Imagine if some students had to run 100 yards to reach the end zone in football, but minority students had to race 200 yards to get there.  Overcoming this uneven playing field in education drives the purpose of the Center for Urban Education (CUE) at the University of Southern California.  Estela Mara Bensimon, a professor of higher education at USC, secured $900,000 from the USC Provost’s Office in 1999 to launch CUE and get the ball rolling.

For the last 18 years, it has consulted with over 100 community colleges and four-year colleges to produce equity in student outcomes and help minority students achieve undergraduate degrees and overcome a variety of obstacles.  It employs its proprietary Equity Scorecard to “identify problems, develop intervention and implement equity goals to increase retention, transfer and graduation rates for under-represented racial and ethnic groups,” declares its mission statement.

Lindsey Malcom-Piqueux, its associate director for research and policy, said it “encourages institutions and practitioners to use inquiry to remediate their own practices to create equity for all students.”  She noted that, “We’ve worked specifically around remedial and basic skills education as this is one of the areas in which students of color experience the largest inequities.”  Moreover, she described English and math skills as “the large gatekeepers to baccalaureate degree attainment.”

Malcom-Piquex explained that overcoming these inequities, which are embedded into the American educational system, is complicated and often based on overcoming systemic practices.  Students who hail from underprivileged areas, who are often minority, tend to attend schools that are “under resourced, whose teachers tend to have less experience in the classroom, and that sets the stage for inequities that we see once students complete high school and are ready to enter college,” she said.

But most colleges are structured to appeal to what works for reaching middle class and affluent students more so than targeting most minority students whose needs are different.  For most minority students, attending a lecture isn’t the most effective learning technique.  “Students of color are more likely to engage with material when they see its relevance to their community and lives,” she said.  Minority students thrive educationally when they “feel validated by faculty members and are engaged in experiential learning,” she added.

The more minority students feel accepted on campus and welcomed, the more likely they are to succeed.  At most colleges, students of color only encounter minority adults on campus when they see “janitors, food service staff and landscapers, not faculty,” Malcom-Piquex noted. And for every 300 students on most campuses, 250 of them are white.

Once CUE consults with a college, its first step is to “view inequities as a problem of educational practice,” Malcom-Piquex noted.  It collaborates with faculty, staff and administrators and “asks them to use data to see where inequities occur in the college environment. Are the inequities stemming from degree completion or course completion or transfer credits?”  Once the inequity is identified, CUE collaborates with faculty to determine what’s going on in the classroom and what can be done to ameliorate the situation.

“We ask them to focus on remediating practice, rather than remediating students,” Malcolm-Piquex stated.  What Center for Urban Education emphasizes is that most college remediation programs “places the causes of inequities on the deficits of the students.  It’s their lack of skills.”  Hence, students are blamed because “They don’t know how to study, or they’re not prepared,” the list goes on and on, she insinuated.  What’s ignored is that most minority students have been educated in an unequal environment.

CUE provides the tools that encourage faculty to examine their own polices and improve them.  “It’s a series of prompts and questions that walk a faculty member through their own syllabus from the perspective of a student and look beyond the words to see what’s communicated,” noted Malcom-Piquex, a Columbia, Md. native who has a doctorate in higher education from USC and graduated from MIT.

She stresses that the faculty is driving the self-examination; it’s not being done for them.  “That’s much more effective than us doing it.  They’re the experts of local content,” she noted.

In June 2013, the Community College of Aurora, located eight miles east of Denver, received a grant to participate in an equity excellence program run by CUE.  The college is extremely diverse, and its 7,439 students in fall 2016 consisted of 37 percent White students, 27 percent Latino, 20 percent African-American, eight percent Asian and two percent American Indian.

James Gray, its math chairman, said the college’s goal was to “increase the success of students who have the largest achievement gaps.”  He described CUE’s approach as a “process of action, research and inquiry.”  Ultimately, the project contributed to “change the culture of our college. We wanted it to be more inclusive and responsive in our student areas,” he observed.

CUE’s focus became part of every faculty member’s overall approach and game plan.  Increasing the equity gap became woven into their work plans, departmental goals and everyday life.

For example, the math department uses data on race, ethnicity and gender to track each student’s progress.  “We could see how people were doing in relation to the overall average,” he said. Mentoring was launched, peer-to-peer observations were stepped up and the syllabus was scrutinized to see where it could be improved to reach more students.

Gray examined his own teaching approach, scrutinized what was working and what wasn’t and realized he too had a problem holding minority students accountable if they were late.  Confronting them made him anxious, but watching other faculty who handled it well led to strengthening his skills.  He realized that holding students accountable raised his expectations of them, and the more he did that, the more they often intensified their efforts.

The college’s goal was a five-year plan to raise equity achievement from 29 percent of students to 40 percent, and that plan is still ongoing.

Another major change, Gray suggested, was the math department altered its hiring practices. It interviewed 27 candidates for a full-time job rather than 10 to 12 as in the past.  It brought in 11 candidates to interview with a more diverse slate than three or four in the past. It asked, for example, “If a student doesn’t do well, to what do you attribute that?”

It eventually hired a Hispanic male, and Gray admitted that he might not have earned a chance previously.  Moreover, it has gotten more polished at identifying candidates who understand their students and offer access to all students.  

 “Shining the light” on equity achievement helped transform the culture, Gray suggested.  “So much of what we do comes down to belief, realizing what students need, what they can do and cannot do,” he said.  The more faculties expect of students, the more students respond, he said.  Though the effects of CUE are still a work in progress, Gray admitted, “having all faculty set equity goals is a major accomplishment.” •