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Opportunity Culture® News and Views

In the News: Opportunity Culture® Appearances

by | August 2, 2013

Recent Opportunity Culture appearances:

  • Getting Smart listed Public Impact and our Opportunity Culture initiative in its first annual “smart list” of great policy and advocacy organizations making a difference. The 40 groups on the list “put students first, set the path, and lead the conversation.”
  • EdSurge ran a featured article on our latest case study, on Rocketship Education, discussing how Rocketship’s modifications to its blended-learning model “put teachers in the driver’s seat.” This is the fourth in a series of Opportunity Culture case studies Public Impact published this summer, to great response and high demand; more case studies will be coming this fall and beyond.

Rocketship Education: Bringing Tech Closer to Teachers

by | July 24, 2013

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.

In the News: Opportunity Culture® Appearances

by | July 19, 2013

Recent Opportunity Culture appearances:

Strong Results at New Higher-Paying, Reach-Extending Charter

by | July 9, 2013

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.

Case Study: How Charlotte Zone Planned Opportunity Culture® Schools

by | June 27, 2013

In late 2011, Denise Watts, a Charlotte-Mecklenburg zone superintendent, approached Public Impact for help meeting the goals she had as executive director for the new Project L.I.F.T., a $55 million public-private partnership to improve academics at historically low-performing, high-need schools in western Charlotte, N.C.

“If we didn’t try something truly different to change education, many of my students were not going to graduate,” Watts says.

Public Impact’s second Opportunity Culture case study, Charlotte, N.C.’s Project L.I.F.T.: New Teaching Roles Create Culture of Excellence in High-Need Schools, explains the “truly different” things that L.I.F.T. did to redesign four schools using Opportunity Culture models and principles. The study details the steps these schools took and the challenges they faced as they prepared to kick off their Opportunity Culture schools at the beginning of the 2013–14 school year. An accompanying study, Charlotte, N.C.’s Project L.I.F.T.: One Teacher’s View of Becoming a Paid Teacher-Leader, offers a Q&A with an excellent teacher on one design team, now set to take on one of the redesigned jobs as a multi-classroom leader.

Indiana Charter Board to Applicants with Innovative Models: Apply Today

by | June 20, 2013

How can a charter authorizer encourage innovation while also holding applicants and schools to high standards of quality? The Indiana Charter School Board first tried to do this in spring, and it’s giving applicants another chance today, as it releases its guidelines for the fall cycle of proposals. The board wants applicants to consider proposing dramatically different school models.

Letters of intent are due July 12, with full applications due August 9.

As in the spring cycle, request for applications, developed with support from Public Impact, suggests that applicants consider dramatically different school designs, including those that use “staff roles, technology, compensation structures, and/or other aspects of school design and/or implementation to enable the school to reach more students with excellent teaching” in a financially sustainable way.

500 Charlotte School Leaders Hear the Promise of an Opportunity Culture®

by | June 18, 2013

How could an Opportunity Culture help an entire district, not just a few schools? As the keynote speakers at Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s Leadership Conference on Monday, Public Impact’s Bryan C. Hassel and Jiye Grace Han gave 500 leaders—including principals, assistant principals, and district administrators—a chance to envision a district that reaches every student with excellent teachers and teaching teams, for higher pay, within budget.

Four of Charlotte’s Project L.I.F.T. schools will implement their own carefully designed Opportunity Cultures this fall—but Charlotte-Mecklenburg Superintendent Heath Morrison wanted his schools’ leaders to think big, with a conference theme of “Student Success by DESIGN: The Transformation of Our Schools.” He invited Hassel and Han to explain how using an Opportunity Culture and extending the reach of excellent teachers as central design concepts could help schools achieve the transformation Morrison wants to see district-wide.

1st Opportunity Culture® Case Study: Extending One Teacher’s Reach

by | June 17, 2013

In Public Impact’s Opportunity Culture school models, schools use job redesign and technology to reach more students with excellent teachers, for more pay, within budget. As districts and schools around the country consider implementing their own Opportunity Cultures, they want real-life examples of just how others have already done so.

Today, we begin a series of case studies that provide in-depth looks 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. In the studies, we will describe new programs, including personal descriptions of teachers involved. We will also analyze how well the programs stack up to the five Reach Extension Principles, which call for reaching more students with excellent teaching, higher pay, sustainable funding, job-embedded development opportunity, and enhanced authority and clear accountability for great teachers.

In our first study, Leading Educators: Empowering Teacher-Leaders to Extend Their Reach by Leading Teams, we profile Anna Lavely of Kansas, who participates in Leading Educators’ two-year fellowship aimed at developing the leadership of already-excellent teachers.

In the News: Opportunity Culture® Appearances

by | June 14, 2013

RETHINK: Planning and Designing for K-12 Next Generation Learning: iNACOL (the International Association of of K-12 Online Learning) and Next Generation Learning Challenges created this toolkit to help district, charter, and school leaders when they are just beginning to consider and design next-generation programs and schools, with personalized, competency-based, and blended learning. The toolkit includes links to many Opportunity Culture publications and tools, including some on staffing models, financial sustainability, and change management. Go here for our full list of Opportunity Culture’s school design tools, which we update often.

Q&A: Meet an Opportunity Culture® Excellent Teacher

by | June 5, 2013

Meet Romain Bertrand: middle school math teacher and Opportunity Culture enthusiast. As this school year winds down, he’s already thoroughly looking forward to the next—when he will become a Multi-Classroom Leader at Ranson IB Middle School, taking accountability for the learning results of 700 students. At Ranson, a Project L.I.F.T. school in Charlotte, N.C., Bertrand sees the opportunities of its new Opportunity Culture—to extend the reach of excellent teachers to more students, for more pay, and develop other teachers—giving him and others exactly the sort of recognition and respect he says teachers now sorely lack.

Bertrand grew up in Avignon, in the south of France, the son of teachers who both went on to become principals. After teaching middle school math in France for five years, he came to the U.S. through the Chapel Hill, N.C.-based VIF International Education, which placed him in Charlotte, teaching seventh- and eighth-grade math for five years. “It became obvious after 10 years of teaching that I finally found my groove, and I saw that I could consistently get my students to enjoy math and become passionate about it, and to grow,” says Bertrand (relaxing at right with his children).

Bertrand began working with Teach Charlotte, a six-week summer teaching academy, where he coached teachers, which prepared him for his current job at Ranson IB Middle School as a facilitator. That led to his role on the school design team at Ranson, tasked with redesigning the school to implement an Opportunity Culture in the 2013-14 year. Put a charming French accent in your head, and read what he said to Public Impact’s Grace Han in a May 28 interview: