External Tools and Resources on Equity

  •  "America to Me" from Ocsar-nominee , Steve James ("Hoop Dreams"), is a docuseries available on Starz. It's an immersive look at a single year inside Oak Park River Forest High School, one of the more diverse and progressive high schools in Chicagoland with benevolent teachers, every amenity imaginable and one disquieting drawback: white students' test scores are climbing, while black students' scores have stagnated. Learn more.
  •   The Aspen Institute's Education & Society Program developed a tool called "Pursuing Social and Emotional Development Through a Racial Equity Lens: 5 Strategies for System Leaders to Take Action."  Read more. 
  •   ERS has released a working paper on resource equity. Resource equity is the allocation and use of resources (people, time, and money) to create student experiences that enable all children to reach empowering and rigorous learning outcomes. The paper identifies nine "dimensions of equity" which link to student outcomes, identify typical sources of inequities, share ways that schools and systems have organized resources to create greater equity, and provide sample diagnostic questions to help systems self-assess. Read the paper.
  •   The Urban Institute launched a tool, "School Funding: Do Poor Kids Get Their Fair Share?", in August 2017,  with a state-level view of how education funding has changed over the past two decades and compares how progressively states spend their education dollars. Access the tool.
  •  The Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality and the National Black Women’s Justice Institute released a toolkit on improving interactions between girls of color and School Resource Officers. The report is based on research conducted in the South with girls of color and officers in school: bit.ly/beherresource
Be Her Resource September 2017
  •  The Great Lakes Equity Center is one of four regional equity assistance centers funded by the US DOE under Title IV of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. They provide technical assistance and training, upon request, in the areas of race, sex, national origin and religion to public school districts and other responsible governmental agencies. Their website hosts a wealth of free equity-oriented professional development resources such as webinars, pod/vodcasts, presentations and so much more. If you are interested in the area of equity, civil rights and school reform, explore their website.
  • NYC Leadership Academy's short film "What It Takes: Leading  Districts for Equity,"highlights the innovative equity work in one of their partner districts, Newburgh Enlarged City School District (NY). The district's superintendent Roberto Padilla is featured in this video. Watch the video.
  • Teach Us All is is a documentary and social justice campaign on educational inequality set against the backdrop of the 1957 Little Rock school crisis. Learn more.

 External Articles

  •  "Equity is Empathy in Action," by Jonathan Raymond, President of the Stuart Foundation. Raymond recently published a book titled Wildflowers, which reflects on what Mr. Raymond learned during his time in educational leadership, especially the four years he was Superintendent of Sacramento City Unified School District.(August 24, 2018)
  •  "Extensive Data Shows Punishing Reach of Racism for Black Boys," by Emily Badger, Claire Cain Miller, Adam Pearce and Kevin Quearly (New York Times, March 19, 2018)

 

Updated September 2018