Staffing Innovations

In this report, the Center for American Progress and Public Impact outline four concrete actions that the federal government can take to expand student access to excellent teachers.

This Public Impact video explains how excellent teachers can close achievement gaps, and why schools must reach more students with these teachers. It also introduces new models that let schools pay teachers up to 40 percent more and teacher-leaders up to 130 percent more, within budget. 

This Public Impact webpage provides information on how school models that extend the reach of excellent teachers to more students can create new roles that enable teachers and paraprofessionals to pursue a variety of career paths.

The complete recipe for Singapore’s educational success is not public, but one element stands out: the development and thorough use of performance-linked “competencies” to measure, reward, and develop teacher performance. This report by Public Impact explores Singapore’s successful teacher evaluation and development system—recognized by its education leadership and teachers as effective and fair.

This infographic by Public Impact summarizes the ideas of “Opportunity Culture” and illustrates ways schools can use job redesign and technology to put excellent teachers in charge of students’ learning. 

The T3 (Turnaround Teacher Teams) Initiative at Teach Plus represents an innovative approach to recruiting, developing, and supporting teachers to serve in high-need schools. The T3 Initiative currently partners with schools in Massachusetts and Tennessee. The initiative creates cohorts of highly effective and experienced teachers, supports them in becoming turnaround specialists, and places them in teams in the schools in which they are most needed.

This Public Impact webpage provides an overview table and detailed descriptions of school models that redesign jobs, and in some cases, use technology in new ways, to extend the reach of excellent teachers to more students.

This Public Impact webpage has links to a presentation and two short publications created specifically for teacher audiences. These resources illustrate what teaching and learning could look like in an Opportunity Culture, and they focus on the benefits for teachers and the potential to truly change the teaching profession.

The job of “teacher” in most schools today remains centered on full-time classroom responsibilities that are defined by the location, timing, and schedule of the school day and a one-teacher-per-classroom model. But particularly in today’s budget climate, interest in quality-focused job redesigns is increasing among forward-thinking state, district, and charter school leaders. This report, prepared by Public Impact for the Center for American Progress, profiles two organizations—the Rocketship Education network of charter schools and the Fairfax County, Virginia, school district.