The Role District Leaders Play in Advancing Resource Equity

5 Ways Chief Equity Officers Can Advance Resource Equity in

Large-scale political divisions and challenging social issues have in many ways trickled down to education systems, putting increasing pressure on equity officers like you to advance your work in a polarized climate.

It’s a tough moment, but also one that offers unprecedented access to the data and resources needed to diagnose and address equity in education.

As a chief equity officer, you’re in a position to make structural, policy, and practice changes that impact not only how much money the district has but also how well the district uses those funds to ensure equity and excellence. By shifting from traditional equity work to this resource equity approach, you can address disparities in your district.

Here are four things you can do to unlock better, more equitable student experiences.

1. Make Resource Equity a Central Part of Your District’s Strategic Plan

Far too often, equity plans are pushed to the side or siloed from strategic, instructional, and financial planning. But when equity work sits on a different desk than the plans that guide the district, leaders aren’t able to make informed resource allocation decisions to address inequities.

Our 10 dimensions of resource equity can help you advocate for integrating equity work into strategic planning processes. By encouraging other leaders to consider how things like teacher diversity or school climate impact student experiences, you can help connect the dots between resource equity and budget and instruction strategies.

We’re already seeing this approach work: Leaders in Dallas have used this approach to change districtwide structures, policies, and practices to drive equitable outcomes, while Montgomery leaders have developed a framework for connecting racial equity with resource use goals.

2. Identify Opportunities With an Annual Resource Equity Diagnostic

Most districts conduct some sort of equity review, but standard approaches can only go so far. In a typical review, for example, a district might find disparities between which students are enrolling in advanced coursework. That’s vital information to guide strategic decisions.

But a resource equity diagnostic takes this one step further. Leaders can use the vast amount of data at their fingertips to pinpoint why these disparities exist. It might reveal that schools with high populations of Latinx and Black students simply don’t have as many advanced courses available, for example. Or it might show that those students aren’t getting enrolled in those courses when they are available.

An annual resource equity diagnostic gives you a tool for advocating for policy and practice changes that can immediately address these problems.

3. Advocate for Policy and Practice Changes That Promote
Resource Equity

Embedding resource equity into the district’s daily operations is essential—and that requires collaboration with other leaders.

Work with your chief financial officer to advocate for equitable district funding systems that ensure resource decisions don’t disproportionately affect students with the greatest needs.

Collaborate with your chief talent officer to put equity at the forefront of hiring decisions and ensure the district hires and retains educators that reflect the diversity of the student body.

Partner with your chief academic officer to differentiate staffing and scheduling to better meet students’ unique needs.

4. Be a Resource Equity Champion for Your District

As a chief equity officer, you see the inequities that impact students and teachers firsthand. But advancing resource equity means fostering a shared understanding of those disparities among the community.

By partnering with the Black and Brown Coalition for Educational Equity and Excellence, for example, district leaders in Montgomery brought community members, families, and advocacy groups together to identify data-driven resource equity solutions.

Cultivating this kind of community understanding and support can help drive collective action in your district.

Take the Next Step to Advance Resource Equity

1. Use our DIY analysis toolkit to conduct a resource equity diagnostic and assess inequities in your district.
2. Discover communication strategies for advocating and making the case for resource equity with our decks.
3. Send this page to the relevant members of your team.
4. Reach out for support today!

5 Ways Chief Academic Officers Can Advance Resource Equity
in Their Districts

Leaders in nearly every district across the nation are seeing the urgent need for learning acceleration, putting chief academic officers (CAOs) like you in the spotlight. Academic achievement took a serious hit during the pandemic, and it’s up to you and your fellow leaders to help students recover.

While all students need support right now, the foundational systemic inequities that are baked into our underlying systems mean that not every student is starting from the same point. Many students experience less access to the instructional time, attention, empowering content, and other resources they need to thrive.

