What is ERS?
Classroom rostering is one of the most consequential — and least examined — decisions a school makes. ERS changes that. By evaluating student needs alongside teacher strengths, ERS makes every placement decision transparent, defensible, and grounded in evidence.
Key Benefits
Every student deserves a teacher who is the right fit for their needs — not just whoever is left after the schedule is built. ERS ensures placement decisions are made on evidence, not convenience, giving every student a genuine shot at success regardless of their background or prior performance.
ERS matches students to the teachers best suited to their learning needs — using evidence, not intuition — driving measurable gains in academic growth.
ERS gives school leaders a clear, auditable rationale for every placement decision — replacing subjective judgment with consistent, evidence-based criteria that families and staff can trust.
ERS puts the right information in the hands of the people who know students best. Rather than replacing educator judgment, it sharpens it — giving teachers and school leaders the evidence they need to make placement decisions with confidence.
Research & Development
ERS has been a decade in the making. Since 2015, Basis has partnered with Hourglass Educational Technology Solutions to conceptualize, design, and build ERS — investing the time required to get the methodology right before putting it in front of real students and teachers.
That investment has been rigorous from the start. With support from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences and the Belk Foundation, and in close collaboration with researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, we subjected ERS to the same standards of evidence we apply to all of our work. Extensive focus group interviews with school leaders, analyses of classroom assignment patterns across North Carolina public schools, and iterative design refinement preceded any formal testing.
The formal pilot, a randomized controlled trial conducted in partnership with the Wake County Public School System, brought ERS into 4th and 5th-grade classrooms across four elementary schools during the 2023–24 school year. Principals found ERS easy to use, well-matched to their existing workflows, and worth doing again – and every principal who received ERS-recommended rosters asked for them the following year.
Research-Backed Impact
Pilot study results backed up that confidence. Students in ERS schools were 17 percentage points more likely to be assigned to their best-fit teacher than students in comparison schools — a meaningful shift in access to effective instruction, produced not by hiring new teachers or overhauling curriculum, but by making smarter use of the people and data already in the building. Cost analyses further showed that ERS generates significant savings when implemented at scale, freeing up time that principals and teachers can redirect toward instruction.
Work With Us
Ready to bring transparency and equity to every classroom placement decision? Let’s talk about how ERS can give your schools the evidence they need to match every student with the right teacher — and make rostering a driver of achievement rather than an afterthought.