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Financially Sustainable Career Paths for Teachers

Follow the money. Usually good advice to find out what’s actually important—or not—to people or organizations, regardless of the values they profess. In education, what’s most striking is where the money doesn’t go: to a variety of engaging roles and opportunities for education professionals, and expanded impact and opportunity for those who demonstrate excellence. In everyday lingo, that’s called “career paths.”

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools

Began using Opportunity Culture® models in: 2013-14 Learn more about the Opportunity Culture® initiative in CMS by visiting the district website. Details: In 2013–14, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools’ Project L.I.F.T. became the first implementation site in Public...

Redesigning Schools for Financially Sustainable Excellence: Infographic!

Everybody loves a good infographic (even you wonky researchers – just wait ‘til nobody’s looking), and we hope this one will change how you view education reform efforts.

For word nerds, here’s a summary:

  • Our nation is falling behind globally as other nations provide increasingly rigorous and widespread education to their people. No surprises there.
  • It’s not hard to see why: In contrast to educationally high-performing nations, ours is not selective about who teaches our children. As a result, schools cannot provide the kind of autonomy that great teachers crave. They just can’t have confidence that most teaching professionals will self- lead the rigor-and-innovation infused school cultures great teachers want and students need.

How digital learning can (and must) help excellent teachers reach more children

Thanks to Michael Horn for letting us add onto his noteworthy post “Why digital learning will liberate teachers.” Here we want to second his point and add another: schools – and nations – that excel in the digital age will be those that use digital tools both to make teaching more manageable for the average teacher, and to give massively more students access to excellent teachers.

And not just in the obvious ways. Yes, directly through digital instruction. But also by freeing excellent teachers to reach more students in-person.

Today, only about 25 percent of U.S. classrooms have teachers whose students learn enough to close achievement gaps in a few years and make further progress like the world’s top students. Another 25 percent have lagging teachers whose students end up further behind. The rest have solid teachers – students on track stay on track, but students starting behind stay behind, and few get ahead. Overall, U.S. students end up pretty much where they started out in life, the antithesis of the American dream.

Khan Academy: Not Overhyped, Just Missing a Key Ingredient – Excellent Live Teachers

Rick Hess was right to question the simplistic hyping of Khan Academy’s online video lectures in this Straight Up post. But we think he’s only got it half-right: it’s less a matter of OVER-hyping than MIS-hyping the true potential of what Khan is doing. Just to summarize, Khan Academy offers short, engaging tutorials in math, science and other subjects and is experimenting with having kids use these during homework time, freeing up school time for problem solving and collaborative work – a concept commonly called “flipping.”

We’ve written here and here about the importance figuring out as a nation how to “extend the reach” of great teachers to more students, since great teachers accountable for student learning are the one “intervention” we know can close achievement gaps and raise the bar for all students.