Our research-backed approach to the 10 Dimensions of Resource Equity can help you and your team diagnose the disparities that impact these students and pinpoint ways to close achievement gaps.

Here are five things you can do to unlock better, more equitable student experiences for all students in your district.

1. Reallocate Instructional Resources to Prioritize the Highest-Need Schools and Students

Supporting students isn’t just about layering resources onto existing (and often inequitable) structures. It’s about strategically allocating those resources based on your students’ needs.

As a CAO, you’re able to review school funding and staffing formulas to identify how you’re allocating teachers, instructional coaches, guidance counselors, teaching assistants, and other staff to schools. Then, you can revise those formulas to drive change. Consider, for example, replacing one-size-fits-all staffing allocations with weighted allocations that take into consideration differences in school size and student need.

This process also applies to academic resources and school budgets. Assess how you can update formulas to ensure that high-poverty schools that need more resources receive additional textbooks, instructional materials, and other academic supports. And consider how you can create more budget flexibility to allow principals to customize their resource decisions based on their school’s unique context.

2. Regularly Audit Transcript and Course Enrollment Data to Ensure Equitable Access

Change is possible, but only if you know what to change. That’s why resource equity work starts with data analysis. We offer free tools to help your team go beyond standard equity analyses to get to root causes.

For example, nearly every district looks at differences in advanced coursework enrollment across student groups. But teams often assume disparities are simply the result of differences in incoming performance and course eligibility. Our resource equity approach pushes districts to dig deeper.

One district we worked with unpacked the root causes of 8^th grade algebra 1 enrollment disparities between white and Latinx students, for instance. They discovered that 40% of the gap had nothing to do with course eligibility. Instead, it was a result of algebra 1 courses not being offered at schools with primarily Latinx populations. And when those courses were offered, Latinx students were being enrolled at significantly lower rates than their white peers—even after meeting course eligibility requirements.

Collecting this data is the first and most important step in changing policies and practices to address disparities. The insights can lead you to reorganize academic programs across the district, revise policies for identifying students for advanced coursework, and training school teams to develop equity-centered schedules. No matter your action steps, it all starts with the data.

 3. Support Schools in Adjusting Student Schedules to Differentiate Instructional Time and Provide Individualized Attention

Two primary elements affect students in the classroom—and you can impact both:

• Instructional time. Do lower-performing students consistently receive additional time in the core subjects they’re behind in? Does this practice vary by school? If you can’t increase the amount of instructional time, consider strategic scheduling and staffing approaches—like targeted flexible intervention blocks or accelerated course sequencing—to ensure students who need additional time get it.
• Instructional attention. Do lower-performing students consistently receive more individualized attention in the core subjects they’re behind in? Does this practice vary by school? Are you able to increase teaching staff in the highest-poverty schools? If not, consider providing more flexibility around existing loads to significantly reduce class sizes for high-priority subjects and intervention courses, while increasing class sizes for elective and advanced classes to offset the increased costs. Or consider utilizing high-dosage tutoring, push-in support, and within-class groupings to provide targeted support to individual students.

4. Implement a Districtwide ROI Approach

You’re likely investing in several initiatives to accelerate learning and help all students succeed. But how do you know which are working and which aren’t? What about which efforts are working for which students? Can you pinpoint why some initiatives are working in some schools but not others?

Our Strategic System ROI (SSROI) approach can help answer these tough questions. It’s a five-step process that enables you and your team to evaluate the impact of your strategies. With SSROI, you can unpack what might be contributing to differences in effectiveness across schools and student groups—and learn what to scale or improve.

5. Be a Resource Equity Champion in Your District

If you want to transform student experiences, collaboration is critical. Consider these partnerships:

• Work with your district’s data team to conduct annual data audits and develop a school-level dashboard that highlights the most important takeaways for each school leadership team to work on.
• Partner with the chief of schools and school supervisors to provide ongoing, job-embedded professional learning for school leaders. And work with school scheduling teams to shift mindsets that may be rooted in bias and build capacity around implementing equitable, differentiated scheduling practices.
• Collaborate with your chief equity officer to conduct student and family surveys—in their home languages and using multiple modalities—to understand which barriers (including financial, logistical, or information) prevent some students from accessing critical academic programming like afterschool high-dosage tutoring or intersession programming.

