Reaching Further and Learning More? Evaluating Public Impact's 'Opportunity Culture' Initiative. Working Paper 181

Public Impact's "Opportunity Culture" (OC) initiative provides a suite of models aimed at extending the reach of highly effective teachers and has partnered with school districts to implement these interventions in schools. Using administrative data from three partner school districts that collectively include 44 OC schools, we estimate the relationship between OC staffing models and student achievement in math and reading. We find that the bulk of exposed students received treatment under OC's multiclassroom leadership model, in which a master teacher with demonstrated effectiveness intensively leads and coaches a team of teachers, and that these students scored higher in math in all specifications. In reading, while most specifications find positive and significant learning gains for students taught by team teachers, the specification that performs best in our placebo tests--one that includes school-by-year fixed effects to account for overall improvement in treatment schools--does not find any impact. Results for other specifications are more mixed and are imprecisely estimated.