Access to Adequate and Equitable Resources

To learn and thrive, students and young people need access to sufficient and equitable resources, including public funding, well-qualified teachers, meaningful and rigorous instructional opportunities, and a full range of social, emotional, and academic supports. 

Our local, state, and federal systems must be designed to:

• Generate sufficient and sustainable funding to provide every child a high-quality education, from preschool through college;

• Distribute resources equitably, so that opportunities to learn and achieve are not determined by race, family income, neighborhood property wealth, school zone, immigration status, or home language; and

• Link funding and services across child-serving sectors to streamline the provision of services and maximize the equitable use of public funds.

Spending for Equity

The Opportunity Institute collaborates with grassroots advocates and state policymakers to ensure that education funding is used equitably and transparently. We seek to strengthen community stakeholder engagement in determining how to use funds and support whole-child success.

What we’re doing:

• We are supporting the field in using $3 billion in new state funding to support the implementation of transformational community schools in California

• We are advising partners on the use of federal COVID recovery funds to meet urgent needs in schools and districts, including working with community members in the Mississippi Delta region and in central and western New York.

• We are partners on the California campaign Reimagine and Rebuild: Restarting School with Equity at the Center to support COVID recovery.

• We are researching and documenting lessons learned from California state spending plans, including California’s Learning Continuity Plans, to inform state decisions about planning and COVID recovery.

Tackling Structural Inequities

• Our school funding systems must be designed to achieve equity, but too often they are implemented on top of broader fiscal and economic inequities. The Opportunity Institute identifies the role of structural issues, such as unfunded pension liabilities and inequitable tax systems, in sustaining inequities, and suggests changes that would advance economic and racial justice in our schools and communities.

  What we’re doing:

  • The Opportunity Institute is part of the California 100 initiative, and we are conducting research on how to improve California’s fiscal policy.

  • We collaborate with advocates and researchers to explain how unfunded pension liabilities in states like California and Mississippi crowd out education funding, and how systems designed to protect workers in their retirement could be retooled to better support teachers and students.

  • We are partnering with Pivot Learning to examine the ways in which California’s 1978 property tax law, Proposition 13, has contributed to educational and economic inequities.

  • We research ways to make tax systems and school funding policies more equitable and more sustainable.