A Framework for Scaling for Equity

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. 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. Presented in this report is a scaling-for-equity framework informed by the experiences of 10 research-practice partnerships (RPPs) and designed to provide readers with multiple, iterative opportunities to think about equity as it relates to scale. The scaling-for-equity framework supports a journey in which members of a team work to improve educational practice by traveling over time from their origin to a destination. 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, and providing support for disentangling and addressing the many influences and tensions at play when improvement teams aim to bring about change.