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In this issue:
CUE Presents to Nevada's Board of Regents' Committee on Cultural Diversity
Dowd Moderates Congressional Briefing
Race-Conscious Policy Scholars Issue Calls to Action on Behalf of Young Men of Color
Student Success in Community Colleges Addressed at Statewide Panel
Bensimon Named AERA Fellow
Kick-Off to 3rd Equity Scorecard™ Cohort in Madison, Wisconsin CUE Participates in CA Basic Skills Workshops |
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Bensimon Named AERA Fellow
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(L-R) AERA Fellows Drs. Dominic Brewer, Rossier School of Education Assoc. Dean of Research & Faculty Affairs, and Bensimon; AERA President-Elect Dr. William G. Tierney, Dir. of Center for Higher Education Policy Analysis
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Dr. Bensimon was invited to become a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and will be installed in the 2011 Class of Fellows.
The AERA Fellows Program was established by the AERA Council to honor education researchers with substantial research accomplishments, to convey the Association's commitment to excellence in research, and to emphasize to new scholars the importance of sustained research of excellence in the field.
Notably, the 2011 Class of Fellows includes four directors of the ASHE Institutes of Equity and Critical Policy Analysis, which are housed at CUE and funded by the Ford Foundation. In addition to Dr. Bensimon, who serves as principal investigator of the Institutes and director of the Institute for Participatory Critical Action Research, newly named AERA Fellows include:
- Dr. Sylvia Hurtado, Professor and Director of the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA in the Graduate School of Education and Information Sciences and director of the Research Methods for Critical Analysis of Quantitative Data Institute;
- Dr. Anna Neumann, Professor of Higher Education at Teachers College, Columbia University and director of the Research Methods for Critical Analysis of Qualitative Data Institute;
- Dr. Amaury Nora, past Fellow, Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio in the College of Education and Human Development and director of the Scholarship and Publishing from an Equity Perspective Institute; and
- Dr. Michael Olivas, the William B. Bates Distinguished Chair in Law at the University of Houston Law Center, and co-director of the Institute for Higher Education Law and Governance at the University of Houston, and co-director of the Scholarship and Publishing from an Equity Perspective Institute.
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CUE Kicks Off 3rd Equity Scorecard™ Cohort at UWS
CUE and the University of Wisconsin System (UWS) hosted an orientation event in January for two UW campuses -- Green Bay and Stevens Point.
Five years ago, the UWS adopted the Equity Scorecard™ as part of its commitment to equity and began to implement the Scorecard at all of the system's campuses. Green Bay and Stevens Point are part of the third cohort to conduct the Scorecard, bringing the total to 18.
The orientation brought together teams of approximately 10 faculty and staff from each institution to learn how to use the Equity Scorecard™, a data-based, inquiry process aimed at implementing lasting change to improve the academic outcomes of students of color.
Both campuses held their first evidence team meeting shortly after the orientation. Early reports point to each of the teams making steady progress with members already starting to get a better sense of the choke points in student progress.
Read about how CUE is making an impact on the UW-Green Bay campus in the Green Bay Press-Gazette.
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Webinar, Workshops Demonstrate Utility of CUE's Benchmarking Tool to Set Equity Goals
CUE will be holding a series of benchmarking workshops for community colleges, funded by the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation. The spring 2011 workshops will be held in partnership with the California Community Colleges' Basic Skills Initiative (BSI) and the Research & Planning Group's Bridging Research Information and Culture (BRIC) Initiative.
Last December, over 30 community college faculty and administrators participated in CUE's webinar on Using Data to Set Equity Benchmark Goals, which demonstrated CUE's interactive Benchmarking Equity and Student Success Tool™ (BESST). The webinar demonstrated how the BESST could be used to set equity and student success goals using college "pipeline" data showing student progress through the basic skills to transfer-ready curriculum.
If your institution is interested in participating in the workshops, please email Dr. Rosita Ramirez, Project Specialist, at rmramirez@usc.edu.
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The Center for Urban Education (CUE) leads socially conscious research and develops tools needed for institutions of higher education to produce equity in student outcomes.
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CUE Presents Findings and Recommendations to Nevada's Board of Regents' Committee on Cultural Diversity
CUE co-director Dr. Estela Mara Bensimon presented to the Nevada System of Higher Education's (NSHE) Board of Regents' Committee on Cultural Diversity on March 11. She explained how pipeline data can be used to set system level goals and what the policy implications are if such goals are adopted.
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Regent Cedric Crear and Dr. Estela Mara Bensimon
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The presentation comes as part of CUE's two-year partnership with the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE). With funding from the Ford Foundation, CUE is assisting WICHE member states in achieving their college completion goals. The partnership supports NSHE's college completion agenda by examining equity in student success at critical junctures on the path to a degree, including credit accumulation milestones.
CUE's data approach provides NSHE's leaders with a strategy to determine precisely where to intervene in the freshman-to-graduation trajectory in order to meet annual college completion targets and other institutional and system priorities.
At a presentation a couple of weeks ago, CUE Project Specialist Dr. Sandra Luca highlighted findings on community college and university student success rates at a special meeting of NSHE's Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Council.
Last month, also as part of the groundwork for this project, Dr. Bensimon, CUE Executive Director Linda Wong and Dr. Luca hosted a delegation from the NSHE. Cedric Crear, a Nevada Regent and chair of the Cultural Diversity Committee, attended the meeting, along with Dr. Magdalena Martinez, the Assistant Vice Chancellor for Academic and Student Affairs from the Nevada System of Higher Education, and Dr. Edith Fernandez, the director of College Access Programs.
