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In the News: Charlotte’s Opportunity Culture® Expansion

January 10, 2014

Thursday’s announcement that the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District is scaling up its use of Opportunity Culture models that extend the reach of excellent teachers and their teams to more students, for more pay, within budget, got some attention. CMS school design teams, which include teachers and school leaders, will integrate the new models into 17 more schools this year, and more schools will join the implementation in each of the two years after that, with almost half of the district’s schools implementing by 2017–18. Read all about it!

“Belk Foundation gives $505,000 to create big rewards for star teachers” by Charlotte Observer reporter Ann Doss Helms

“More CMS Schools To Give Star Teachers New Duties, Higher Pay,” by WFAE reporter Lisa Miller

“Raises for teachers willing to help redefine how students learn” by WBTV reporter Kristen Miranda

“CMS to expand program which financially rewards top teachers” by WSOC reporter Torie Wells

Worth noting from those reports:

From WFAE:

“This position allowed me to have a comparable salary to [other jobs I’ve been offered outside the classroom], but also stay with kids, which is where my heart is and where my passion is. It’s keeping me in a bunch of classrooms, which is great.”–Kristin Cubbage, a multi-classroom leader at Ashley Park Elementary, one of four Charlotte schools implementing the new models this year.

From WSOC:

“We think [teachers] deserve more — we think they deserve more pay, we think they deserve respect, more support.”–Katie Morris, chairwoman of The Belk Foundation, a local family foundation, which made a rare, three-year commitment of $505,000 to help fund the transition costs of the redesign work, after which the models will be financially sustainable.

From The Charlotte Observer:

“I have loved this job. It really is kind of a dream job in education.”–Cubbage

From WBTV:

“We plan to roll this out to the rest of our CMS buildings. The question is not if, it is when.”–Superintendent Heath Morrison

Charlotte to expand Opportunity Culture® to almost half its schools

January 9, 2014

We have exciting news today, with potentially big implications for teachers and students: Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS) announced a scale-up of its use of Opportunity Culture models that extend the reach of excellent teachers and their teams to more students, for more pay, within budget. The Belk Foundation, a local family foundation, announced a rare, three-year commitment to fund the redesign work, after which the models will be financially sustainable.

For far too long, the field has relied on unsustainably funded career paths. “Sustainable” equaled “We’ll apply for another grant.” This has limited opportunities to districts with superior grant-writing abilities, not the many more with committed, capable leaders who truly want to help more children learn and more teachers excel. With sustainable models, CMS—and other districts that follow its lead—can make a long-term promise to current and prospective teachers, rather than snatching back extra pay, and the roles it funds, after a few years.

Our team at Public Impact will partner with Education Resource Strategies to help schools select and adapt models that reallocate funds to pay teachers more for taking responsibility for more students’ learning, directly and by leading teaching teams in fully accountable leadership roles. Together, we will also help school teams, all of which include teachers, increase on-the-job planning and development time, and provide for flexible scheduling and grouping.

In fall 2013, four schools within the Project L.I.F.T. zone of high-need CMS schools began implementing Opportunity Culture models, which we developed in consultation with teachers nationwide from organizations including Teach Plus and Educators 4 Excellence.

Now, CMS school design teams that include teachers and school leaders will integrate the new models into 17 more schools this year, and more schools will join the implementation in each of the two years after that, with almost half of the district’s schools implementing by 2017–18. The Belk Foundation will fund transition costs with a grant of $505,000, one of the foundation’s largest ever.

Opportunity Culture® in the News: Thanksgiving Advice!

November 26, 2013

“There’s no better time to convince your whole family that teacher salaries must go up than at Thanksgiving Dinner. You’ve got a captive audience full of loved ones who are too full to move, so ignore the old adage to not discuss politics at the dinner table,” says the Teacher Salary Project in its “Guide to Surviving a Political Conversation at Thanksgiving.”

Check out their script for offering a toast to teachers to kick off your dinner, plus facts and research any family member can chew over, no matter where they sit on the political spectrum–including how an Opportunity Culture can pay teachers more, within budget.

