By Public Impact®, May 12, 2022
As districts seek innovations to bolster student academics and bring support and joy to students and teachers, the Opportunity Culture® model continues to spread and produce results, even in another challenging pandemic year.
Each year, Public Impact® analyzes Opportunity Culture® data to improve its materials and its work with schools and districts. With the overarching goal of reaching all students with high-growth learning, Public Impact® has expanded the Opportunity Culture® initiative’s participating schools (including those committed to but not yet implementing Opportunity Culture® designs) by 50 percent each year, on average—helping schools and districts make changes that educators love, with increased career opportunities and support.
As the Opportunity Culture® Dashboard shows in its 2021–22 update:
- 55 sites—primarily districts, plus a smaller number of charter management organizations—now are part of the Opportunity Culture® initiative.
- Those sites include more than 640 schools that are implementing, designing, or committed to launch Opportunity Culture® designs; 93% of those now in the design or implementation phases are eligible for Title I funding.
- Nationally, Opportunity Culture® sites now reach over 120,000 students with excellent teaching…
- and they reach over 4,500 teachers with advanced roles or on-the-job support and development on teaching teams.
- For extending their reach through Opportunity Culture® roles, over 1,180 teachers earned more:
- a total of $11.9 million in extra pay in 2021–22 alone
- and $41.6 million since Opportunity Culture® implementation began.
In the annual, anonymous Opportunity Culture® survey, educators continue to express strong confidence about Opportunity Culture® implementation in their schools—despite many taking the survey during the height of stress from the Omicron surge. Ninety-eight percent of multi-classroom leaders said they want Opportunity Culture® roles to continue in their schools; 94 percent of staff in all Opportunity Culture® roles agree that teachers in Opportunity Culture® are held to high professional standards for delivering instruction. See the dashboard for more survey results.
In Opportunity Culture® sites, each participating school forms a design and implementation team of teachers and administrators that determines how to use Opportunity Culture® roles to reach more of their students with excellent teaching. The design teams reallocate school budgets to permanently fund substantial pay supplements for those in Opportunity Culture® roles and for teacher resident salaries, in contrast to temporary grant-funded programs.
The foundational role is that of a multi-classroom leader, or MCL—a teacher with a track record of high-growth student learning who leads a small teaching team for substantially higher pay. An MCL’s team may include team reach teachers, who—critically in a time of teacher shortages —directly teach more students, typically without raising instructional group sizes, for more pay. This avoids filling a portion of teacher vacancies with long-term substitutes. Research-proven paraprofessional tutoring, guided by MCL-led teachers, fills the gap. To learn more about Opportunity Culture® schools and these and other roles, designed to maximize both student learning growth and educators’ paid career opportunities, see OpportunityCulture.org. Read the results of third-party studies of Opportunity Culture® implementation here.