We can tell you all about how district leaders laud Opportunity Culture® models. But as every great writing teacher ever has said, “show, don’t tell.”
So to show you what superintendents think, how about hearing directly from them? Over the initiative’s first decade, past and present superintendents of Opportunity Culture®-implementing districts have told me much about why this has been valuable for their students and educators.
North Carolina’s Charlotte-Mecklenburg district was an Opportunity Culture® pioneer; using this strategic staffing “served a critical role in retaining teachers and expanding the reach of our highest-performing educators,” Superintendent Crystal Hill said. “This investment in our teachers ultimately increases the academic performance of our students.”
Wake County, North Carolina, Superintendent Robert Taylor said that expanded teacher leadership roles, such as the Multi-Classroom Leader® role supporting a small grade-level or subject-area team with intensive, job-embedded support, “are critical to assessing and advancing student achievement. These collaborative teaching teams help each classroom teacher continually improve their instructional practices to shape student learning.”
Why did Scott Muri bring Opportunity Culture® models to two Texas districts after experiencing them elsewhere? “The reason is because it works. I’ve been doing this work for over a decade, and in each system, you saw the effectiveness with kids and with adults. And any time you find a strategy that works, you stick with it.”
Just after Muri retired from serving as superintendent of Ector County Independent School District, it was named the K–12 Dive 2024 District of the Year.
As K-12 Dive noted, the Texas Education Agency gave Ector County ISD (ECISD) an F accountability rating in 2019, the first year under Superintendent Muri. In 2022, the most recent year rated, the district earned its first-ever B rating from TEA.
Since 2019, the district’s teacher turnover rate dropped from 18% to 1%. Adding Opportunity Culture® roles helped retain teachers, Muri said, with vacancies dropping from 350 to 29.
“We’ve seen and really measure the effect of OC [implementation]—just the innovation that is embedded with it, to affect other parts of the organization,” Muri said. “It is having a systemwide impact.”
In Winchester, Virginia, Superintendent Jason van Heukelum had student growth results to celebrate just before we spoke in 2024. Virginia student learning growth results showed that for the 2023–24 year, his district’s seventh-grade math students were number 1 in the state for learning growth; fourth-grade math was in the top 10, and eighth-grade math was in the top 12. All three of these grades had 100 percent of their students reached by Multi-Classroom Leader® teaching teams.
With a team leader accountable for the results of all of the team’s students, van Heukelum said, and Opportunity Culture structures that make possible true data-driven instruction and extensive use of consistently regrouped small groups, “we’re catching the kids in real time, all of the time.”
Instead of being a solution to just one problem, he said, “this is a solution that hits two, three, or four problems that you have,” he said. “One is career paths for teachers; one is student achievement, one is teacher climate, teacher satisfaction. And so, this solution hits on all three of those buckets, maybe even more. Two, it’s cost neutral, it doesn’t cost you any more money—it’s a rethinking of how you spend your money and how you spend your allotments…and, we have the data to back it up.”
The Opportunity Culture® concept “is a key lever for change,” Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools Superintendent Tricia McManus said. “It is a strategy that empowers teachers to take ownership of student learning through adult learning, collaboration and a strong focus on instructional excellence for all.”
Thirty schools in her North Carolina district were using Multi-Classroom Leader® teams by fall 2024, “finding great success in this approach to just-in-time professional learning and coaching amongst colleagues,” said McManus, who intends for all of the district’s schools to implement over time.
“This team approach provides on-site support to those who make the magic happen for students every day, while also serving as a career ladder opportunity to keep our best teachers in schools. Teacher empowerment and support are the recipe for student success, and that is what this staffing model is all about,” McManus said.
Wilson County Schools in North Carolina was one of many districts to receive state grant funding to plan their Opportunity Culture® transition. Superintendent Lane Mills said that by implementing the model, “we will be able to improve the quality of newly hired teachers, assist current teachers, and add to the instructional knowledge base of our school system to increase student achievement. This grant will help lead an advancement in teaching and create pathways to encourage educators to grow in their profession while still continuing to teach.”
Also in North Carolina, “Guilford County Schools is proud to be a pioneering district in the Opportunity Culture initiative, dedicated to bringing advanced teaching roles to our schools and serving the students who have faced the greatest instructional inequities,” Superintendent Whitley Oakley said. “Since implementing this model in the 2018–2019 school year, our schools using Opportunity Culture roles have consistently demonstrated impressive growth in student achievement. Each year, GCS attracts exceptional educators to join our Opportunity Culture cohort, ensuring sustainable improvement across our schools.”
“The Opportunity Culture model has allowed us to extend the reach of our most effective teachers, and we look forward to seeing its continued impact as we expand it to more schools in Cumberland County,” said Cumberland County Schools Superintendent Marvin Connelly, Jr., the 2024 A. Craig Phillips North Carolina Superintendent of the Year.
“We thought it makes sense that everybody in our district should have an opportunity, not just certain schools or certain sides of the county,” said Valerie Bridges, the now retired superintendent of Edgecombe County, and the 2022 A. Craig Phillips North Carolina Superintendent of the Year. “The first year was to implement it at the north side of the county, which has traditionally been a harder side of this county to have teacher positions filled and keep them filled all year. Our first year with Opportunity Culture, we had no openings—that had never happened.”
Vance County, North Carolina, Superintendent Cindy Bennett called the Opportunity Culture® model “the vehicle that will carry you wherever it is that you want to carry that district, because whatever your priorities are, you can always find within the Opportunity Culture model the supports, the strategies, the ideas, the basic principles that would carry you forward. It’s something that isn’t time-sensitive, it isn’t trendy—it’s just good common sense.”
And when he was superintendent of Vance County before moving to Chatham County Schools—where he also introduced Opportunity Culture® roles—Anthony Jackson, the 2020 A. Craig Phillips North Carolina Superintendent of the Year, said, “It really solves a lot of the challenges that you have, and it really does expand the reach of all of the work that we’re trying to do right here in the district. There is nothing better than support at the point of need.”
Jackson saw faster results than he expected, when interviewed in Vance County’s second year of implementation. “Our schools that are Opportunity Culture schools, we saw an improvement in their outcomes immediately last year in terms of growth of students,” he said. “And with the coaching that [team leaders] are providing to our teachers and our extended reach teachers are providing to students, we saw this year an increase in the number of teachers who outperform the state in terms of growth of students. … If I had known the impact, how quickly some of these things we were able to embed a lot of these practices into our schools—I would have been more aggressive at the outset.”
When Arkansas districts began implementing the model, they also had enthusiastic superintendents. Here’s a bit of what they said when they joined the initiative in the mid-2010s.
Using Opportunity Culture® strategic staffing “is an amazing opportunity for our district to provide greater reach and a larger impact on the students in our district,” said Tiffany Hardrick, superintendent of the Forrest City School District in Arkansas.
Along with transforming teaching and learning, “the development of future teacher-leaders and the impact on teacher retention is certainly a bonus!” said Mary Ann Spears, superintendent of the Lincoln Consolidated School District in Arkansas.
“We believe the retention and recruitment of quality teachers are essential to the success of our district, and a big part of this is supporting teachers and providing opportunities for professional growth,” Crossett, Arkansas, Superintendent Gary Williams said. The Opportunity Culture® model “will provide both for our teachers as they continue their excellent work of serving our students.”