Web pages

The Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLCs), sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, profiled the 20 grantees of its third wave of grant funding, Breakthrough School Models for College Readiness. The profiles provide a snapshot of these 20 next-generation blended school models at their inception and include overviews of the tools the grantees plan to use and the populations they will serve.

The Emerging Leaders Program by New Leaders is designed to strengthen leadership skills of teachers, coaches and assistant principals with the ultimate goal of putting participants on the path to principalship while building leadership capacity across a system. The goal is to develop the mindsets and skill sets to drive achievement gains in schools immediately. 

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 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 Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) was established by the U.S. Department of Education in 2006 and was designed to support performance-based teacher and principal compensation systems in high-need schools, funded mostly by grants. To apply and qualify for one of these grants, the applicants must design a system in high-need schools with differentiated levels of compensation for teacher and students based upon metrics such as student achievement gains. This webpage provides a list of successful TIF grantees with links to their applications.

Vanderbilt University’s National Center on Performance Initiatives provides studies that evaluate how pay-for-performance initiatives impact the quality of schools and districts. This resource is a scholarly assessment of education initiatives that use pay for performance, including randomized field trials of teacher-specific and schoolwide bonuses across the country.

This Public Impact webpage contains links to financial analyses of three of the 20+ Opportunity Culture school models. Savings and cost calculations of the models—Elementary Subject Specialization, Multi-Classroom Leadership, and Time-Technology Swap Rotation—illustrate that schools could increase excellent teachers’ pay up to approximately 130 percent, without increasing class sizes and within available budgets. In some variations, schools may pay all teachers more, sustainably.

To address the shortage of excellent teachers in the United States, the System for Teacher and Student Advancement (TAP) has created a multipronged incentive structure to recruit more of America’s best candidates into the classroom. These include multiple career paths, professional development, collaboration, and performance-based compensation. TAP has been implemented in several states with some success.