Charting a Course for Student Success
Plotting a course for reallocating your resources to improve student performance requires a clear map. ERS provides this clarity through its resource mapping process. It gives educational leaders a picture of how well their resources are aligned with their strategic vision—and where the disconnects are. The insight it provides can serve as a catalyst for transformational change.
The ERS resource mapping process is diagnostic and in-depth, focused on pinpointing areas of inefficiency. To achieve this, we:
- Research a comprehensive range of resource factors, including expenditures, payroll, course schedules, human resources, student information, student performance, and other data.
- Supplement these data with information and insights gained through extensive interviews at multiple levels throughout the school system.
- Refine district-provided information, reconciling data and accounts to identify data flaws and inconsistencies, and recoding data so that spending can be compared to other school systems.
- Define clear, research-supported metrics that describe how people, time, and money are allocated to create individual attention, leverage teaching effectiveness, and focus student time.
- Analyze student-level resource data against student performance data. We calculate and evaluate key resource metrics for individual students, then link these “input” metrics to student performance “outcome” metrics. Using student performance data, we create a measure of “academic need” to determine whether resources are allocated according to need. This allows for the creation of a “value-add” approach to measuring changes in student performance.
- Report our findings through clear, well-documented reports that help school system leaders effectively diagnose inefficiencies and misalignments in the way their human, time, and financial resources are allocated.
Our resource mapping process is highly collaborative, with ERS professionals working closely with school system leadership and key stakeholders for up to two years. The information and context it provides can be invaluable in helping identify the most leveraged opportunities for realigning investments to support sustainable improvements in student performance.
