• Home
  • Working with ERS
• Practice Areas
  • Professional Development
  • School Funding
  • School Level Resources
  • Performance Management
  • System Design
• Clients & Partners
  • Clients
  • Partners
• Web Tools
  • DREAM
• Research Room
• About ERS
  • ERS Team
  • ERS in the News
  • Contact ERS
  • ERS Job Opportunities
  • Upcoming ERS Appearances

Other ERS
Practice Areas

• Professional Development
• School Funding Systems
• School Level Resource Use
• Performance Management
• School System Design

Publications on School System Design from ERS

Rethinking School-System Resources to Create Excellence and Equity
by Karen Hawley Miles

This paper outlines the essential roles of school systems in supporting educational improvement and holding schools accountable for results.

The Essential Roles include allocating resources equitably across schools, building capacity for instruction and leadership, ensuring school-level flexibility and capacity to best utilize resources, and promoting research-based school level professional development.

Published by the Annenberg Foundation, Spring 2006. View and download in PDF format.

For a list of other publications from ERS on School System Design, click here.

School System Design

Our Approach

ERS’s fifth practice area outlines the roles, practices, and strategies that systems can use to promote transformational improvement in student performance. To help school systems successfully manage portfolios of innovative, high-performing schools, we provide:

Assessment tools that measure how well the system provides the essential system roles that ensure:

• Equitable allocation of resources
• Student access to high quality instruction
• Strong instructional and leadership capacity
• Evidence-based programs, curriculum, and instructional strategies
• Cost-effective operations, and shared services
• Effective accountability for results

Examples of school system programs, infrastructure, and policies that support these goals including:

• Student assignment and choice
• Student and school budgeting
• Teacher hiring, induction, and assignment
• Teaching standards, professional development, compensation, and career paths
• Instructional programs and assessments
• Contracting and delivery of services and support
• Performance reporting, management and remediation

A diagnostic assessment of the system’s highest priority needs for improving performance

Guidance in implementing specific strategies that best support equity and excellence.  Such strategies might include:

• Managed choice
• Weighted student funding
• Negotiating changes in union contracts
• Incentive-based hiring, career paths & compensation
• Supervision and review of standards-based performance measures for administrators, teachers, students, and schools
• Outsourcing and decentralizing system, school, and student services

ERS Web-Based Tools

With support from the School Finance Redesign Project (SRFP) at the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Education and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, ERS is designing several web-based tools to guide district and school leaders in understanding and maximizing their allocation of time, people, and money to support improved instruction. 

Get more information and to see how ERS Tools can inform School System Design.