Looking to address equity issues on campus, San Diego Mesa College sought out advice and expertise from the Center for Urban Education (CUE) at the University of Southern California.
By conducting campus visits and attending cabinet meetings, representatives from CUE gained more insight into Mesa’s culture and recommended the implementation of the Equity Scorecard Model.
“We needed to have someone hold up the mirror to us because it can be difficult to change from within if you don’t know what you need to change,” said Dr. Pamela Luster, president of Mesa.
The model—which provides tools, language and rubrics through a lens of racial equity—has four phases including laying out the groundwork, defining the problem, creating solutions through inquiry and sustaining the work over time.
Through analyzing existing policies and practices, administrators found a number of areas to improve on.
For example, Mesa’s program reviews, which are designed to assess teaching outcomes, did not include data or questions about how particular groups of students performed overtime. As a result, professors and faculty members shifted their goals to address how and what they were teaching to get better outcomes for students of color.
“We were disaggregating data in ways that we had not done before so that we can be clear about what Mesa’s expectations were in terms of supporting our students,” said Luster.