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Dowd Moderates Congressional Briefing on Expanding STEM Access
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Dr. Alicia C. Dowd
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The event was held by the House Diversity and Innovation (D&I) Caucus under the leadership of two of the Caucus' founding members and current co-chairs, Rep. Michael Honda (D, CA 10th district) and Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D, TX 15th district).
Accompanied by Rossier Ph.D. students Araceli Espinoza, Tiffany Jones and Raquel Rall, Dr. Dowd also met with key figures to further discuss the participation of underrepresented minority groups in STEM fields. Among them were Juan Sepulveda, director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans, and Joseph Mais, aide of Congressman Raul Grijalva who is also Vice Chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Education Task Force.
Among other priorities, the NAS report emphasizes the need for institutional leadership to develop a commitment to inclusiveness in STEM. It calls on campuses to conduct "deliberate self-appraisals" focused on campus climate and to "audit" their legacies of exclusion. It recommends that colleges and universities track student progress through the curriculum and take action to improve the "choke points" where students are lost from STEM.
Dr. Dowd, an associate professor in the Rossier School of Education and the principal investigator of a study funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to characterize Latina and Latino student pathways to STEM degrees, noted that CUE has created tools to conduct the self-appraisals and data analyses called for in the report. A primary focus of CUE's NSF-funded study has been on understanding the values, behaviors, and commitments of STEM faculty and administrators who act as "institutional agents" for cultural and structural changes in STEM fields.
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Race-Conscious Policy Scholars Issue Calls to Action on Behalf of Young Men of Color
As educational leaders take stock of the tremendous opportunity gaps facing African American males in education, health, and welfare, they are looking for innovative ideas to begin to urgently address those gaps. It is not surprising, then, that when Christopher Edley, dean of the U.C. Berkeley School of Law, and his colleague Jorge Ruiz de Velasco of Berkeley's Warren Institute assembled scholars to contribute to an edited volume on this subject, they invited Dr. Bensimon.
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Drs. Frank Harris III and Estela Mara Bensimon |
Bensimon, whose accomplishments over the past several years include creating a research community of race-conscious scholars, in turn, involved Dr. Frank Harris III, assistant professor at San Diego State University. Harris had been one of over 100 participants in CUE's Institutes for Equity and Critical Policy Analysis, which are funded by the Ford Foundation for the purpose of creating stronger networks of scholars who are equipped to address issues of race and racial equity in policy matters.
Harris, who is also former associate director of CUE, drew on his experience facilitating CUE's Equity Scorecard™, his nationally published research on college men, and his participation in CUE's Institute on Participatory Critical Action Research to take the lead in authoring the chapter.
The resulting chapter, "The Equity Scorecard: A Process for Building Institutional Capacity to Educate Young Men of Color" by Harris, Bensimon and Rossier School of Education Ph.D. student Robin Bishop, was recently published in Edley and Ruiz de Velasco's book, "Changing Places: How Communities Will Improve the Health of Boys of Color." The chapter describes CUE's Equity Scorecard™ as a process that colleges and universities can use to assess and improve success for male students of color.
To download the chapter, click here. Please visit the Boys and Young Men of Color website to download the book. |
Student Success in Community Colleges Is Addressed at a Statewide Panel
On January 24th, Dr. Bensimon participated in a Sacramento panel composed of CEOs, faculty, researchers, and business representatives focused on the critical issue of student success in California's community colleges.
Sponsored by the Community College League of California, the symposium focused on the League's "2020 Vision for Student Success" report, which was released last November by its Commission on the Future. The report recommended that community colleges increase their certificate and associate degree completions by one million over the next decade and close the achievement gap among demographic and socioeconomic groups. It also endorsed the concept of tying a budget cut to attrition rates, which Governor Brown has proposed in his recent budget plan.
Dr. Bensimon noted this should be done through incentives, not punitive measures. She added that colleges with high concentrations of low-income, underprepared students, tend to have higher attrition rates and stressed that equity must be integrated as a measure of performance, and thus a basis for funding. She also urged that incentives be applied to promote equal outcomes among all racial and ethnic student groups.
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Upcoming Events
Benchmarking Workshop
Los Medanos and Diablo Valley Colleges
March 17, 2011
The Center for Urban Education will sponsor benchmarking workshops at Los Medanos and Diablo Valley Colleges -- both California community colleges -- to use the colleges' data to set benchmark goals for improving student success and racial-ethnic equity in persistence and completion.
STEP 2011: Institutional Culture, Institutional Change & Institutionalization. Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Talent Expansion Program (STEP) 2011 Grantees Meeting
Washington, DC
March 17-18, 2011
Dr. Dowd will be a plenary speaker at the STEP 2011 grantees meeting to discuss what it means to be an institutional change agent on behalf of underrepresented racial-ethnic groups in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields. Dowd will describe an emerging science of agency and "praxis" in STEM focused on understanding the kinds of professional development STEM educators need to become "institutional agents." Based on case study research supported by the National Science Foundation, CUE has characterized the role of "institutional agents" in STEM and is now evaluating the factors that enable STEM educators to act as agents of equity.
Computing Alliance of Hispanic-Serving Institutions (CAHSI) 2011 Annual Meeting
San Juan, Puerto Rico
March 27-29, 2011
Dr. Dowd will participate on a panel of research experts to discuss social science research on Hispanics. This event, called Unifying Efforts to Advance Hispanics, will include a series of workshops and panels to foster dialogue that could help the advancement of students' careers in computing.
2011 Latino Education Advocacy Days (LEAD) Summit
California State University, San Bernardino
March 28, 2011
Hosted by the College of Education at California State University San Bernardino, the second annual LEAD Summit will convene key stakeholders who share a commitment to educational issues that impact Latinos. Dr. Bensimon will participate in a panel discussion focusing on Latinas and Latinos in STEM fields.
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