Education Resource Strategies: Transforming School Systems for Student Success
Education Resource Strategies (ERS) is dedicated to helping school systems and state leaders make transformative shifts in their resources, structures, and practices. Since 2005, ERS has partnered with over 150 school systems and state leaders, bringing a research-driven, collaborative approach and analytic expertise to build a better future for all students, especially those with the greatest learning needs and those furthest from opportunity.
What ERS Does
ERS focuses on the larger picture: how resources (people, time, and money) work together to create strategic systems that support strong schools. By bringing the latest research from the field to every partnership, ERS provides rigorous quantitative and qualitative analysis and facilitates decision-making processes to help education leaders drive change. By the end of an ERS engagement, district and school partners feel shared ownership over their opportunities and are better equipped to take action.
Data Analysis for Decision-Support and Case-Making
ERS's unparalleled analytic expertise, proprietary benchmark database, and ability to integrate research, best practice, and stakeholder feedback allow for quick identification of high-priority challenges and opportunities. Whether assessing district spending patterns, examining school portfolio configurations, dissecting inequities in student learning time, or analyzing compensation structures, ERS sheds light on the most critical challenges and opportunities for driving transformation. Partners use these analyses to inform strategic planning cycles, superintendent transitions, central office reorganization efforts, school board inquiries, new district initiative launches, and more.
Strategy Design
ERS helps leaders translate their high-level visions for student success into a set of clear strategic priorities powered by the concrete shifts in staffing, schedules, and budgets needed to enact meaningful change. ERS's unique approach helps leaders craft the specific school- and district-level resource use, practice, and policy shifts they need to successfully achieve their vision. By pinpointing leading indicators and metrics, ERS also helps leaders monitor change to ensure they stay on track.
Implementation Support
ERS helps turn ambitious strategies into reality through hands-on support ranging from limited advisory on specific initiatives to detailed implementation support and guidance for full-scale transformation. Grounded in years of on-the-ground experience partnering with large districts across the country, ERS's implementation support uses research-based best practices to help leaders execute bold strategies. ERS excels in the creation of continuous improvement processes, adapting work based on real-time progress, and ensuring that change management and stakeholder engagement are central parts of a district’s implementation plans.
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Leadership Development
ERS offers standalone workshops for districts and state education agencies interested in growing their leaders’ skillsets or for individuals seeking to expand their knowledge base.
Transforming Systems for Student Thriving
ERS empowers school system leaders to make transformative shifts in resources, structures, and practices so that all students-especially those with the greatest learning needs and those furthest from opportunity-attend a school where they can learn and thrive.
Driving positive learning experiences, reimagining the teaching job, and ensuring long-term financial sustainability requires leaders to make strategic resource shifts. ERS is committed to helping districts make these resource shifts and allocate people, time, and money to achieve their highest potential.
ERS helps school districts organize resources to drive greater opportunities and outcomes for all students by:
- Analyzing data and integrating research, best practices, and stakeholder feedback to guide decision-making.
- Designing effective schooling models, including making resource tradeoffs and building consensus.
- Implementing planned strategies and monitoring progress.
Strategic System ROI
ERS anchors its approach in a holistic progress monitoring model-what they call Strategic System ROI-that enables continuous improvement. ERS also helps district leaders analyze their current school portfolios to align with student needs, district strategy, and financial context.
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ERS supports district leaders by:
- Assessing current resource use.
- Taking strategic plans to the next level.
- Redesigning school portfolios.
- Helping achieve a high ROI.
District Strategy, Planning & Innovation
ERS helps districts take their strategic plan to the next level.
Strategic Planning in Holyoke Public Schools
In 2022, ERS supported Holyoke Public Schools’ (HPS) new superintendent, Anthony Soto, in creating the district’s new strategic plan. Led by ERS’ design process, HPS leaders brought together 45 community stakeholders to form two groups:
- The advisory committee defined high-level components, including the mission, vision, core values, and equity priorities.
- The steering committee defined the district’s theory of action, core priorities, implementation strategies, and initiative maps that outline the district’s ongoing core work.
Superintendent Soto and his team completed an extensive five-month entry-planning process, using classroom visits, focus groups, and surveys to understand the district’s current state and prioritize key focus areas for the strategic plan. At the end of the planning process, 100% of steering committee members agreed or strongly agreed that they felt good about the initiative maps they created with ERS’ support, and 100% of advisory committee members also felt that the plan sets HPS in the right direction for the next three years.
Financial Sustainability
ERS helps districts create-and sustain-a higher-ROI budgeting process. Recent partners include Portland Public Schools, Cleveland Metropolitan School District, and Baltimore City Public Schools.
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Driving long-term financial sustainability is more important than ever. A truly effective sustainability strategy starts with developing a deep understanding of the district’s cost structures and revenue forecast, and then developing a process to assess the return on investment of various initiatives. This information forms the basis for discussions around the tough, but necessary, tradeoffs leaders need to make to advance their efforts. It also helps create a shared fact base that leaders can use to engage stakeholders in the need to invest for the future, rather than just protecting what has always been.
ERS supports district leaders by:
- Mapping resource use and allocation.
