The Equity Audit Template revolves around four opportunity areas and allows for an examination of equity at the school level. For the slide show tutorial for creating your own template please use this Google Slide template. Please contact us for the powerpoint version of the template or to learn how to use the template with more recent data (currently designed for 2017-18/2015 data).

A blue and green colored piechart broken into quarters, each quarter has a different word: funding, discipline, access, achievement.

Understanding the Equity Audit Framework

The EEMS Equity Audit Framework is based around the idea that discrepancies in opportunities are reflected in achievement gaps for students. The framework consists of four opportunity areas: access to programming, discipline policies, funding, and achievement.

Interpreting Equity Audit Data

Paul Gorski’s social justice framework for Equity Literacy calls on educators to

  1. Recognize biases and inequities
  2. Respond in immediate term
  3. Redress biases in long term
  4. Create and Sustain bias-free and equitable learning environment

The  Equity Audit model helps us to Recognize Opportunity Gaps – discrepancies in funding, access, and discipline that lead to achievement gaps.  Use the following questions to examine your school’s equity audit data with a lens of responding to inequities and creating solutions for building an equitable learning environment.

  1. Where do you see (recognize) balanced representation and where do you see racial, gender, or SES discrepancies in access (enrollment in programs – GT, Spec Ed, AP), discipline procedures, funding, and achievement?
  2. Give a deficit model explanation for these discrepancies.
  3. Give a critical structural model explanation for these discrepancies.
  4. Using the critical structural model explanation – brainstorm possible strategies to respond and redress the discrepancies.

Equity Audit Example

A screenshot of two bar graphs showing the 4 year cohort graduation rate for 2013-2014 of Portland High School (77.7%) compared to the state average (86.5%)

Click HERE for an example of an Equity Audit put together with data from Biddeford Primary School.

Click HERE for an example of an Equity Audit put together with data from Biddeford Intermediate School.

Click HERE for an example of an Equity Audit put together with data from both Portland High School and Deering High School.

Additional Resources

Miseducation
Based on civil rights data released by the U.S. Department of Education, ProPublica has built an interactive database to examine racial disparities in educational opportunities and school discipline. Information is available from than 96,000 individual public and charter schools and 17,000 districts.