Western Educational Equity Assistance Center

Guide / Tool

The REAL Mathematics Digital Design Companion: Applying Equity Principles to Math EdTech Development and Procurement

EdTech products are rapidly transforming math education, yet culturally responsive and sustaining education (CRSE) principles remain largely absent from how these tools are designed and selected. While the broader education field recognizes the value of culturally responsive practices, concrete guidance on how to apply these principles in EdTech contexts, particularly as products evolve to incorporate new AI features, has been limited.

WestEd developed the REAL Mathematics Digital Design Companion to help bridge that gap, offering a practical guide for EdTech development teams and school and district leaders involved in procurement decisions. Rather than being a compliance checklist, the companion is designed to expand the factors teams consider when building or evaluating math EdTech products, helping ensure these tools are accessible for all students and do not replicate the pitfalls of the past. This resource is part of WestEd’s broader REAL Mathematics work supporting relevant, engaging, and applied learning in mathematics.

Community-Centered Approaches to Safety and Well-Being: A Tool for Reflection and Action

How can schools and communities foster safety, connection, and well-being in the face of increasing adversity? This resource shares evidence-based insights and lessons from communities that have responded to challenges with collective care and support. It includes foundational context, key concepts and research, reflection questions, and practical tools to help educators and community leaders strengthen conditions for safety and well-being.

Improving Attendance Through Human-Centered Leadership Practices

Regular school attendance is a strong predictor of academic success, yet many attendance strategies rely on top-down, compliance-driven approaches that fall short of addressing root causes. This brief from WestEd’s Western Educational Equity Assistance Center offers education leaders an alternative: human-centered leadership practices that prioritize empathy, flexibility, and collaboration to understand and address the barriers keeping students out of school. The brief organizes its guidance around three levels of action. At the individual level, leaders examine their own mindsets about absences. At the collective level, staff, students, and families work together to bridge perspectives and learn from shared data. At the systems level, leaders adapt policies and routines to better serve those least well supported by current approaches.

For each level, the brief pairs practices, such as strengthening self-awareness, navigating diverse perspectives, and fostering transparent communication, with reflection questions and practical “Try It Out” activities that leaders can apply directly in their schools. Ultimately, the brief calls on education leaders to cultivate trust and engage those most affected by attendance challenges, positioning human connection as central to creating lasting improvements in attendance.

Following Through: 5 Strategies for Getting Federal Relief Aid to Students Who Need It Most

To address the increased needs of students and schools resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government has enacted a series of three relief and stimulus bills — the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act), the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act (CRRSAA), and the American Rescue Plan (ARP) — that have collectively infused nearly $200 billion directly into K–12 public education.

State education agency leaders play a critical role in providing guidance and technical assistance to local education agencies regarding the equitable allocation and use of funding to help ensure that dollars reach and positively affect the students with highest need.

In addition, states have an opportunity to support LEAs in thoughtfully engaging community stakeholders, elevating the voices of underserved communities and utilizing their input in strategic resource decisions, and strengthening LEAs’ ongoing planning processes.

This policy brief offers five strategies that state and local education agency leaders can use to follow through on the intended use of federal relief aid – including measuring, monitoring, and disseminating information on the impact of local investments in order to meaningfully support students most impacted by the pandemic.

7 Recommendations for Using Education Data to Support Equitable Learning Outcomes

While there are many different types of education data, policymakers and education leaders often place heavy emphasis on data from large-scale quantitative measures, such as annual state assessments. But data from these sources alone do not provide a complete picture of learning and are often not well suited to informing improvements at the local level.

This brief provides seven recommendations to help educators, administrators, policymakers, and others use a wider range of data to more effectively support equitable learning outcomes.

Systems Reviews: Building Coherence, Increasing Efficiency, and Improving Workflow at State Educational Agencies

State educational agencies (SEAs) face complex challenges that require both technical solutions and adaptive approaches that shift leadership, structures, and processes. WestEd’s systems review process provides a structured yet flexible framework to help SEAs

  • assess systems and improve coordination to reduce redundancy and enhance productivity;
  • build leadership and staff capacity to navigate both technical and adaptive challenges; and
  • align agency work with long-term state priorities for sustainable, meaningful change.

Drawing on decades of expertise in capacity building, technical assistance, and systems improvement, WestEd partners with SEA leaders to ensure efforts are data-driven, actionable, and impactful. By applying principles of organization development, systems thinking, and continuous improvement, this approach helps agencies realize their full potential.

Implementing Participatory Systems Change Initiatives: A Tool for Reflecting on the Essential Conditions 

As part of a suite of resources on participatory systems change for equity, this tool offers an approach to systems change that centers the wisdom and motivations of those closest to systemic equity challenges to make sense of and transform system conditions toward opportunity and well-being through collective action. The tool describes a set of essential conditions for implementing participatory systems change initiatives and sample indicators to help readers assess the extent to which the conditions are already established in their contexts.

Implementing Participatory Systems Change: A Reflection Guide on the Continuum of Participation

Key to the participatory systems change for equity approach are understanding and navigating participation along a continuum. The continuum of participation acknowledges varying modes of participation within a given systems change effort, with each mode serving a key purpose. This guide aims to add clarity to the nuanced nature of the continuum of participation by (a) describing the various participation modes and how they are interrelated and (b) offering practical considerations for leaders as they navigate the continuum and seek approaches to systems change that are more participatory.

Preparing Students for Life Beyond the Classroom: Spotlighting Success in North Dakota: The benefits of social emotional learning (SEL) in two rural school districts

When schools and school systems adopt a whole-person approach to learning, educators see improved student attendance and engagement, improved student connectedness, better social and emotional health, and improved academic outcomes. In addition to gaining academic knowledge, students are able to graduate with the essential social and emotional skills needed to succeed in college and the workforce.

To support statewide adoption of social-emotional learning (SEL) and other whole-person strategies, the National Center of Social and Emotional Learning and School Safety at WestEd worked with the North Dakota Department of Public Instruction and North Dakota Regional Education Association to identify districts that had been experiencing success with using whole-person practices.

Using a mixed-method research approach, two districts rose to the top as SEL exemplars: Wilton School District and Richland #44 School District. This case study explores each district’s successful strategies and some of the benefits they have offered to the district’s students, staff, and communities — beyond the evident student performance data.

Aligned and Coherent Communications to Serve the Whole Person: A Workbook for State Education Agencies

Strategic communications is important for building awareness, engagement, and commitment for serving children and youth. When this communication is bidirectional, it also creates avenues for state education agency (SEA) leaders to receive timely, honest feedback from stakeholders about the effectiveness of whole-person initiatives.

This guide is organized around six interrelated domains of alignment and coherence: Goals, Funding and Policies, Strategic Communications, Stakeholder Engagement, Capacity Building, and Data Use.

This Strategic Communications Workbook is designed to be used by SEA leaders as a companion to Serving the Whole Person: An Alignment and Coherence Guide for State Education Agencies in order to aid in the design and launch of their strategic communications efforts.