Equity Is More Than an Office: How to Forge an Equity-Centered Strategic Plan That Works
Angela King Smith and Betty Chang, June 25, 2023
Over the last few years, many districts across the country have established or elevated equity offices to help address the enduring, unacceptable race- and income-based disparities in student outcomes and experiences within their systems. But so many equity leaders have been both consumed by work that has fueled heated political debate and struggling to make progress on the district’s equity goals.
Part of the challenge was that many equity offices focused their initial efforts primarily on changing mindsets without giving equal consideration for changing the structures, policies, and practices that create inequitable learning experiences across their districts. Developing more inclusive curricula is important, for example, but it is not sufficient—especially when students of color and students from lower-income families are consistently less likely to have access to a highly effective teacher to instruct them on new curricula, to be provided with the individualized time and attention to allow them to learn it, and to be assigned to the advanced coursework that would prepare them for college and career readiness. Shifting focus beyond traditional equity work toward resource equity is an important start.
What Is Resource Equity?
A resource equity approach involves:
- Creating a foundation of excellence that ensures all students receive the right research-backed combination of resources at the right time.
- Ensuring equitable access to those resources such that students who need more support receive it.
“Resources” refers to both money and the ways districts use money to create strong student experiences and drive high learning outcomes. Explore our 10 dimensions of equity that have the greatest impact on student experiences and outcomes, and check out our paper “From Equity Officer to Strategic Resource Equity Leader: A 3-Step Process for Making the Shift.”
Another challenge we’ve identified through our experience supporting a cohort of 14 senior equity leaders in partnership with the National Equity Project is that equity leaders often aren’t positioned for success in their roles. Far too often, equity work is siloed from or considered supplemental to other district work, which creates confusion around competing districtwide priorities. For example, we see many districts with an equity plan from the equity office sitting alongside a strategic plan from the strategy office, a budget plan from the finance office, and an instructional plan from the academic office—all of which overlap in scope but are rarely aligned. This also contributes to the pervasive sentiment that “equity is the equity office’s work,” a sentiment that indicates that other district leaders lack clarity and understanding around their own roles and responsibilities in this space.
But no one office or person can be solely responsible for ensuring all students can access the learning opportunities and targeted support they need to thrive. This is everyone’s work. And there’s no better time than now for district leaders to act. With so many districts embarking on strategic planning efforts to prepare for a post-pandemic, post-ESSER future, now is the time to develop a single, aligned, inspiring vision that incorporates resource equity at its core.
For this to happen, though, district leaders need to collaborate to transform organizational practices, policies, and mindsets to enable all students to reach rigorous learning outcomes—no matter their race or income. Here are five key principles for doing this well:
5 Principles for Creating an Equity-Centered Strategic Plan
1. Create Cross-Functional Strategic Planning Teams to Drive and Support Equity-Centered Planning
Strategic planning teams need to comprise a cross-section of leaders that allow for multiple perspectives and collaboration around the comprehensive work required. To ensure that resource equity considerations are part of the discussion, district leaders who share responsibility over allocating and organizing resources should also be at the table. This means, for example, including senior representatives across instruction, finance, human resources, operations, and district strategy.
It’s also helpful for strategic planning teams to include school leaders, teachers, and other school-based positions, as they provide an important grounding perspective for what’s working in schools—or what’s not. This shared ownership and collective buy-in is critical to ensuring the strategic plan has clear direction for making meaningful change across the district.
See the Appendix for more details on how to effectively build strategic planning teams.
2. Use Data and Research to Cultivate a Shared Understanding of the District’s Opportunities and Challenges
To center resource equity within the strategic plan, leaders need to collect and review data around how the district currently allocates and organizes resources against research-backed strategies that create excellent and equitable learning experiences for all students. Data can also be a powerful tool for understanding systemic disparities, as well as bright spots of excellence or acceleration within the district. For example, a diagnostic might highlight specific schools that are creating schedules and providing targeted support to ensure students get the help and extra time they need when they need it to master learning goals. Using data to identify successes like this enables district teams to adopt best practices across the district, identify existing strengths and opportunities, and access the insights needed for meaningful conversations.
