Making Teaching a Highly Paid, High-Impact Profession
In this brief, Public Impact Co-Directors Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan C. Hassel update their vision of an Opportunity Culture. The brief explains how extending the reach of great teachers can start a virtuous cycle of excellence and higher pay for all teachers.
Multi-classroom leaders in Nashville’s iZone: Listen to Aundrea Cline-Thomas report on NewsChannel5 about Opportunity Culture teacher-leaders at Buena Vista Elementary, Robert Churchwell Elementary, and Bailey Middle School in Metro Nashville Public Schools. Cline-Thomas discusses how these excellent teachers are extending their reach to more students by leading a team of teachers–while being accountable for the results of all students in the team–and focusing their own teaching on small groups of struggling students, all for more pay. Read more about Multi-Classroom Leadership, and see how Charlotte, N.C., schools are implementing this model.
Christopher Gergen and Stephen Martin focused their “Doing Better at Doing Good” column* in The (Raleigh, N.C.) News and Observer on Public Impact and our Opportunity Culture models, noting our work with Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s Project L.I.F.T.
“The reach extension strategy has far-reaching implications for the way our classrooms are designed, our teachers are trained, and our budgets are constructed. It’s transformative work that is hard to do. But the allure of providing excellent teaching for all of our children while providing team-based development and well-compensated professional pathways to our state’s teachers is undeniable,” wrote Gergen, the founder of Bull City Forward and Queen City Forward, a fellow with the Fuqua Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship at Duke University, and author of Life Entrepreneurs, and Martin, a director at the Center for Creative Leadership and author of The Messy Quest for Meaning.
Recent Opportunity Culture appearances:
When Rocketship Education, a pioneering, rapidly expanding charter school network, looked at its results, it could have rested on its laurels. After all, with seven schools in California together ranking as the top public school system for low-income elementary students, Rocketship had proof that its blended-learning model— combining online learning with face-to-face instruction—works.
But next year, Rocketship leaders will fix a disconnect they see between what happens in the online learning lab and the classroom, to give teachers more control over the students’ digital learning and further individualize the teaching.
Instead of reporting to a separate computer lab, fourth- and fifth-graders will move within an open, flexible classroom between digital learning and in-person instruction, with those moves based on their individual needs and the roles that specific teachers are best suited to play—similar to the Opportunity Culture Time-Technology Swap—Flex model and the Role Specialization model.
In the latest Opportunity Culture case study from Public Impact, Rocketship Education: Pioneering Charter Network Innovates Again, Bringing Tech Closer to Teachers, we look at what Rocketship has done so far to achieve its top results, and where it’s headed.
This case study details how Rocketship, a pioneering, rapidly expanding charter school network, planned to refine its blended-learning model in the 2013–14 year.
Recent Opportunity Culture appearances:
What do you get when you combine an experienced charter school leader with a new model that mixes multi-classroom leaders and blended learning in a high-need school? At charter management organization Touchstone Education, you get nimble teachers, quick to adjust their models as needed, and some great student results.
“We have learned that the one most important thing we can do to positively impact the learning of a child is to consistently provide them with a great teacher,” says Ben Rayer, Touchstone’s founder and CEO, and former president of Mastery Charter Schools. “In our model, we have reframed what teachers do and how they are developed.”
Touchstone opened its first site in fall 2012, Merit Preparatory Charter School in Newark, N.J. The school started small, with 84 sixth-graders, so it could quickly adjust and learn from its efforts. In its first year, with a student population that is 90 percent low-income and was generally several years behind grade level, Merit Prep Newark showed great growth in reading and science: By March 2013 tests, students already demonstrated two years of growth in reading and 1.25 years of growth in science.
This is one in a series of case studies looking at how districts, charter schools, and other programs have begun using Opportunity Culture models or experimented with similar means of expanding teachers’ impact on students and peer teachers.
Public Impact’s second Opportunity Culture case study explains the “truly different” things that Project L.I.F.T. did to redesign four schools using Opportunity Culture models and principles.