ahead.
Public Impact’s work in Charlotte is made possible by Project L.I.F.T.’s multi-funder collaborative, which includes local and national private and corporate foundations.
Project L.I.F.T. is a groundbreaking initiative dedicated to supporting gap-closing reforms in nine high-need schools in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district. To ensure all children receive the promise of a high-quality education, Project L.I.F.T. aspires to lift up and accelerate the school district’s efforts to improve academic outcomes for all students. The work of Project L.I.F.T. to eliminate educational disparities includes the following:
- Four key areas of intervention: talent, time, technology, and invested parents/community support
- Efforts to reform policy that will advance educational outcomes for students
- An unprecedented goal of raising $55 million for a five-year initiative
For more information, please visit www.projectliftcharlotte.org.
Read the news release announcing L.I.F.T. as an Opportunity Culture site.
Listen to a WFAE news report about 708 applications that flooded in this spring for 26 new reach-extension jobs at four Project L.I.F.T. schools.
Learn more about becoming a site in the Opportunity Culture initiative.