Check out the Alliance for Resource Equity’s Resource Equity Diagnostic toolkit, which can help district leaders assess how their resource allocation practices are helping or hindering students’ abilities to reach empowering, rigorous learning outcomes.
3. Clearly Identify, Align, and Articulate District Priorities
Equity-centered planning requires strategic planning teams to be willing to transform existing structures, policies, and practices to improve learning experiences and outcomes—but no single team will be able to do it all.
After analyzing the data and synthesizing key opportunities for intervention, teams must decide on the core strategic priorities they want to collectively pursue. Too many priorities will stretch the district’s capacity—and the team’s supporting roles—too thin, likely reducing the impact of their efforts. By selecting three to five core initiatives for the district to prioritize, however, the team can narrow their focus and support to the areas that need it most.
Consider taking a “Do Now, Build Toward” approach toward prioritization, which entails identifying the smaller short-term goals that address the district’s most critical needs and build toward an inspiring, bold vision.
4. Get Specific to Ensure Action
District leaders, administrators, and teachers need detailed information to put concepts, commitments, and frameworks into practice each day. To provide this level of depth, strategic planning teams need to get specific about what policies, processes, and practices need to change at the classroom, school, and district levels and clearly outline the required action steps. When it comes to issues of resource equity, this could mean redesigning existing school budgeting, staffing, and planning timelines and circulating guidance on how schools can provide targeted student supports and interventions to those who need it the most.
It’s equally important for districts to take a continuous improvement approach toward measuring the success of their actions. Read how Tulsa Public Schools moved smoothly from a bold vision to strategic planning to effective implementation by establishing new structures, organizing new teams, and leveraging a continuous improvement approach. Or check out our Districts at Work series that profiles how eight school systems shifted resources and redesigned processes to better support schools and students.
5. Engage Critical Community Stakeholders Through Strategic and Intentional Collaboration
A district’s equity-centered strategic plan might be created by a team, but it impacts the whole community. That’s why strategic planning teams need to engage critical stakeholders throughout the process and clearly articulate the plan, key priorities, action steps, and intended outcomes across the community afterward. Doing so not only helps garner feedback from teachers, families, parents, and students who will be most impacted by the plan, but also enables them to share responsibility for the core initiatives that will drive it.
Strategic planning teams should also find ways to flexibly adapt the strategic plan based on the community’s input to ensure that it closely aligns with the needs and concerns of those at the heart of equity issues. When teams secure community engagement throughout the process from vision to evolving implementation, they’re more likely to succeed.
Learn about how Holyoke Public Schools took a community-centric approach and tapped into their strengths to create a plan that would lead to sustainable academic recovery. Or read about how Dallas ISD utilized stakeholder engagement to develop a comprehensive racial equity strategy plan and monitor its ongoing progress.
For teams looking to address the areas of greatest student need in their district, intentionally designing their strategic plan through a resource equity lens can provide them with a critical North Star. Thoughtfully collecting input from the right stakeholders to set data-driven goals ensures that the strategic plan is more than just words on the page. It’s a roadmap to creating more equitable learning experiences and outcomes and ensuring excellence across the system.
When crafted mindfully, an equity-centered strategic plan can become a commitment for the organization’s future direction, expanding equity beyond the single siloed office to become a true driving force for lasting change throughout the district.
Appendix
Steps for Building Strategic Planning Teams
| Item | Description | Key Questions to Consider |
| Determine core working leadership team. | Create a cross-functional team of leaders comprising school and system leaders. |
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| Determine larger advisory body. | Create a cross-functional team of constituents that includes district teachers, principals, parents, students, staff members, district leaders, and community members. |
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| Be intentional about roles, responsibilities, and engagement structures. | Clearly outline the team’s purpose, objectives, roles, and responsibilities. |
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| Adjust team membership. | Review the team’s composition to ensure there’s a balance of representation, skills, and expertise. |
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| Create teaming structures. | Establish structures and processes for the team to hold effective and productive meetings. |
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| Build capacity for teaming. | Establish norms and create opportunities for developing safe, collaborative spaces. |
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| Develop accountability and authority structures. | Determine the outcomes that the team must produce as a result of this process. |
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Interested in partnering with ERS on a resource equity diagnostic or equity-centered strategic planning process?
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Read more on how equity leaders can leverage their resources to enact lasting change:
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