The Opportunity Culture® Principles

Five keys to sustainable, scalable innovative staffing with results

The Opportunity Culture® principles help schools ensure that roles extending the reach of excellent teachers and principals to far more students, and to their colleagues, are sustainable and effective.

The principles for teachers and for principals are very similar; additional guidance for each type can be found here.

To learn more, read the two-page guide:

Understanding the Opportunity Culture® Principles

The Opportunity Culture® Principles for Teachers Extending Their Reach

Teams of teachers & school leaders must choose and tailor models to:

Reach more students with excellent teachers and their teams

Pay teachers more for extending their reach

Fund pay within regular budgets

Provide protected in-school time and clarity about how to use it for planning, collaboration, and development

Match authority and accountability to each person’s responsibilities

The Opportunity Culture® Principles for Principals Extending Their Reach as Multi-School Leaders

Teams of principals and district/network leaders​ must choose and tailor models to:

Reach more students with excellent principals and their teams

Pay principals more for extending their reach

Fund pay within regular budgets

Provide protected in-school time and clarity about how to use it for planning, collaboration, and development

—within and across the schools each leader leads

Match authority and accountability to each person’s responsibilities

To guarantee excellence for students, consistently and long-term, adhere to each principle. Ignore any of the five principles, and your effort will fall short—for students, teachers, and principals.

These principles were developed in response to decades of failed efforts to create high-quality advanced roles for teachers and principals, and refined based on early implementation of the Opportunity Culture® model. Research now shows the efficacy of the model and the Multi-Classroom Leader™ role: Third-party studies have found that, on average, teachers who joined teams led by educators in this role moved from producing 50th percentile student learning growth to 77th percentile student learning growth.

The principles support one another. New roles that allow educators to extend their reach—taking on far more responsibility—should pay more. Higher pay must be funded with regular budgets, not temporary sources, so that advanced roles last. Roles that require taking on responsibility for more students or teachers must include more time for planning, team collaboration, and on-the-job development. And greater responsibility should be formalized, so that evaluations match each advanced role, and colleagues know who has authority to lead.

Don’t take shortcuts. Experience has shown that following each and every principle, in letter and spirit, is the only way for schools to achieve excellence consistently and sustainably. Delaying full implementation of any principle reduces student learning, makes teachers’ jobs harder, and creates problems that must be fixed later.