Confronting Equity Issues on Campus: Implementing the Equity Scorecard in Theory and Practice

How can it be that 50 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, our institutions of higher education have still not found ways of reducing the education gaps for racial and ethnic groups?

That is the question that informs and animates the Equity Scorecard model of organizational change. It shifts institutions’ focus from what students do (or fail to do) to what institutions can do―through their practices and structures, as well as the actions of their leaders and faculty―to produce equity in outcomes for racially marginalized populations. Drawing on organizational learning theory and the methods of action research, it creates a structure for practitioners to become investigators of their own institutional culture, to become aware of racial disparities, confront their own practices and learn how things are done on their own turf to ask: In what ways are my practices contributing to equity/inequity?

The Equity Scorecard model differs significantly from traditional approaches to effecting change by creating institutional teams to examine and discuss internal data about student outcomes, disaggregated by race and ethnicity. The premise of the project is that institutional data acts as a powerful trigger for group learning about inequities in educational outcomes, and that the likelihood of improving those outcomes increases if the focus is on those things within the immediate control of the participating leaders and practitioners.

Numerous institutions have successfully used The Equity Scorecard’s data tools and processes of self-reflection to uncover and document the behaviors and structures that lead to failure to retain and graduate students from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds with a history of unequal opportunity; and to create the climate for faculty and staff to take ownership of the issues and develop sustainable practices to eliminate racial disparities in academic performance.

The Scorecard can be used at a small-scale to analyze indi

Estela Mara Bensimon is a professor of higher education and co-director of the Center for Urban Education at the USC Rossier School of Education. Her current research is on issues of racial equity in higher education from the perspective of organizational learning and sociocultural practice theories. She is particularly interested in place-based, practitioner-driven inquiry as a means of organizational change in higher education. Dr. Bensimon has held the highest leadership positions in the Association for the Study of Higher Education (president, 2005–2006) and in the American Education Research Association―Division on Postsecondary Education (vice president, 1992–1994). She has served on the boards of the American Association for Higher Education and the Association of American Colleges and Universities. Dr. Bensimon was associate dean of the USC Rossier School of Education from 1996 to 2000 and was a Fulbright Scholar to Mexico in2002. She earned her doctorate in higher education from Teachers College, Columbia University.

Lindsey Malcom is an assistant professor of higher education administration in the Graduate School of Education and Human Development at the George Washington University. She received her bachelor’s degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, her master’s degree from the California Institute of Technology, and her PhD in Education from the University of Southern California. Lindsey’s scholarship focuses on broadening participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields.