TOOL: CAREER PATHS TO GUIDE TALENT AND BUDGETING SYSTEMS
The district should define career pathways to guide future recruiting, hiring/selection, evaluation, development,
promotion, and pay decisions.
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For recruiting, schools and districts can use the Opportunity Culture vision and its greater career, pay,
and development opportunities to attract high-achieving candidates.
When hiring teachers and staff for these school models, districts and schools can use behavioral
competencies—the habits of behavior that help predict how employees will do their jobs—to place
teachers and staff in the right roles and help them succeed.
Evaluations should reflect the job expectations for each role (see the next section for more).
Training and development implemented in initial pilot schools must be continuously improved to help
teachers leap into new reach roles and improve in the roles they have currently.
Promotions to more advanced roles and extended-reach positions should be based on evaluations
aligned with reach roles, so that the right people can enter advanced positions when these roles
become available.
Pay should be aligned with the financial benefits created when teachers increase their own and their
teams’ ability to reach more students with excellence. Districts will need to provide guidance to schools
regarding pay and financial sustainability.
Budgets that are rigidly allocated to either people or technology—and to specific roles that assume a
one-teacher-one-classroom model—will need to be adjusted and made more flexible to achieve optimal
reach extension and higher pay in each school setting. The long-term budgeting process and
transitional-cost management are two areas that most districts will need to address. School leaders may
also need to refine their school-level budgets, including their sustainability plans. Design teams should
confirm with the district that their plans are financially sustainable, after adjustments to staffing plans
have been finalized. Schools should also work to integrate year-to-year budget changes into their
revised staffing plans.
The career paths page on OpportunityCulture.org provides an overview of multiple career paths that schools
can use to expand opportunities for their teachers. Districts can use these as a starting point. All of the reach
models produce natural career paths for teachers. Within any given school model, the greater the reach, the
greater the pay, as long as teachers can maintain their excellence alone or in teams. Districts may use this
information as a starting point to develop guidance on career paths to ensure alignment with their overall vision
and to provide some consistency across schools.
The financial planning and pay analysis tools on OpportunityCulture.org can help districts ensure that paid
career advancement paths are financially sustainable.
©2014 Public Impact
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