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This report seeks to help school district leaders and improvement teams define what it means to scale for equity. It presents a scaling-for-equity framework informed by the experiences of 10 research-practice partnerships (RPPs). The framework and accompanying tools are designed to (1) help improvement teams navigate their scaling-for-equity journey and (2) support school district leaders striving to transform their communities’ public education systems into equitable ones.
For more than four decades, researchers, policymakers, professional educators, and the philanthropic community in education have wrestled with how to scale up promising pockets of reform. Twenty years ago, the concept of scale was often used in education to refer to the number of schools or classrooms reached by a given reform effort, but since that time our common conception of scale has evolved. Now, we believe that—to achieve scale—innovations, in education or elsewhere, must do more than simply spread to more users; they must also affect deep change in practice, be sustained over time, cultivate a shared sense of ownership among local community members, and involve fundamental systems change.
Despite this progress in our thinking, by and large, prior work on scaling has given little explicit attention to equity. In this report, however, scaling questions are considered equity questions: What should we scale? Who should be involved? Where and when should we start? How will we know when scale has been achieved?
Centering equity in scaling efforts means working with and prioritizing students who have historically lacked access to powerful learning opportunities, including deeper learning, and have not reached the ambitious outcomes we desire for everyone. This report seeks to help school district leaders and improvement teams define what it means to scale for equity.
The framework and accompanying tools are designed to (1) help improvement teams navigate their scaling-for-equity journey and (2) support school district leaders striving to transform their communities’ public education systems into equitable ones by:
- Prompting improvement team members to consider equity-related questions during all stages of the work and to develop shared responses
- Describing and categorizing scaling strategies so that teams can identify the strategies, alone or in combination, that will bring them closer to their equity goals
- Providing support for disentangling and addressing the many influences and tensions at play when improvement teams aim to bring about change
