Scaling Success : learning from education intervention programs to close the racial education achievement gap

Abstract

An overview of American education reveals a concerning pattern: when outcomes are disaggregated by race, students from certain racial minority groups often have poorer outcomes than White students. This pattern, the racial education achievement gap, can be seen in different sorts of measures from the literature, including in the low representation of minority students at elite public institutions. To address this low representation, and to keep universities racially diverse, administrators and policymakers often turn to race-based affirmative action, the explicit (and contentious) consideration of an applicant's race in admissions decisions. College-centered education intervention programs are another tool administrators and policymakers use to address the gap reflected in elite college enrollment and to keep campuses diverse. This thesis asks how do and how can appropriately designed college-based education intervention programs help to both keep racial diversity and close the racial educational achievement gap in America's colleges? To this end, chapter one lays out the motivating issues - the gap, affirmative action, and education intervention programs; chapter two contains the case study of two successful programs, focusing on the programs' designs, the participants' experiences, and the conditions that foster academic excellence in minority students; chapter three, in part using causal loop diagrams from system dynamics modelling, makes the case for appreciating education as a complex system - one with interlocking political, economic, pedagogic, and sociocultural forces - and thus urges caution in drawing conclusions from chapter two; and chapter four, drawing from the two preceding chapters, proposes three policy recommendations to improve not just the presence of minority students at selective institutions, but, more importantly, their overall academic thriving.