Take the Next Step to Advance Resource Equity

1. Conduct a resource equity diagnostic with our DIY analysis toolkit.
2. Boost student experiences and outcomes with our instructional time and attention and empowering, rigorous content
3. Send this page to the relevant members of your team.
4. Reach out for support today!

5 Ways Chief Talent Officers Can Advance Resource Equity in Their Districts

In districts across the country, chief talent officers (CTOs) like you make critical hiring, development, and retention decisions to build teams of skilled, passionate educators. Even when facing teacher shortages and unprecedented budget challenges, you have opportunities to help ensure that every student from every background has access to a high-quality education.

Here are five actions you can take to improve resource equity in your district.

1. Implement Equity-Centered Recruitment and Hiring Processes

• Clearly define each role’s equity-centered skills and competencies and use them to adapt practices and policies throughout the recruitment, application, and selection processes.
• Regularly review district pipeline data to improve hiring and recruitment efforts and attract a diverse candidate pool. Collect and disaggregate applicant data by race and ethnicity and use this data to inform future hiring efforts.
• Shift hiring timelines earlier—especially for schools with more vacancies or those with recruitment challenges—to allow for more time to attract a strong, qualified workforce.

2. Assign the Most Effective Teachers and Principals to Support the Highest-Need Schools

• Offer incentives—such as differentiated compensation, professional growth opportunities, or reduced workloads—to make challenging roles more appealing to and sustainable for high-potential candidates.
• Facilitate open conversations with teachers and school leaders to learn why they choose to work in certain schools or classrooms. Use this insight to adjust roles, responsibilities, and compensation, ensuring alignment with student needs.
• Review school-level teacher assignment patterns to identify inequities or biases. More experienced teachers are often assigned to teach small, advanced electives, for example, while novice teachers are assigned to teach lower-level core classes with higher student loads.

3. Differentiate Roles and Responsibilities to Recognize Effectiveness and Support Career Progression

• Create clearly defined, differentiated roles—along with additional compensation and/or restructured time—that help teachers and leaders continually increase their own learning and impact. Consider reducing novice teachers and leaders’ responsibilities and providing those with more experience opportunities to coach their peers.
• Regularly analyze transfer and retention data to identify trends, particularly in the schools that struggle with staff retention. Use quantitative and qualitative insights to continually adjust and differentiate roles, responsibilities, and compensation.
• Align compensation with retention needs to fill and retain critical roles. If early-career retention is an issue in your district, for example, consider implementing higher salary increases earlier in teachers’ and school leaders’ careers.

4. Hire and Retain a Workforce That Mirrors the Diversity of the Student Body

• Recruit and develop diverse school leaders who are committed to fostering inclusive working conditions in which teachers of color feel welcomed, supported, and able to bring their authentic selves to work.
• Design inclusive curricula and work environments that allow teachers of color to adapt their teaching to meet students’ needs. Remove barriers to leadership roles and provide ongoing professional development that focuses on equity and anti-racism.
• Value teachers of color by providing targeted financial support, such as loan forgiveness, service scholarships, and relocation incentives, to attract and retain teachers of color, particularly in high-need schools or subject areas.

5. Be a Resource Equity Champion in Your District

• Partner with the chief equity officer (CEqO) to develop or refine what equity-centered teaching and school leadership looks like in your district. Then, use that framework to align talent management practices with districtwide equity goals.
• Collaborate with the chief academic officer and school supervisors to support teachers and school leaders in fostering culturally affirming school environments and delivering culturally responsive curricula.
• Work with the chief financial officer to identify how finance and talent teams can collaborate to provide targeted support to schools that struggle the most with filling vacancies.