Happy Thanksgiving, and here’s to all the great teachers in our lives!

Focus Federal Investments to Give Every Student Access to Excellent Teachers

November 20, 2013

Excellent teachers—those in the top 20 to 25 percent—are the ones who produce the strong learning growth students need to catch up and pursue advanced work. These teachers, on average, help students make a year and a half worth of learning growth annually. Without excellent teachers consistently, students who start out behind rarely catch up, and students who meet today’s grade-level targets rarely leap ahead to meet rising global standards.

Giving all students access to excellent teachers, and the teams that they lead, could also transform teaching, as we’ve begun to show through our Opportunity Culture pilot schools. The new school models in these schools allow sustainably funded higher pay for all, leadership roles that let great teachers lead teams, time for on-the-job collaboration and development, and enhanced authority and credit when helping more students. Early Opportunity Culture implementers have attracted large numbers of applicants for these new jobs, even in high-poverty schools.

In a new brief we wrote with Christen Holly and Gillian Locke for the Center for American Progress, Giving Every Student Access to Excellent Teachers: A Vision for Focusing Federal Investments in Education, we suggest four ways the federal government can dramatically increase access to excellent teaching and transform the profession:

6 Ways to Pay All Teachers More–Within Budget

October 31, 2013

Our fresh approach to paying teachers more is the basic premise of an Opportunity Culture: Use redesigned jobs and age-appropriate technology to reallocate spending toward what matters most—great teaching. But have you wondered just how that works?

Our new three-page brief, 6 Ways to Pay All Teachers More Within Budget, spells it out for you. With Opportunity Culture models, schools can extend the reach of excellent teachers and the teams they lead to more students, for more pay, within budget (not temporary grants)—making significant pay increases possible for all teachers.

Savings and cost calculations of several models–Multi-Classroom Leadership, Elementary Subject Specialization, Time-Technology Swaps, and the combination at the secondary level of Multi-Classroom Leadership with Time-Technology Swaps–show that schools could pay teachers approximately 20 to 130 percent more—without increasing class sizes, and within existing budgets. Even when increasing all team teachers’ pay, schools can still pay teacher-leaders approximately 65 to 80 percent more. And beyond that, reallocating other current spending could offer yet another boost to teachers’ pay, beyond what we have demonstrated so far in our Opportunity Culture models.

Multi-Classroom Leader®: Why I Love This Teaching/Leading Model

October 29, 2013

Romain Bertrand, a multi-classroom leader (MCL) at Ranson IB Middle School in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg district, wants to spread the word: Keep great teachers in the classroom, splitting their time between teaching and leading other teachers–for more pay. In “To be or not to be in the classroom, that is the question…“, Bertrand blogs about the sadness of teachers feeling forced out of the classroom in order to progress in their careers–and why using the MCL model should be the way forward for schools.

“For years, a sad reality has been hurting our educational system, at least here in North Carolina: If you are good at teaching and you truly enjoy it, the only way for you to expand your impact and advance in your career is to … leave the very same classroom where you currently excel,” Bertrand writes.

“This paradox has become a dirty little secret that we all whisper: At one point, I am going to have to leave the classroom. It can be to make a decent living (extremely sad but understandable point) but it can also be to find a way to reach more students through instructional coaching and school leadership. Often, it can be to try [to] combine both goals. Couldn’t there be another way?”

Using Blended Learning to Pay Teachers More

October 28, 2013

The power and promise of blended learning—to let students learn individually paced basics online, so teachers can focus on personalized, enriched face-to-face instruction—can bring excellent teaching to more students, and enable all teachers to earn at least 20 percent more, sustainably. In addition, teachers can gain planning and collaboration time during school hours.

How? In what we call Time-Technology Swaps—one of the job models in an Opportunity Culture— excellent teachers and the teams they lead reach more students, for more pay, within budget, without having to increase class sizes. Paraprofessionals working with leadership and direction from teachers supervise the online-learning time. Lower wage rates for paraprofessionals enable higher pay for the excellent teachers and their teams. These teaching teams can teach more students without increasing class size because, at a given time, some of their students are online while teachers work in person with others. Schools can even reduce class sizes and still pay teachers more.

