District Resource Allocation Modeler (DREAM): A Web-Based Tool Supporting the Strategic Use of Educational Resources

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July 2007
Stephen Frank, Karen Hawley Miles

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SFRP Working Paper 19: A companion piece to the District ResourcE Allocation Modeler (DREAM) tool.

With growing pressure for student performance results and increased federal and state mandates, many district leaders and administrators struggle to provide a high-quality education for their students using existing or shrinking resources. These challenges demand hard choices, long-range planning, and a vision for how schools and districts might be organized to improve student performance. Unfortunately, many school leaders do not have adequate tools that allow them to develop a deep understanding of the key drivers of district costs and the fundamental resource trade-offs among them. Without frameworks and tools for analyzing effective ways of using time, people, and money, districts make resource decisions that may appear to promote improved student learning, but, in fact, have little chance of changing the quality of instruction.

To help school leaders build this understanding and make more effective resource decisions, Education Resource Strategies (ERS), a non-profit organization that supports schools and districts in rethinking resources strategically, developed the District ResourcE Allocation Modeler (DREAM). DREAM is based on the premise that school systems can improve student performance through a more transparent, strategic, and research-based use of district resources. By using DREAM, leaders gain a deeper understanding of the connection between resource use and drivers of student performance. This paper describes the research and principles underlying the DREAM tool, provides an overview of the tool and how it is used, and walks through a detailed example of how a district decisionmaker might use the tool to understand the resource trade-offs involved with various policy changes.

For more than a decade, Education Resource Strategies has supported leaders of large urban school districts in strategically reallocating their resources to support improved student performance. This work, as well as an ongoing review of the statistical and case study research in this area, provides the foundation for DREAM. Specifically, we have found that while there is no single “right answer” for how best to organize schools and resources for student performance, high-performing schools do have a strategic vision that drives resource use, and they actively manage their resources to support their vision.

Specifically, these schools share certain design strategies, which we call the “Big Four”:

• improve teacher quality through professional development, job structure, and common planning time;
• increase individual attention by identifying opportunities for creating small group sizes and lower teacher loads in high-need areas;
• focus on core academics by maximizing total time spent on academic subjects and creating longer blocks of uninterrupted time, with an emphasis on literacy; and
• flexibly organize staff and other resources to maximize instructional resources.

DREAM allows users to learn about the “Big Four,” experiment with various approaches for implementing these strategies at a district level, and receive immediate feedback on how their decisions impact the budget and other key measures.

DREAM is organized to serve a range of users and to support varied levels of detail in exploration. The tool begins by asking a user to define a “base case” district by choosing values for student enrollment, percentage of special education students, and per-pupil spending levels. ERS has found that these items are the strongest drivers of cost allocation in large urban districts. Using these user inputs, the tool then creates a “prototypical” district budget, including key metrics necessary to model policy options. This budget is derived from NCES spending and staffing data, augmented by data that ERS has gathered from the districts with which we have worked. The user is then able to model different policy options—from across the board changes in class size, to targeted flexible grouping strategies, to changes in teacher compensation and hiring—at varying levels of detail. At the highest level, the user may make changes to any of 18 different cost drivers, all on a single page, and view the impact on overall and per-pupil spending and other key metrics. Users interested in more targeted policy options may explore them in four design centers: Elementary Schools, Secondary Schools, Teacher Compensation and Time, and Professional Development. The design centers may be accessed individually to look at specific policies or in concert to design an integrated redesign strategy for the district.

While the tool does not dictate or require specific policy choices, we have designed it to encourage experimentation with the resource allocations that research suggests have the most impact on student performance. On each page, introductory text provides an overview of research findings and key issues to consider, and key indicators measuring critical drivers of the design concepts are displayed. Summary budget and expense reports may be viewed at any time.

We are excited about the launch of DREAM and hope that it will inspire users to think more broadly and strategically about resource trade-offs and levers and that it will prompt broader discussions about how to use resources to support district improvement strategies. At ERS, DREAM is only the first step toward our dream of providing accessible and easy-to-use tools for understanding and modeling resource use at the school and district level. For more information, contact ERS at dream@educationresourcestrategies.org or learn more online at www.educationresourcestrategies.org/webtools.htm.