Take the Next Step to Advance Resource Equity

1. Assess inequities using our teaching quality and diversity blueprint, school leadership quality and diversity blueprint, and analysis tools.
2. Explore potential root causes and actions using our Teaching and School Leadership
3. Reach out for support today!

5 Ways Chief Financial Officers Can Advance Resource Equity in Their Districts

As a chief financial officer (CFO), the resource allocation decisions you make every day help ensure that every student—regardless of their background—has access to a high-quality education. And even amid budget challenges and unprecedented uncertainty around the financial future, you still have opportunities to help create the equitable experiences our students deserve.

Here are five things you can do to improve resource equity in your district.

1. Ensure District Funding Systems Are Effective and Equitable

• Regularly analyze data to understand how funding varies across schools and student groups and ensure those with the highest needs get significantly more funding and resources.
• Revise the school funding formula to differentiate funding based on student and school needs. Explore weighted staffing models or student-based budgeting, for example.
• Monitor how school budgets translate to actual expenditures. Schools in low-income communities often experience challenges filling vacancies or spending down funds, for example. These schools can benefit from additional support and more flexibility in how they use budgeted resources.

2. Assess the Impact of Funding-Related Decisions on the Highest-Need Students

• Assess proposed decisions during budget development, especially when making across-the-board decisions like reductions in force (RIFs). RIFs often disproportionately impact novice teachers, who are typically concentrated in the highest-need schools and comprise a higher percentage of teachers of color.
• Evaluate the district’s enrollment adjustment policy decisions. Differences between projected and actual school enrollment are often greater in the highest-need communities. Support schools in developing contingency plans to navigate unexpected enrollment fluctuations throughout the year. Consider adjusting budgets mid-year for schools that experience significant enrollment increases.
• Reconsider mid-year vacancy consolidation practices. In many districts, vacancies are clustered in harder-to-staff schools and disproportionately impact students from low-income backgrounds. Rather than addressing all unfilled roles mid-year, consider converting vacancies in harder-to-staff schools into more flexible funding for instructional materials, programming, and other supports.

 3. Adopt a Districtwide ROI Approach to Maintain Effective Programs and Make Strategic Reductions

• Use an ROI approach to enable more effective budget discussions. Create a standard process to evaluate whether investments and programs are having the desired impact on student experiences and outcomes. Use that information during budget development to decide what to stop, continue, or scale.
• Consider adopting our Strategic System ROI approach, a five-step process that provides a platform for school and district leaders to collaboratively assess the impact of their strategies.

4. Involve Stakeholders in Budgeting Decisions to Ensure Transparency and Inclusivity

• Ground budget communications in the student experience. Developing student-centered budget messages can help convey the purpose behind various investments.
• Build trust through consistency. Work with your communications team to ensure financial presentations and materials are as accessible as possible. Strategically repeat slides, charts, and infographics to build confidence in the accuracy of your financial picture and make it easier for stakeholders to engage in the content.
• Engage stakeholders early and often. Rather than waiting until the budget is nearly finalized, solicit input when setting investment priorities and throughout the budget development process. Consider ways to make budget meetings more accessible by enabling virtual access or translation.

5. Be a Resource Equity Champion for Your District

• Partner with the chief equity officer (CEqO) to refine the district’s stakeholder engagement strategy, ensuring you get input from a diverse group of community members and stakeholders.
• Work with the chief talent officer (CTO) to identify how finance and talent teams can collaborate to provide targeted support to schools that struggle the most with filling vacancies.
• Collaborate with your chief operations officer (COO) to improve enrollment projections process, particularly if this is a challenge in your district and is disproportionately impacting certain communities.

Take the Next Step to Advance Resource Equity

1. Assess school funding inequities with our school funding blueprint and analysis tool.
2. Explore potential root causes and actions using our School Funding Guidebook.
3. Reach out for support today!