Authors: Kim Glassman, Matthew Closter, Robert Roach, Natalie Rose, Victoria Worthen Lang
Today there is a powerful call for American educational institutions to address systemic inequities. Students of color and adult, first-generation, and low-income students who aspire to obtain meaningful postsecondary degrees, career success, and economic mobility face many challenges. Local systems and institutions are not adequately designed to address or swiftly remove long-standing structural barriers for students stumbling along the unjust pathways set up in our education and career sectors.
In the three-part series Transforming Mindsets, Powering Change, we share an emerging picture of how postsecondary institutions and their partners are unearthing complex and entrenched barriers embedded in their systems and shifting culture, practices, and policies. Their stories illustrate how a focused approach to equity—one that attends to implicit and explicit factors—is establishing new mindsets, norms, and policies that today’s students need right now. Over the past 18 months, these efforts have been set ablaze by the pandemic lockdown in spring 2020 that forced student classes and services online—and potentially opened a way to more rapid innovation and reform.
In the series, we capture key learnings from our multi-year partnership with Lumina Foundation and its Talent Hub designation. Equal Measure served as Lumina Foundation’s evaluation and learning partner for the Talent Hubs from 2017 to 2021. These reports are the culmination of 70 interviews with Talent Hub partners and a survey documenting 240 policy and practice changes underway at 22 Talent Hubs.
In Advancing Equity through Postsecondary Education Policy and Practice we present an emerging picture of how postsecondary institutions and their partners are unearthing complex and entrenched barriers embedded in their systems and shifting culture, practices, and policies in response.
Getting to the Root outlines four common approaches to exploring the historic and root causes of inequity and spotlights three Talent Hubs who used findings from their own explorations to drive community- and institutional-level change.
Finally, Recognizing Catalysts for Change in Postsecondary Education profiles three individuals who play an outsized role in promoting equitable change within and across educational institutions and their community partners and identifies common approaches to this work.
Explore all three reports in this series:
Advancing Equity through Postsecondary Education Policy and Practice
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Getting to the Root
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Recognizing Catalysts for Change
in Postsecondary Education
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