Scalable Secondary-Level School Models Increase Teacher Pay, Planning Time

October 24, 2013

Recently, I was chatting with a secondary school-level teacher who co-leads her teacher-run charter school. In her school, scheduling and staffing deliberately provide abundant teacher collaboration time and teacher-leadership, crucial for teachers to innovate and improve as they serve the school’s high-need population. She asked, “Emily, how can we make models like this scalable and appealing to more schools, so that districts use them, too?”

We have just released our latest calculations in the Opportunity Culture series, which indicate that middle and high school teachers who use blended learning and lead teaching teams can earn 20 to 67 percent more, within current budgets, and without class-size increases. This requires new school models with redesigned teacher roles that extend the reach of excellent teachers and their teams to more students. Using these models, teachers also gain 5 to 15 additional school hours weekly to plan and improve instruction collaboratively.

In the News: Opportunity Culture® Appearances

October 11, 2013

Recent Opportunity Culture appearances:

  • The Education Commission of the States recommends our new “Opportunity Culture for All” brief in its October 9 newsletter, saying: “The bad news: Between 1970 and 2010, per pupil spending went up almost 150%, but only 11% went to teachers. Teacher salaries and student outcomes stagnated. There’s a better way, the authors argue. Junk the one-teacher-one-classroom model. Create teaching teams led by one excellent teacher so more kids get exposed. Use digital instruction and paraprofessionals to save money and spend that money on better teacher pay. Be more selective about which teachers enter, which teachers stay.”
  • The recently released e-book Navigating the Digital Shift: Implementation Strategies for Blended and Online Learning, from the Digital Learning Now! Smart Series, includes the paper on “Improving Conditions & Careers: How Blended Learning Can Improve the Teaching Profession,” by Public Impact’s Bryan C. Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel, and John Bailey, Carri Schneider,and Tom Vander Ark. It explains the necessity of creating an Opportunity Culture when using blended learning and why, without that, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to bring personalized blended learning to scale in order to reach every student in every classroom with excellence. As the authors note: “Truly understanding the potential of blended learning leads to the realization that teachers become even more important in a personalized learning environment. This realization, that teaching matters now more than ever, undergirds the “Opportunity Culture” work of Public Impact, which explores how schools can extend the reach of excellent teachers using job redesign and technology and, in doing so, lead to better conditions and careers for teachers.”
  • Romain Bertrand, a Multi-Classroom Leader® at Ranson IB Middle School in Charlotte-Mecklenburg whom we profiled in an Opportunity Culture case study, has started a blog about his work in Ranson’s exciting first year using Opportunity Culture models. Update: He also has just been asked to write for his district’s “Teaching & Learning in CMS” blog on his experience leading teams of teachers to implement blended learning–see his first post here.

Could You Give All Students Excellent Teachers–and Pay More?

October 10, 2013

What if every U.S. student had a new civil right to an excellent teacher, every year, in all core subjects? What if schools also had to pay teachers at least 20 percent more, within budget? Could you design a school that met those demands?

Try it: Use Public Impact’s free Opportunity Culture scenarios to see if you could design a rural or urban, high-poverty school that

  • closes gaps and helps all students leap ahead by letting excellent teachers take responsibility for all students’ learning in core subjects;
  • pays all teachers more, and excellent teachers who lead teams far more, within budget
  • gives teachers frequent school-day time for planning, team collaboration, and on-the-job development; and
  • does not reduce student learning time.

It’s a tall order, but new school models, now being implemented in pilot schools in the U.S., can make what we call an Opportunity Culture a reality.

Designed to help district and school design teams rethink the one-teacher-one-classroom mode, these scenarios ask planners to assume the role of a school principal. The principal must develop a plan to give all students access to excellent teachers and their teams with the school’s current staff, without any new funding. The principal must make the school attractive by both paying teachers more and offering them a great place to work—full of teaching career advancement opportunities and job-embedded development led by teacher-leaders.