Achieving Results through School Redesign

While well-crafted staffing redesign can produce strong learning outcomes in districts of all sizes and types, some districts face extra challenges. Title I schools, small towns, and rural schools often struggle the most to fill educator jobs—and especially to attract and keep staff whose students have demonstrated high-growth learning.

Our organization, Public Impact, has tackled daunting design barriers alongside educators in hundreds of Title I schools in 18 states, many in rural and semirural areas and low-income neighborhoods. These schools have defied the odds, substantially improving learning and boosting educator job satisfaction within limited budgets. Nationally, hundreds of Title I schools using the staffing design we created were two to three times more likely to achieve high-growth learning in 2024–25 than Title I schools in the same states not using these designs, according to public data.[1] Thirteen years of data and experience have also illuminated critical design decisions associated with these outcomes.

What would it take for school systems everywhere to design well and see the same benefits? State policymakers can play a large role, by committing to and catalyzing the transition, clearing policy barriers, and establishing formal checks to ensure that state funds are used for design with results—even in the most challenging contexts.

Defying Odds Early

After years of research on high-performing schools around the world, and in consultation with dozens of teachers and union leaders nationally to create the initial guidance in 2011–12, our firm joined forces with pioneering educators ready to innovate. These educators redesigned roles and career paths, technology and time use, pay, budgets, teaching team instructional practices, and shared accountability. They used these changes to help all students grow to grade level and beyond.

A key facet of our Opportunity Culture staffing design work has been tapping teachers with a record of high student learning growth to become team leaders and paying them more. Doing so has more than doubled the number of teachers producing high-growth student learning in places we have worked.[2] Students gained two to thirteen extra months of learning growth in math and reading.[3] Even same-school students in classrooms not part of these teaching teams increased their learning growth.[4]

From inception, these models achieved strong results in urban Title I and suburban schools—attracting talent and increasing learning. Yet as the implementation expanded in the first state, North Carolina, we were concerned: Many rural districts were already struggling to compete with salaries in wealthier districts a short drive away. These systems had fewer high-growth teachers and less money to fund stipends for new, advanced roles. Still, rural school systems soon embraced these models to address staffing shortages and develop teacher talent.

“Strategic staffing is actually a force multiplier in the rural context,” said Superintendent Anthony Jackson, the 2020 North Carolina Superintendent of the Year. Now in semirural Chatham County, Jackson was superintendent of rural Vance County Schools in 2020, where he introduced Opportunity Culture models. “[W]e were struggling to find teachers, and this model removed that conversation.”

By 2021–22, five of the six schools in Vance using the models achieved high growth, paying team leaders stipends more than 20 percent above average base salaries and paying advanced team teachers more than 15 percent extra. Jackson then brought the models to Chatham County, and in 2024–25, the two initial implementing schools achieved high growth in their first year.

Numerous rural, small-town, and urban systems in many states have redesigned their schools using the same methods. The surges in learning in a state with an economy of average size have been projected as adding an estimated $6 billion to $10 billion over two decades to the gross state product.[5] Design details determine the results essential to those outcomes, though.

Opportunity Culture Principles

We launched the Opportunity Culture initiative with school redesign models based on five interlocking design principles:

• reach more students with excellent teachers and their teams;
• pay teachers more for extending their reach;
• fund pay within regular budgets;
• provide protected in-school time and clarity about how to use it for planning, collaboration, and development; and
• match authority and accountability to each person’s responsibilities.

Systems that follow these design principles are serving more than 275,000 students in 2026.

The first principle is at the core: Reach more students with excellent teachers and their teams. To do this, a group of teachers and administrators at each school determines how to deploy Multi-Classroom Leader (MCL), team teaching, and paraprofessional roles to reach all students with excellent teaching, using dozens of options within that framework. In districts with collective bargaining, teachers unions participate in setting the parameters for school design, while still adhering to the elements associated with stronger learning.

Each educator who fills the MCL role has a record of high learning growth and leads a small teaching team in planning and preparing curricula and lessons, in adopting new curricula and teaching methods, and in student data analysis and subsequent adjustments in instruction. They provide weekly—often daily—on-the-job coaching.