- Forecasting spending and revenue.
- Planning financially.
- Creating better budget processes.
Resource Mapping in Portland Public Schools
During the 2022-23 school year, ERS led Portland Public Schools (PPS) leaders through district resource mapping to assess their current resource use. By analyzing data and facilitating working sessions, ERS helped the PPS cabinet and board better understand the district-level financial picture, school-level resource equity, and current teacher and student experiences.
Our analyses helped PPS leaders make strategic, informed decisions now that will build toward more effective and sustainable resource allocations in the long term. These decisions included:
- Investing in school-based professional development by reducing 64 centrally managed Teacher on Special Assignment FTE and adding 92 instructional coach FTE to school sites to improve consistency in job-embedded professional development and instructional leadership.
- Supporting school leaders by providing them with the flexibility needed to spend funding to best meet their school’s context.
- Making informed budget decisions during a period of overall budget reductions.
School Funding
ERS helps infuse strategic spending processes into a school’s budgeting model. Recent partners include Albuquerque Public Schools, Columbus City Schools, and Crowley Independent School District.
ERS supports districts in designing and implementing funding models that deliver foundational resources to every school and distribute resources strategically and equitably to the highest-need areas. ERS also provides extensive training and redesign processes to help school leaders, school supervisors, and school budget teams make strategic resource use decisions.
ERS supports district leaders by:
- Analyzing school funding efficacy.
- Redesigning school funding and staffing models, including student-based budgeting, weighted-staffing models, and more.
- Supporting strategic school spending by providing “strategic budgeting” implementation support and professional learning to school leaders and the central office staff who support them.
Strategic School Funding in Crowley Independent School District
ERS supported CISD in addressing challenges through the ERS-led Texas Strategic Resource Use Network, in which leaders assess current resource allocation patterns. Together, we charted a path to make short-term shifts in staffing to address the immediate financial challenges and identify opportunities to build toward long-term shifts that support excellent student outcomes and experiences. Through our partnership, CISD made strategic shifts to systematically distribute resources more equitably, regardless of budget conditions.
Those shifts included:
- Developing an elementary-level need index to identify the highest-need schools.
- Utilizing the need index to guide resource allocations through a need-based funding system.
- Making targeted reductions alongside new strategic investments, including hiring high-impact staff at each elementary and middle school to increase student-facing support for all students.
Human Capital Strategy
Teachers are essential to fostering positive student experiences. They motivate students, enable them to advance academically, and even support their holistic wellness. To be effective, teachers need rewarding, collaborative, and sustainable jobs that offer various career pathways and professional growth opportunities.
Giving educators the support they need-and solving today’s recruitment and retention challenges-requires us to take strategic and transformative steps that improve the teaching experience and better support educators at all stages of their careers.
ERS supports district leaders in reimagining the teaching job by:
- Analyzing teacher turnover rates and causes.
- Redesigning teacher compensation and career pathways.
- Redesigning teacher staffing and schedules.
Reimagining the Teaching Job
Building the capacity of state and district leaders and other stakeholders is vital to the long-term success of reimagining teaching roles.
Leveraging Teams
ERS emphasizes a team-based approach, believing that students are more likely to see results from a diverse group of educators with different strengths. This approach allows teachers to lean into their expertise and frees them from trying to be everything to all students. Instead, teams are built that leverage individual skills and expertise to provide more effective instruction.
Expanding On-Ramps
Many aspiring educators face hurdles like limited access to high-quality preparation programs and financial burdens that may hinder their ability to pursue the teaching profession. Rather than continuing to rely on historical approaches, such as requiring candidates to complete a teacher preparation program in a traditional college environment, ERS advocates for multiple high-quality pathways that provide “hands-on experience,” like grow-your-own models and expanded residencies.
Improving the Core Job
ERS believes that attempts to reimagine what teaching looks like that do not explicitly address core components of the job that lead to dissatisfaction, like unsustainable workloads, subpar compensation, and lack of ongoing support, will be unsuccessful. ERS’s framework emphasizes differentiated team-structures and workloads, whereby teachers hold various levels of responsibility (and are therefore compensated dynamically), believing such an approach reduces a teacher’s overall workload. ERS also emphasizes ongoing professional development through regular classroom observations with targeted feedback and coaching, along with collaborative learning sessions for at least 90 minutes a week.
Deepening Impact
Core to ERS’s approach are robust, fairly-compensated leadership opportunities for educators to grow their impact and careers that do not require them to leave the classroom altogether.
School Design
ERS helps districts make key resource shifts to enhance experiences for every student at every level. Every student should attend a school where they can learn and thrive. But creating the conditions that drive positive learning experiences in financially sustainable ways often requires leaders to make big resource shifts across all areas of their district. These shifts include ensuring that school funding is equitable, flexible, and transparent; school portfolios are sustainable, reflect community needs, and provide enriching and challenging experience to all students; central offices are true strategic partners that support all schools in reaching best practices; and school budgets, staffing, and schedules enable personalized time and attention, teacher collaboration, and professional learning.
State Strategy & Support
ERS helps districts join collaborative networks and design statewide support systems that work.
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