The knowledge and skills to educate all children already exist. There are no pedagogical barriers to teaching and learning when willing people are prepared and made available to children.
Asa G. Hilliard
Definition
The goal of resource equity is to create equitable student experiences in learning-ready environments. Resource equity means consistently prioritizing and allocating people, time, and money to align with levels of need and opportunity.
Resource equity recognizes that providing the same amount of resources to students and schools with different lived experiences, assets, and challenges will maintain the status quo of unequal achievement.
The resources people need vary based on their quality of life. Resource equity creates opportunities to share resources within a school or institution or across schools to meet the diverse needs of all students. Advocating for resource equity involves tracking level of opportunity in relation to performance or impact and creating progressive spending patterns.
The levers that impact student experiences occur at all levels of the district, including classrooms, schools, and district departments and offices. District leaders, school administrators, teachers, and support staff engage in continuous learning to identify ways to disrupt, and design their own policies and practices to promote responsive, timely resource equity for students across the district. Resource equity balances immediate solutions with sustainable, long- term distribution of resources to close opportunity gaps for students.
In-Practice
Those who direct resource equity:
- Make allocation decisions across schools and within schools based on data that presents the needs and assets of each community, school, and/or student group—and where they are currently situated within outcomes—to support achieving universal goals.
- Use a broad range of data, including qualitative and multi-sector data, to assess the current and future impact of resource distribution in relation to the distribution of opportunity and how each of these correspond with outcomes.
Advocate for equitable resource allocation in their context or role. - Engage in an extensive, sensitive dialogue with an array of stakeholders, building public moral, economic, and political will to provide the resources and support to co-construct opportunity and give all students access to the resources, opportunities, and educational rigor they need to succeed.
- Re-organize themselves to allocate the time and resources within their locus of control to focus on students and schools in areas of concentrated disadvantage.
- Facilitate opportunities for schools and networks to share resources within and between schools including human capital, materials, and promising practices to address common problems.
- See themselves as resources with agency and prioritize students with the most risk factors working against them in their efforts and actions to support schools and communities.