This design keeps excellent teachers in the classroom. Team leaders continue to teach part of the time, by teaching their own classes or courses or by leading small-group instruction for all of the team’s students. Small-group teaching and tutoring contributes to increased student learning.[6]

Team leaders advance in the profession without moving into administration. “It’s the best of both worlds,” said Casey Jackson, who had an MCL role in Vance County. “I get to work with students; I get to work with teachers and with administration.”[7]

The Opportunity Culture model includes the Team Reach Teacher role, directly teaching more students than typical; the Master Team Reach Teacher role, teaching more students and coaching one or two other teachers; and the Reach Associate role, for paraprofessionals who help reduce group sizes and tutor small groups. With key roles in place, schools may add others, such as remotely located MCL roles for hard-to-staff subjects, special education or bilingual student support, and a Multi-School Leader role, in which a high-performing principal leads and develops a small team of school leaders.

Selecting grades or subjects for initial transformation on the path to reaching all students schoolwide, deciding which variations of MCL and team teacher roles to use, and determining how paraprofessional roles operate—in a learning lab or by pushing into team classrooms—creates a host of options. But in all cases, high-growth teachers lead.

Three more design principles highlight the interrelated elements of pay and accountability: Pay teachers more when they lead a team or directly teach more students than is typical, fund pay within regular budgets, and match authority and accountability to each person’s responsibilities. School design teams analyze their budgets and decide what to reallocate to pay for supplements and new positions. Common sources include not filling every vacancy, which are often numerous in Title I schools, and deploying Title I funds.

Team leaders earn supplements averaging 20 percent (and up to 50 percent) of teacher pay through reallocations of the regular school budget, and they are held accountable for the learning growth results of all their team’s students, ideally through a district’s evaluation system. The supplements have led to six-figure pay in some districts, especially when stacked with other pay boosts in a state.[8] In 2024–25, the average MCL supplement was $13,352 and went as high as $25,000. Team members who teach more students than usual, individually or as a team, typically earn between 3 and 15 percent extra, and teams may include staff in yearlong paid teacher residencies and apprenticeships.

“The pay supplement MCL [roles] get, which ranges in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools from $11,250 to $18,250, and the ability to impact more than just one classroom were a real blessing,” said Steven Kennedy, an early adopter of the MCL role.[9] “It allowed me to stay in a career that I think I was made for. It allowed me to keep teaching and provide for my family in ways that six years ago seemed impossible.”

When their team leaders have “skin in the game” through accountability for the team’s student results, team teachers become more open to daily collaboration and feedback. “I’ve never had so much support in all my teaching career,” team teacher Mary Price said.[10]

Because they are getting that support, seeing improved student results, and observing the leader’s hard work, teachers accept that their leaders are paid more, principals have told us.

One design principle focuses on protecting teachers’ time, requiring schools to redesign schedules to secure in-school time for planning, collaboration, and development through on-the-job coaching using the team’s curriculum.

Outcomes

Public Impact has supported districts and states in making the transition to these designs, provided professional learning for people in new roles, and created an online portal to support design and certify schools that meet standards correlated with results. Educators have begun using the portal on their own to keep designs up to date and to reach more students per school and system.

Since 2013, 90 sites in 17 states and the District of Columbia have used these designs—from large, urban districts such as the 144,000-student Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools to more than a dozen districts with fewer than 10,000 students. Half of implementing districts have fewer than 15 schools. At the end of 2024–25, more than 1,000 schools were implementing or planning Opportunity Culture designs or were committed by their districts or states to use them in coming years. Over 90 percent of these schools are eligible for Title I funding.

North Carolina’s State Board of Education provides grant funds for districts to design advanced, higher-paid roles for their educators. Since 2016, about 75 percent of districts receiving these funds were using Opportunity Culture staffing designs in their applications.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. The district began to use Opportunity Culture designs in 2013 and quickly thereafter committed to scaling them up. There are now 180 schools in the district using MCL teams with a variety of team roles. The district has sustained implementation through over half a dozen superintendent changes.

In 2024–25, Charlotte schools with these teams were substantially more likely to record high growth, as measured using a statewide tool for assessing student growth, and less likely to have low growth compared with other schools in the state. Approximately 70 percent of district schools with Certified Opportunity Culture School status and four years using MCL-led teams exceeded the state’s growth targets. Nearly two-thirds of the system’s schools with these models achieved high growth overall in 2024–25, a rare feat for a US school district in the top 20 for size. Over 70 percent of its schools using the models for at least four years achieved high growth. The district has chosen to get all of its schools certified. The national initiative, in turn, is learning from the district’s successes.

In North Carolina overall, as nationally, the 200-plus Title I schools with certified status were two to three times more likely to exceed learning growth expectations in 2024–25 than Title I schools not using Opportunity Culture designs, according to data from the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction.[11] Forty-eight percent of the certified schools exceeded growth targets, compared with 25 percent of all schools in the state.

