Taking Equal Opportunity Rhetoric Seriously: Envisioning and Costing-Out a P-12 Public School System in North Carolina Where Every Child Thrives

The Challenge: Opportunity Gaps and the Myth of the “Great Equalizer” Educational opportunity gaps continue to limit the lives of millions of children in the United States (Carter & Welner, 2013). [...] (Michigan is the third state, and we are currently deciding on the states to follow.) The process described in this report was designed to seek the vision of those public-school advocates with the most in-depth, on-the-ground knowledge of the needs of North Carolina’s students and their schools. [...] The Price of Opportunity Panel Approach Embarking on our work, we considered existing approaches and concluded that we needed to build on the PJP bottom-up approach because it facilitates the identification, design, and estimation of the costs of programs and resources needed to meet an educational goal within a specific policy environment, such as a state. [...] Because the Price of Opportunity project explores an ambitious vision for schools, and because the PJP bottom-up approach creates a space for discussion about the conceptualization of educational standards and the resources needed to meet an ambitious standard, we developed a Great Equalizer standard: A “Great Equalizer” public school has the resources and programs needed to overcome the challenge. [...] Embedded in the POP approach are five sets of assumptions, each of which is discussed in the following sections: • the researchers’ license for conducting the costing-out study • the educational standard that should be met • the geographic and demographic variance in educational needs • the experts most qualified to speak to these issues • the type of resources and programs that should be taken in.