The Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) is the State Education Agency for the District of Columbia charged with raising the quality of education for all DC residents. OSSE is focused on sustaining, accelerating, and deepening the progress being made for the District’s 90,000+ students. OSSE serves as the District’s liaison to the U.S. Department of Education and works closely with the District’s 470+ early childhood facilities, 250+ schools, 60+ local education agencies (including DCPS and charter organizations), and community-based organizations to provide critical programming and resources to our stakeholders. 

Educators are the single most important in-school factor impacting student learning and lives. The state education agency plays a critically important role in leading towards ensuring that all DC students have equitable access to excellent educators. OSSE is seeking an Academic Acceleration Manager to manage and oversee critical state level, public-facing programs related to literacy, math, science, and social studies. Specifically, the Manager will lead a team that provides robust, high-quality, and culturally relevant professional development for educators and administrators, in core content areas. Most importantly, the Academic Acceleration Manager will drive the vision and implement the strategy across the portfolio by providing strong leadership and subject matter expertise, advancing a data-driven culture, and identifying and seizing upon the connections across and within this portfolio to maximize outcomes for students. 

The Academic Acceleration Manager position is located in OSSE’s Division of Teaching and Learning, within the Core Content team. The Core Content team focuses on providing training, technical assistance, and professional development to DC local education agencies (LEAs) in order to ensure all students, have the opportunity to excel. The Academic Acceleration Manager will be responsible for developing professional development plans, use of data, research, and best practices to advance equitable strategies that ultimately lead to academic success for all students in all DC classrooms. In doing so, the Manager will steward financial resources, oversee initiatives, and iterate to improve effectiveness and efficacy, while ensuring alignment with agency priorities. The Academic Acceleration Manager will report to the Director of Academic Excellence. 

Specific functions of the Academic Acceleration Manager include: 

• Develop, supervise, and implement state-level strategies that lead towards improved academic outcomes for all DC students, with a particular emphasis on meeting the needs of students who are furthest from opportunity. 
• Provide direct supervision, guidance, mentoring and coaching to direct reports within the Division of Teaching and Learning, enabling individuals on the team to grow in their skills and achieve ambitious goals. 
• Utilize national, state and local sources of educator data and student data – together with insights from research and practice – to ensure DC educators receive professional development and core academic content support to meet the needs of all DC students. 
• Propose, manage, and execute strategic uses of funding in the service of OSSE’s strategic plan. 
• Oversee policy initiatives related to educator professional development (e.g., Dyslexia legislation implementation) in alignment with agency and division priorities. 
• Advise leadership on mandated programming and make proposals for new professional learning content and guidance related to existing programs.  
• Connects stakeholders to resources, information and research from within the agency, and across the education sector to help schools and systems solve targeted instructional challenges.  
• Ensure coherence across OSSE’s instructional specialist workstreams, with a specific focus on monitoring and evaluating LEA instructional improvement cycles (including possible school visits, classroom observations, professional development, and content support). 
• Collaborate across the Division and with other Divisions within OSSE. 

Key qualifications for the role include: 

• A four-year Bachelors’ degree from an accredited college or university;  
• One year of specialized experience equivalent to the next lowest grade level in the District of Columbia government;  
• Demonstrated experience designing instructional training opportunities for adult learners (i.e., the principles and techniques used in designing training programs, developing design strategy and models, and applying design methods to the improvement of instructional effectiveness validating training materials, and evaluating training);  
• Demonstrated experience evaluating the effectiveness of instructional/educational programs; 
• Demonstrated experience embedding technology into education and trainings (e.g. selecting appropriate computer software); 
• Capacity to synthesize large amounts of qualitative and quantitative information to uncover trends, analyze root causes, and act strategically; 
• Experience in preparing and presenting recommendations and solutions regarding complex issues based on analysis and evaluation; 
• Exemplary fiscal and program management skills, with a focus on grants and/or similar programming that uses public funds; 
• Demonstrated experience managing complex projects that require cross-functional collaboration between teams and agencies; 
• Strong written and verbal communication skills that enable the incumbent to effectively and efficiently communicate both technical and theoretical topics accurately, concisely, and compellingly; 
• At least five (5) years of experience teaching or leading in a school or local educational agency (LEA); 
• Meticulous attention to detail, with an ability to produce high-quality work in a fast-paced, dynamic environment;  
• An unapologetic commitment to ensuring that all DC students have equitable, sustained access to educators who are equipped with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions necessary to enable all DC students to succeed; 
• An understanding of the Science of Reading and structured literacy and  
• Demonstrated experience managing and supervising diverse, high-performing team(s) to achieve ambitious goals. 

Our ideal candidate will also have: 

• A growth mindset and  
• Relevant, advanced professional education from an accredited university (e.g., M.A., MAT, M.Ed., J.D., Ph.D., Ed.D.). 

Interested applicants should register for the OSSE Hiring Fair.