CUE Co-Director, Estela Mara Bensimon
- CUE Co-Director, Estela Mara Bensimon
Equity is more than a buzzword for Estela Mara Bensimon. A professor at the USC Rossier School of Education and founding director of the school’s Center for Urban Education (CUE), Bensimon has dedicated much of her career to understanding and addressing racial and ethnic inequalities in higher education.
Bensimon was the driving force behind CUE, which she launched in 1999 with funding from a sizeable grant from USC’s Urban Initiative—based on her observation that the victories in terms of access to higher education that had been achieved in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement - although historic and significant - still needed to be translated into equitable educational outcomes for African-American and Latino students.
Bensimon called upon educators and policymakers to “move beyond talking about diversity in terms of who goes to college so we can have the harder, more substantive and urgent conversation about who finishes.”
During its first 10 years, CUE has fostered research that has helped institutions of higher education across the country become more accountable to students from underserved racial and ethnic communities. Building on its inaugural model (the “Diversity Scorecard”), the center has pioneered a multi-disciplined approach, called the CUE Equity Model, which provides accountability, inquiry and benchmarking tools for assessing progress toward closing the racial achievement gap in college completion. This award-winning model has been used by over 40 2 and 4-year institutions nationwide, including as a systemic intervention for the State of Wisconsin. CUE’s cutting edge work in the areas of equity research, advocacy and institutional transformation was selected by the Lumina Foundation as the framework for its multi-million dollar Achieving the Dream effort, which has been used at over 80 community colleges nationwide.
As Bensimon looks forward to the next ten years at CUE she is seeking to take her research and all that has been learned in the first decade to a new scale. She is currently writing a theoretical textbook and a hands-on manual for practitioners that will exponentially increase CUE’s capacity to share what they have learned with institutions eager to create equity in outcomes not just diversity in access. Dr. Bensimon is also seeking to create capacity through the development of a leadership academy funded by the Carnegie Foundation to train equity advocates and by expanding the field of equity-minded scholars through her leading role in the creation of the ASHE (Association for the Study of Higher Education) Institutes on Equity and Critical Policy Analysis. Funded by the Ford Foundation and launched in summer 2009, the Institutes are a collaboration among seven institutions across the United States. The goal is to cultivate research examining racial and ethnic inequality in higher education as well as to create a network of graduate students, faculty, and policy analysts who can address these issues as a community.
“If we are to transform postsecondary institutions to focus not only on diversifying who they admit, but more importantly those who succeed, then we must create the capacity and commitment—as a field, with educational leaders and practitioners on the front lines—to be equity-minded. I have dedicated the first ten years of CUE to this end and I look forward to taking this goal to scale in the next decade.”