Carlsbad, New Mexico. When Superintendent Gerry Washburn arrived in this nine-school district in 2019, a third of the district’s teacher positions were vacant, and students were struggling. But after seeing Opportunity Culture teams in action in Ector County, Texas, which had similarly struggled, he and some of his district leaders and principals were eager to switch.

Carlsbad schools saw results by their first and second years of implementation. In 2024–25, Desert Willow Elementary posted the highest growth in the state in literacy proficiency among medium-size schools, and the 31st highest growth in math proficiency out of hundreds of similar-size schools. PR Leyva Intermediate posted the fourth highest growth in math proficiency and the seventeenth highest growth in literacy proficiency. Cottonwood Elementary had the tenth highest growth in math proficiency among medium-size schools and the eighteenth highest growth in literacy proficiency.

“I’ve been stunned at the acceleration that we’re seeing,” Washburn said. “I cannot describe the culture shift in Desert Willow and Cottonwood. It is impossible for somebody who wasn’t there to understand the magnitude of the shift.” [12]

The district also dramatically reduced vacancies, from 103 when Washburn arrived to 24. “Opportunity Culture is the closest thing to a silver bullet that I’ve seen in my career,” he said.

Ector County, Texas. As it did for Carlsbad, Ector County Schools inspired many districts, after then Superintendent Scott Muri turned around dual challenges of vacancies and low student achievement with redesign. When Muri came to Ector County in the summer of 2019, 16 of the district’s 45 schools had an F grade from the state, and 4 had a D. Meanwhile, the school year started—and ended—with 350 teacher vacancies.

In a 2025 hearing before the US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, Muri said that Opportunity Culture design led to a jump in the percentage of high school students considered postsecondary ready, from 56 percent in 2019 to 93 percent in 2025, the highest graduation rate in 23 years, and recognition by Harvard and Stanford Universities for its math and reading gains.[13] By 2024–25, the district had just 29 vacancies.

Winchester, Virginia. Superintendent Jason van Heukelum introduced Opportunity Culture to Winchester Public Schools in 2021–22 and pushed to use it districtwide. Two years into implementation, their seventh grade math students were no. 1 in the state for learning growth, fourth grade math was in the top 10, and eighth grade math was in the top 12. MCL teams had reached all the students in these grades. Across the district, fifteen teams were reaching all students in a subject or grade, with nine teams’ students posting high growth.

“A lot of times, you have a problem, you have a solution,” Van Heukelum said. “This is a solution that hits two, three, or four problems that you have. One is career paths for teachers, one is student achievement, one is teacher climate, teacher satisfaction…. [I]t doesn’t cost you any more money—it’s a rethinking of how you spend your money and how you spend your allotments.”[14]

Wilson County, North Carolina. Principal April Shackleford said team leaders in her rural school guided the implementation of the science of reading with a focus on data-driven, small-group tutoring.[15] Her school saw dramatic learning growth, which researcher Chad Aldeman identified as outperforming expectations for reading proficiency.[16] In 2024, 47 percent of Wilson’s Title I schools with Opportunity Culture models exceeded the state’s growth target, compared with 21 percent of North Carolina Title I schools without the models.

Madison Parish, Louisiana. A tight focus on MCL support combined with high-quality instructional materials helped this small, rural district begin to address long-standing issues of low performance. The district was second in the state in 2024–25 for growth in early literacy, as measured by K-3 results on the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills, or DIBELS, test, and it improved teacher retention.[17] Nationally, teachers consistently express strong satisfaction in annual, anonymous surveys, with 97–99 percent of MCL educators and 91 percent of educators in team roles wanting implementation to continue.

Three Key Steps for State Boards

In a time of declining enrollments, tight budgets, and disappointing gains in student learning, state boards can support districts’ school redesign efforts. They can do so by committing to data-driven results, catalyzing change through transition funding and removal of policy barriers, and continuing the monitoring and support needed to reach all students.

Commit and Catalyze. State boards and other leaders must commit to data-driven design with results for all students and educators in core subjects. Expending funds on low- or moderate-result designs reduces the number of students and educators who benefit.

Even when pay supplements are funded within regular budgets, states must fund districts’ transition costs. The US Department of Education’s recent Dear Colleague letter makes clear that implementing this kind of model is an allowed and encouraged use of Title II and Title I schoolwide dollars.[18] States can use SEA set-aside funds to support district implementation. And states can use their LEA federal funding applications to guide districts toward using their own Title funding for school redesign, aligned with evidence about what works.

