Rethinking the Allocation of Teaching Resources: Some Lessons From High Performing Schools

Although a great deal of debate surrounds the level and allocation of resources to public schools, very little of this discussion addresses how schools might organize teaching resources more effectively at the school level. This paper describes case studies of five high performing public schools that have organized professional resources in innovative ways. The study sought to detail alternative ways of deploying instructional resources in order to provide concrete alternatives to traditional organization of teachers and to quantify objectively the ways in which these schools use resources differently depending on their instructional goals and strategies. Although the schools studied looked very different from one another, they shared five principles of resource allocation which are outlined in this paper. The paper develops a framework for re-examining the use of resources and a methodology which may be used to measure the extent to which schools use their resources in focused ways to support teaching and learning.