Beverley Tyndall

As Public Impact continues our Opportunity Culture quest to reach more students with great teachers, we’re seeing both district and charter schools come on board. In the charter sector, a disproportionate amount of activity is by new charter school organizations.

But these new school providers can’t just ask the school next door—or even the charter school next door—how to make reach models that combine job redesign and technology successful for students and teachers. They need each other. So we formed the national Opportunity Culture Charter School Network.

The network’s four founding members are Foundations College Prep in Chicago, Ingenuity Prep in Washington, D.C., Touchstone Education in Newark, N.J., and Venture Academy in Minneapolis.

In a new report on the effects of the recession on teacher salaries in 41 major school districts, the National Council on Teacher Quality found that teacher raises for experience and market forces like inflation were one-third to one-half of what they were at the beginning of the recession. Eighty percent of the districts studied had a total pay freeze or pay cut in at least one school year between 2008-09 and 2011-12–although none had a cut or freeze every year, and eight districts showed positive salary growth each year between 2008-09 and 2011-12. See the report for details on how the districts adjusted pay in the face of tight budgets.

One way districts could respond is by employing an Opportunity Culture: See our “Paying Teachers More” page to understand how Opportunity Culture models could increase excellent teachers’ pay up to approximately 130%, without increasing class sizes and within available budgets. In some variations, schools may pay all teachers more, sustainably. Combining these and other sustainable models to extend the reach of excellent teachers and promote excellence by all instructional staff may produce even greater savings to fund teacher pay increases and other priorities, while producing excellent student outcomes.

A year ago, Public Impact began working with school design teams of pilot schools in the Charlotte and Nashville public school districts to choose and tailor school models for extending the reach of excellent teachers to more students.

We didn’t know for certain how well the design processes would go. We chose these districts because they had leaders who showed real commitment to expanding the impact and authority of already-excellent teachers and a burning passion to help disadvantaged students. But would that be enough?