The Clarke County School District is excited to launch Opportunity Culture, a new teacher career pathway, to positively impact our students and community. LEARN MORE! Sign up for an informational webinar.

To provide all students with excellent teaching and to help students close achievement gaps and leap ahead, our schools are using Opportunity Culture models for their teachers and students. Opportunity Culture models enable schools to reach every student with excellent teachers and their teams —consistently — while paying teachers more for their extra responsibilities and helping all educators improve on the job and work collaboratively. All pay supplements are funded through reallocations of existing budgets – no temporary grants.

Opportunity Culture models create new roles for teachers — through a foundation of the Multi-Classroom Leader role — and support staff, and they carefully integrate technology to save teachers time and help individualize instruction, often through small groups. The most effective teachers are responsible not only for helping more students, but also for helping their peers achieve teaching excellence. Research has shown large student learning gains for students on Multi-Classroom Leader teams.

In each Opportunity Culture school, a team of teachers and administrators adopts new roles to reach more students with teachers who have produced high-growth student learning. The team decides what reallocations to make to fund higher-paid roles, how to design school schedules for collaboration at school, how fast to reach all students with excellent teaching, and other design elements. Four schools will pilot the new career pathway in the 2024-2025 school year: Clarke Central High School, Burney-Harris-Lyons Middle School, Timothy Road Elementary, and Winterville Elementary.

How Opportunity Culture Models Work

In each Opportunity Culture school:

A group of teachers and administrators determines how to use the Multi-Classroom Leader (MCL) role and other teaching team roles to reach all students with excellent teaching and small-group instruction and pay teachers more. Opportunity Culture models provide customizable designs based on a proven framework.

Each MCL leads a small teaching team, providing guidance and frequent on-the-job coaching while continuing to teach, often by leading small-group instruction. Research shows that when teachers increase small-group teaching and tutoring, student learning surges.

Accountable for the results of all students in the team, MCLs earn supplements averaging 20 percent (and up to 50 percent) of teacher pay, within the regular school budget.

In the majority of schools, some MCL team members serve in the Team Reach Teacher and Reach Associate roles, reaching more students, for more pay, with increased small-group learning, all with MCL guidance and support.

Schools redesign schedules to provide additional school-day time for teacher planning, coaching, and collaboration.

Opportunity Culture leadership and paid team roles have been shown to more than double the number of teachers producing high-growth student learning. Students gain an extra half-year of learning growth on average.