Tapping into its two decades of experience in helping community colleges close achievement gaps and accelerate student success, Achieving the Dream (ATD) has released an 87-page toolkit to guide colleges through their policies and practices to improve student equity and outcomes.
“Our colleges will only be as successful as the success of our most marginalized students,” ATD President and CEO Dr. Karen A. Stout said in a release. “Centering students and their lived experiences in the design of our policies and practices will support more students to success and begin to address the inequitable design of our colleges and our inequitable outcomes. This is important work, consistent with our history and mission, for community colleges, who are local engines of prosperity for students, their families and the communities they serve.”
In her forward to the report, Stout wrote that despite the challenges facing reforms to improve equity — from the recent Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, to multiple attempts across the country to curb diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in higher education — it is critical to keep advancing the movement.
“We cannot risk losing decades of momentum in accelerating equitable student success outcomes and abandoning families and the communities we serve,” she said.
Eight principles
The toolkit directs college leaders to “reflect and act” on ATD’s eight equity principles designed to foster comprehensive change at institutions through operationalizing equitable policies and practices. It acknowledges that colleges are at different points in their efforts to improve equity and student success, hence the toolkit provides various entry points to help colleges.
The eight ATD equity principles are:
- Develop an equity mindset.
- Interrogate institutional practices, structures and policies, and replace inequitable ones.
- Integrate holistic supports through the student experience.
- Embrace cultural competence and culturally responsive pedagogy.
- Leverage existing and new data to support a culture of inquiry and evidence.
- Drive positive change through perseverance and power sharing.
- Engage with local community to develop partnerships that lead to economic vitality.
- Acknowledge the pervasiveness of racism and discrimination in the U.S.
The toolkit includes sections for self-assessment in various areas. For example, in the section on equity practices for cultivating an equity mindset, the toolkit includes a dozen statements to help leaders “evaluate their own experiences, mindsets, and biases, and identify areas for growth.” For instance, the first statement reads, “As a leader, I invest in my own equity learning and demonstrate vulnerability in sharing my learning and practices with colleagues.” Participants can check “not yet,” “needs to develop,” “needs to strengthen” and “implemented.”
Proven practices
An appendix in the toolkit provides brief examples of various community colleges’ efforts on the eight principles. For example, Austin Community College (Texas) is noted for its work to instill equity-minded design in its teaching and curriculum development. To do that, new faculty receive orientations and onboarding sessions throughout the year on equity. Chattanooga State Community College (Tennessee) is cited for efforts to include diverse perspectives at the president’s cabinet meetings. Coahoma Community College (Mississippi) analyzed student data that showed equity gaps in certain gateway and non-gateway courses. It led to the college hiring an academic success coach, offering extra instruction during evenings, implementing mandatory tutoring and adding mental health counseling. The efforts yielded a 25% drop in the number of students with GPAs under 2.0 and an average GPA bump of 0.65 for about 75% of students.
The appendix also includes examples from Compton College in California, Kingsborough Community College in New York, Lee College in Texas, Michigan’s Mott Community College and Pierce College District in Washington.