Clear Barriers. State leaders must also remove policy barriers that hamper within-budget design or results. Transition funding may be scaled, with lower-wealth systems receiving more help, for example. Rigid state budgets that prevent paying educators more with existing funds present a policy barrier, as do class-size limits that prevent trading in persistently vacant positions to pay more to teachers who remain. As long as teacher leaders are accountable for student learning, removing these and other policy barriers lets schools reach all students and lets districts pay teachers more.

Check—and Recheck. Design with results requires oversight and accountability for use of state funds—at launch and ongoing. Design is not one and done, and reaching a few school systems in a pilot will not shift statewide learning or economic outcomes. State leaders can monitor design quality, asking, for instance, whether schools are providing time for teacher leaders to coach their teams and what research has emerged that may affect staffing models. How many students are served in the redesign, and how can that reach be expanded? Are LEAs and schools selecting teacher leaders based on prior high growth? Are teacher leaders clearly accountable for student learning across their whole team?

“Part of the story in education is ‘Why would anyone want to be a teacher?’” Carlsbad Superintendent Washburn said. “Opportunity Culture gives you an answer to that. You treat people like professionals, you give them the capacity to learn, you give them support, and you don’t expect them to do it all at once. And they deliver amazing results.”

Never has the call been louder to achieve dramatic learning results quickly, at scale, and in ways that support and reward educators. While private philanthropy can get the ball rolling, only state leaders have the power to reach students and educators statewide—with redesign that works.

Sharon Kebschull Barrett is the Public Impact senior vice president for communications and editorial services. Bryan C. Hassel is the co-president of Public Impact. For more information on the Opportunity Culture model, see our web page. Opportunity Culture^® encompasses several copyright-protected elements and trademarked role titles: Multi-Classroom Leader^®, MCL™, Team Reach Teacher™, Master Team Reach Teacher™, and Reach Associate™, Multi-School Leader™, and Certified Opportunity Culture School^®.

Notes

[1] Public Impact, Opportunity Culture research findings, web page (2026).

[2] Jacob Kirksey et al., “Evaluating Opportunity Culture: Improving Student Achievement through Strategic Staffing in West Texas,” policy brief no. 5 (Texas Tech University College of Education, February 2026); Benjamin Backes and Michael Hansen, “Reaching Further and Learning More? Evaluating Public Impact’s Opportunity Culture Initiative,” CALDER Working Paper No. 181-0118 (AIR, 2018).

[3] Kirksey et al., “Evaluating Opportunity Culture,” policy brief; Backes and Hansen, “Reaching Further and Learning More?” working paper.

[4] Kirksey et al., “Evaluating Opportunity Culture,” policy brief.

[5] See McKinsey & Co., “The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools,” summary of findings (April 2009). See our more conservative estimate applied to one state in Christen Holly et al., “Projected Statewide Impact of ‘Opportunity Culture’ School Models” (Public Impact, 2014).

[6] Andre Nickow, Philip Oreopoulos, and Vincent Quan, “The Impressive Effects of Tutoring on PreK-12 Learning: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Experimental Evidence,” NBER Working Paper No. 27476 (National Bureau of Economic Research, July 2020).

[7] Opportunity Culture, “Best of Both Worlds,” video.

[8] Sharon Kebschull Barrett, “How Some Texas Teachers Are Earning Six Figures—Without Leaving the Classroom,” opinion, The 74, June 4, 2025. See also Stephanie Howard, “How to Keep Teachers: Provide a Complete Package,” opinion, District Administration, September 12, 2025.

[9] Steven Kennedy, “Can I Really Keep at This? What Kept One Great Teacher in the Classroom,” opinion, EducationNC, February 24, 2020.

[10] Opportunity Culture, “Teacher Support in an Opportunity Culture®,” video.

[11] Public Impact calculation based on data from the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction.

[12] Opportunity Culture, “Superintendents Speak: Vacancies Plummet, Student Results Rocket in Carlsbad, New Mexico,” podcast.

[13] Scott Muri, testimony before the US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, “The State of K–12 Education,” video, September 18, 2025; Education Recovery Scorecard, “District Success Stories,” web page.

[14] Opportunity Culture, “A Superintendent’s View: Go All-In with Opportunity Culture® Teams, Small-Group,” podcast.

[15] Opportunity Culture, “Dramatic Student Growth Follows Focus on Data, Small-Group Tutoring, and Collaboration,” podcast.

[16] Chad Aldeman, “Which School Districts Do the Best Job of Teaching Kids to Read?” report, The 74, September 10, 2024.

[17] Opportunity Culture, “For Louisiana District, HQIM + Opportunity Culture® Teams Sparks Early Wins,” podcast.

[18] US Department of Education, February 9, 2026, letter.