California Community Colleges

Benchmarking for Equity

To increase the number of students progressing from basic skills to college-level courses, the Center for Urban Education is partnering with leaders of the California Community Colleges’ Basic Skills Initiative (BSI) to enhance the capacity of educators to conduct performance benchmarking. CUE researchers are applying their expertise in data analysis to assist educators in using institutional data, disaggregated by race and ethnicity, to create performance benchmarks as part of a strategic planning process to improve equitable student outcomes.

CUE researchers have already participated in BSI regional meetings and made presentations at workshops which looked more deeply at student success and showed how data and inquiry could be used to improve campus practices.

Learning to use data for action planning and identifying where interventions can be made in the remedial pipeline are key to getting students out of developmental education and into credit-bearing courses. Educators have responded positively to the workshops and are asking for more time and opportunity to integrate data analysis with systematic inquiry to enhance student success.

CUE’s Benchmarking Equity and Student Success Tool™ (BESST) can be used to set short- and long- term equity goals in relationship to college action plans.

 

 

 

2011 Spring Workshops
CUE held 13 regional benchmarking workshops across California to help participating community colleges incorporate data and set benchmarks to address their efforts in closing the achievement gap among students of color.

Featured Presentation

Read Dr. Alicia C. Dowd’s presentation at a BSI workshop in Escondido, CA.