Leadership Academy to Deliver on Obama's Equity Promise
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Leadership Academy to Deliver on Obama's Equity Promise
USC's Center for Urban Education to train educators to reduce racial gaps, increase achievement
July 31, 2009 (Los Angeles, CA) - In April 2009, President Obama challenged the country, "just as we've opened the doors of college to every American, we also have to ensure that more students can walk through them. That's why I've challenged every American to commit to at least one year of higher education or advanced training, because, by the end of the next decade, I want to see America have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world."
CUE is poised to aid in the effort to increase the effectiveness of postsecondary institutions. “We have spent the last decade doing intensive research and development into institutional effectiveness, organizational learning and outcome equity” says Dowd, CUE’s co-director. Our leadership academy will be a means by which we can take our learning to scale--dramatically increasing our ability to impact outcomes.” She adds.
“Achieving Obama’s ambitious goal requires asking important questions about college outcomes--not just in total numbers, but also by groups to understand why some are succeeding and why others are not. We have made great strides in access says CUE co-director, Estela Mara Bensimon, but equity in outcomes has yet to be realized.”
Bensimon is enthusiastic about Obama’s most recent effort to reform higher education--a 12 billion dollar community college initiative--the largest single infusion of federal dollars to2-year institutions in our nation’s history. “Community colleges are the entry point for the majority of historically underserved students, but unfortunately the vast majority of these students never graduate. According to Bensimon, disproportionally high levels of attrition for students of color isn’t just a missed opportunity, it’s a moral and economic imperative.”
If Obama’s new initiative is any indication, he appears to agree. Obama’s Community College Initiative which specifically targets “groups underrepresented in higher education,” in order to “increase postsecondary degree, certificate and industry-recognized credential completion rates.” According to CUE co-director Alicia Dowd, the color conscious language of this bill is an important step in the right direction. It’s not just that we need more college graduates--we need to dramatically increase success rates for students who represent the majority, not the minority. Making an impact in underserved student populations will make a dramatic difference in terms of social and economic justice.” It’s important to understand that setting benchmarks to improve staggeringly low rates of success for students of color is a vital step, but setting goals is not the same as achieving them. Changing minds, practices and the policies that support the status quo isn’t easy adds Dowd. It’s why we are creating CUE’s Leadership Academy.
Over the next several years, the Center for Urban Education (CUE) will significantly enhance its ability to bring equity minded innovation to higher education by dramatically increasing the number of equity minded practitioners in the field through the development of a leadership academy and manual based upon CUE’s Equity Impact Model.
The Academy and stand-alone manual will delineate the procedural and conceptual “know-how” of the CUE Equity Model, including interactive training and materials to develop new capacity to create equity-minded practitioners, leaders and policy analysts, increasing institutional capacity and commitment to outcome equity. “Nothing of its kind exists” says Bensimon says, “and it’s urgently needed.”
Dowd add, “Our systems of education are awash in data and demands for accountability have never been higher, but practitioners on the ground--in the classroom, in leadership and policy making roles need to learn to think and act in color conscious, equity-minded ways. And that means asking hard questions about the data and turning numbers into new ways of seeing and serving students of color.”
The creation of the CUE Leadership Academy adds a significant new level of commitment and outreach potential to CUE’s repertoire of practical training materials which will enable CUE to more effectively and efficiently translate the theory, practices and research findings of the Equity Model to larger audiences. This “scale-able” project, vastly increases CUE’s capacity to bring equity-mindedness within postsecondary institutions seeking to identify the reasons and implications of the achievement gap in postsecondary education. The Academy and text will foster race-consciousness as an affirmative step towards the creation of a community of equity-minded practitioner-scholars committed to closing racial gaps. This project is an example of how CUE is expanding the field through the training and encouragement of equity-minded practitioners, scholars and policy analysts.
Established at the University of Southern California in 1999 as part of the University's urban initiative, 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. CUE's research team pioneered a multi-disciplined inquiry approach that is helping higher education institutions across the country become more accountable to students from underserved racial and ethnic communities. CUE publishes reports and papers on a range of topics related to equity and accountability, the transformation of institutional data into useable knowledge, and the role of faculty and administrators in organizational change. CUE is dedicated to conducting research that makes a difference.
The CUE Leadership Academy is made possible by generous funding from the Carnegie Corporation. For questions about the project, please email co-principal investigators Estela Mara Bensimon (bensimon@usc.edu), Alicia C. Dowd (adowd@usc.edu) or project coordinator, Laura Lord (llord@usc.edu).
Center for Urban Education (CUE)
Rossier School of Education
University of Southern California
3470 Trousdale Parkway, WPH 702
Los Angeles, California 90089
Office: 213-740-0196
Fax: 213-740-3889
email contact: llord@usc.edu
http://cue.usc.edu