Senators Hear About Opportunity Culture Results

Credit: U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions

Opportunity Culture^® teaching teams work, U.S. senators heard today in a Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions hearing on the state of K–12 education.

Ector County ISD Superintendent Emeritus Scott Muri was one of the hearing’s five witnesses. When he came to the district in the summer of 2019, he told the committee, “I was faced with 34,000 students, a staff of 4,200, 45 schools. Twenty of those schools were ranked D or F by the state of Texas, with 16 of those schools receiving an F rating.

“So as I dug in with the team that I worked with, I quickly discovered that one of the primary reasons that those schools were failing was a simple lack of teachers. On the first day of school in August of 2019, we had 350 teacher vacancies. Eighteen percent of the classrooms in our school district did not have a teacher, on the first day, the 10th day, the 50th day, or the 90th day—we did not fill those vacancies that year. And so we knew we had to do something about it…[including that] we redesigned the traditional role of the teacher.

“Gone was the teacher that taught all day long, and we introduced an opportunity in which our most effective teachers taught for 50% of their day, and then they spent the other 50% of their day embedded in coaching and developing their peers. We call that work Opportunity Culture, developed by an organization in North Carolina called Public Impact—powerful results for students for that.”

Dr. Scott Muri Credit: U.S Senate

Among those results, Dr. Muri said: the percentage of high school students considered post-secondary ready jumped from 56% in 2019 to 93% in 2025; the graduation rate was the highest in 23 years; and the district was recognized by Harvard University and Stanford for its math and reading gains in the Education Recovery Scorecard.

“While the country went down, our students increased,” he said. “And so those investments that we made in children made a difference. And so, as we think about this work today, I would offer some recommendations. One is: Hold our teachers to high standards, validate and recognize and honor the profession that is teaching, [and] validate, honor, and recognize our principals…educating them, informing them, holding them, molding them, shaping them, and improving them—but valuing them in our society is one of the greatest things that we can do.”

Along with using Opportunity Culture staffing design, the strategic plan that Muri and his staff developed to recruit, retain, and support teachers included providing professional learning that used standards developed by the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards, redesigning compensation systems, developing internal teacher pipelines, and creating a full-year teacher residency for aspiring teachers paying $45,000 a year.

By the 2024–25 year, the district had gone from 350 teacher vacancies to 29.

Opportunity Culture staffing models were designed to affect both instruction and human resources by extending the reach of excellent teaching to more students, for more pay, within regular budgets. Multi-Classroom Leader^® roles are filled by excellent teachers with a record of high-growth student learning results; they lead small teaching teams that include advanced paraprofessionals who focus on small-group tutoring during the school day, and teachers who may also extend their reach to more students.

These roles all receive higher pay that is sustainable through reallocations of regular budgets. Pay supplements for the Multi-Classroom Leader role nationally average 23 percent of state base pay, or $13,513, and go as high as $25,000; in Ector County (ECISD), they averaged about 25% of typical Texas teacher pay.

ECISD, like neighboring Midland ISD, has seen teachers reach six-figure pay through a combination of these supplements with state incentive funding that recognizes high-performing teachers. (See our op-ed in The 74 and a column from Dr. Stephanie Howard, Midland superintendent, in District Administration.)

In the hearing, senators largely focused on NAEP (the National Assessment of Educational Progress) results and how to improve student learning, and the influence of AI, smartphones, and social media on students and classrooms.

Noting that the issues with student learning declines predate Covid—tying them in large part to the rise of social media and smartphones—the witnesses agreed on the importance of focusing on excellent teaching, a point Muri returned to repeatedly.

But Dr. Eric Hanushek, a groundbreaking researcher on teacher quality and pay and Hoover Institution senior fellow, said that the nation lacks incentives to follow examples such as ECISD.

“A pervasive problem is we don’t have any incentives to have higher achievement in our schools, and that is across the board,” he said. “We have the example of Odessa [Ector County’s largest city], that we heard about this morning…where they change the way they evaluate and reward the effective teachers very highly, and yet these examples, that are well-known around the nation, are not picked up by other school districts. There are 13,500 school districts, of which a handful have followed the examples here. And so if we don’t, in fact, reward achievement, and incentivize achievement, I think we’re in trouble. And that’s the major change that I think we have to make.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders asked the witnesses if starting salaries needed to be raised to get students to go into teaching.

“Yes, we heard good evidence from Dr. Muri…about how increasing pay, but doing it with a focus on quality, can be a really powerful lever for improvement,” said Dr. Martin West, academic dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, which sets policy for NAEP.

Dr. Martin West Credit: U.S Senate

Dr. Eric Hanushek Credit: U.S Senate

“Absolutely it makes a difference, not only in attracting but retaining [teachers],” Muri said. “So I think it’s paying attention to two things. One, we need to raise the base, that starting pay, and then also incentivize—those incentives for highly effective teachers are critical. It makes a difference.”

Muri highlighted the power of yearlong, paid teacher residencies as well, a feature of Opportunity Culture models.

“Our apprentices are teacher residents. They spend a full year with a master teacher in our environment,” Muri said. “When those students are finished with that year and enter the classroom as a real teacher, they are much better equipped. We no longer have that first-year teacher learning loss that we sometimes see…we see a remarkable difference in teacher performance.”

The hearing also discussed student disengagement, and Sanders asked Muri how to “get kids excited about school.”

“I go back to the number one factor that influences academic achievement is the teacher, and so it is helping our teachers develop those engaging strategies to effectively use in the classroom,” Muri said. “When you walk into a classroom and you see excitement and energy on the faces of children, that didn’t happen by itself. It happened with intentionality by a great teacher in that space.”

Emily Ayscue Hassel designed the Opportunity Culture initiative after years of research by the Public Impact team and input from many teachers.

“Dr. Muri embodies the brave, persistent leadership that every system needs,” she said. “I am grateful to him and to the research leaders like Dr. West and Dr. Hanushek who light the path forward for our country. Most of all, we’re grateful to the educators who inspire students and one another each day in schools.”

“I hope state and national legislators will match their leadership,” said Bryan C. Hassel, co-president of Public Impact, “and help reach more educators, students, and communities with excellent teaching and excellent educator careers.”

The Public Impact^® mission is to improve education dramatically for all students—especially students whose needs have not been well met. We are a team of professionals from many backgrounds, including former teachers and principals. We are researchers, thought leaders, tool builders, and on-the-ground consultants who work with leading education reformers. To learn more, please visit www.publicimpact.com.

This newsletter was made possible in part by supporters of the Opportunity Culture^® initiative. The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of Public Impact^®.

Manage Preferences | Unsubscribe

Public Impact, 405 East Main Street, Carrboro, North Carolina 27510, United States