Erasing the Opportunity Gap – Achieving Equity within School Districts

School boards and superintendents in urban and large suburban school districts sometimes distribute pivotal human, curricular and construction resources in a way that becomes unintentionally uneven, causing an opportunity gap between children living in well-off versus poor neighborhoods. School board members make one-at-a-time decisions that have long-term consequences. Among them: the number and nature of Advanced Placement courses at a given high school; assignment of principals, teachers and guidance counselors; and the age and re-conditioning of school buildings. All of these actions at first blush appear to be neutral choices. Yet, when the best resources are persistently handled in a way that favors affluent areas in a single school district, inequity becomes a repeating pattern locked in over decades. The result is an opportunity gap that finds some students receiving an inferior education simply because of their zip code.

We will use a tool called "READ" (the Resource Equity Assessment Document), developed by national Appleseed, to assess intra-district resource equity. The project stresses the key roles of school board policies and practices, as well as school superintendent leadership, in giving all students an equal opportunity to succeed. The goal is to assess three school districts in Massachusetts, to increase transparency of school board operations and to empower citizens to advocate for resource equity in their school district. Specifically we seek to: