Improving outcomes for students means strengthening the systems, policies and people behind them.
Members of NORC’s Central Comprehensive Center team explain how we partner with education agencies in our seven Central region states—Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming—to help improve academic achievement, accountability systems, educator working conditions, student attendance, and leadership.
Watch the video to learn more.
Ensuring resources are spent wisely is a universal goal for state education agencies. The Wyoming Department of Education (WDE) is proactively strengthening its resource allocation review (RAR) process with support from a partnership with the Central Comprehensive Center and the Center for Strategic Funding and Finance (CSFF). The project’s approach aims to enhance the WDE’s collaboration with local school districts.
An RAR is a review of a school district’s use of money, staff, instructional time, and programmatic resources.
Federal Requirement. While used in a variety of settings, the RAR is required under the U.S. Department of Education’s Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) for school districts with a significant number of schools implementing school improvement plans.
ESSA requires the state education agencies help those school districts conduct their RARs, but each state has flexibility and autonomy in designing their own review process.
State Response. Wyoming’s ESSA state plan—approved by the U.S. Department of Education—details the state’s approach to identify, support, and monitor schools through a multitiered system of recognition and improvement. The plan outlines the WDE’s review of building-level resource allocations alongside student achievement data to identify any underserved subgroups. State report card data is used to ensure that schools identified for improvement are not underfunded compared to others. Any issues found are reported to the school district for resolution.
Local Complexities. In local-control states like Wyoming, this federally mandated, state-created plan includes another layer of complexity. The WDE can make requests of their 48 school districts, but districts determine how they respond to some state requirements, like defining curriculum based on state standards.
“The WDE can’t tell school districts exactly what they must do to meet the RAR requirements the WDE outlined in its ESSA state plan,” explains Joe Simpson, one of the Central Comprehensive Center Wyoming project leads. Instead, those decisions are left up to the school boards and leadership teams that manage each school district.
Merging federal, state, and local roles is at the heart of this project. The WDE request for support will help them guide school districts to effectively allocate resources to ensure schools implementing improvement plans uniformly deliver high-quality education to all students.
“While ESSA compliance is important, this project is about so much more than compliance,” said Simpson. “The WDE is creating a system of technical assistance supports that will bring value to its schools, educators, and students.”
Before the WDE creates a comprehensive statewide process for school districts to use, they need to look inward. Together with the Central Comprehensive Center and the CSFF, the WDE began this project by strengthening its own capacity to support RARs. Support from the CSFF was particularly critical at this point, as they drafted an RAR Guidebook to help school districts conduct effective reviews and implement evidence-based strategies.
As a next step, the WDE will conduct two rounds of school district piloting and reviews to ensure the updated RAR process, RAR Guidebook, and tools support reflective decision-making, collaborative problem-solving, and continuous improvement at the school district and individual school levels.
Based on feedback from pilot districts, the WDE and the Central Comprehensive Center will then develop an RAR implementation and evaluation plan. At that point, the WDE will disseminate the RAR Guidebook and accompanying tools to districts conducting RARs.
The updated process is re-centering the RAR request on school districts from a compliance practice into an impactful, insightful practice.
“This state-level work is done with a district-focused lens,” explains Simpson. “The WDE wanted to create a comprehensive process that provides districts with results and information they can use.”
Ultimately, the updated RAR process should improve student outcomes by guiding schools and districts in a process to determine: