CSN Subject Matter: Achieving the Dream Air date: January 5, 2020 Welcome to this week's edition of CSN Subject Matter, the College of Southern Nevada’s weekly radio program in conjunction with KNPR. I'm your host, Meghin Delaney from Communications Office. CSN is Nevada's largest and most diverse higher education institution, so naturally we've got plenty of great stories to share. Today, we're talking about closing the achievement gap at CSN. We'll discuss what progress we've made, where we are now, and how we chart a course for the future. That's a lot of big stuff to talk about so I have with me CSN President Dr. Federico Zaragoza; James McCoy, CSN’s associate vice president of academic affairs; and Dr. Martha Ellis, the director of higher education strategy, policy, and services and a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. In addition, she’s a coach with Achieving the Dream, a national partner that's been helping CSN with this very important work. As always you can learn more about CSN by visiting csn.edu. We look forward to helping you succeed and now, we're onto today show. Meghin: Hi there, Dr. Ellis, thanks for being with us today. I think this is your first stop in town so far. so I'm glad to have you here with us. Would you mind introducing yourself to our audience, and talking a little bit about your work with Achieving the Dream? Martha Ellis: Sure, thanks so much Meghin, it's great to be with you and it's great to be in Las Vegas and at CSN. As you said, I'm the director of higher education strategy, policy, and services for the University of Texas at Austin. In that role, I’m leading the higher education team, so we're working with colleges and universities across the United States in redesigning mathematics. As most of us know math is the primary course that's a real challenge for many students in completing their degree, so we really are looking at restructuring math, both in the sequence of courses and also looking at the way that we teach it. Prior to that, I was associate Vice Chancellor at the University of Texas system office and prior to that a community college president. As far as working with Achieving the Dream, I've been working with them for about 14 years now, four of those years were as a president of a college that was an Achieving the Dream college, much like you see at CSN. The other part has been a leadership coach, and for the past 10 years I've been working with colleges across the country. I’ve worked with about 20 of them now and usually work with the colleges for about five years, again helping them to succeed in the goals that they set for their students. Meghin: Wow, thank you for that introduction, it’s really an honor for us to have someone of your caliber here with us to do this work, so I'm excited. I wanted to have you dig a little bit more into how Achieving the Dream work, what you do when you partner with those colleges to close the achievement gaps, and it might also be helpful to get folks who might be unfamiliar with a basic definition of what we mean when we talk about the achievement gap? Martha Ellis: Sure, Achieving the Dream, let me tell you a little bit about that first to give a little context. There’s about 277 colleges across the country that are really committed to this work, they’re really looking at changing their institutions so that they meet the needs of the students, so we were talking about in the achievement gap, it’s how do we make sure that all students have the opportunity to succeed at the same level. They bring in assets and they bring in challenges and we want to make sure we build on their assets and also help them to compensate for some of the challenges that they have. So what can we do to help them, so what Achieving the Dream does is bring colleges together to share knowledge, to share best practices, and then also all of this work is based on really strong data evidence so we understand the student experience from the different students perspective, and then we can make sound decisions on how best to utilize services for the students. The colleges that are part of Achieving the Dream like, CSN, I really am there to support the goals and ATD wants to provide support studies colleges. The primary goals are first to reduce barriers so that all students can be successful and then secondly to provide access to high quality education in an inclusive environment that really bring a strong workforce and a strong democracy. Meghin: Great, and I do want to mention CSN is considered an Achieving the Dream Leader College with Distinction and I know that Dr. Z and James McCoy will share with us shortly about some of the work we've done to to achieve that title, but can you explain to us what kind of school earn that distinction, what's the criteria? Martha Ellis: Sure, first of all, let me say congratulations to CSN, there's only 11, let me repeat that, only 11, colleges in the United States have been given this Leader College of Distinction, so it's highly an honor and it really recognizes the outstanding work. And how they're deciding, it’s based on facts, it is really data around students, how many students complete courses, how many students stay at the college to complete a degree, and how does the college address those achievement gaps that we talked about earlier. Really these leading colleges do this through designing services so that each student receives what they need to be successful, and student success means not only the individual student achieving their personal goals, but they learned a lot along the way too. They have better skills, better career, but it also means educational growth and economic growth and social mobility for the student, for their families, for the community, and for the nation at large. Meghin: And so only 11 places across the whole country. Wow that's really amazing for CSN, but I know is always is never fully done and there's always a lot more that we can do, so thank you for your insight. Today, we’re chatting about CSN work on equity and closing the achievement gaps between our students. I just spoke with Dr. Martha Ellis from Achieving the Dream about the national work and now CSN’s own James McCoy is going to tell us a little bit about the good work that has been going on at CSN in the last few years. So, hi, James, would you mind introducing yourself to our audience and talking a little bit about what you do at CSN? James: Sure, Meghin, thanks. First it’s just an honor to be here and sharing the same space as Dr. Zaragoza and Dr. Ellis, both incredible thought leaders in the areas of student success in the community college, and in higher education, in general and of course closing the achievement gap, I'm honored to be able to sit next to these folks and and be counted among them. This is my 17th year and the first half of my career CSN, I got to play in the classroom, I was a communication professor and really got a good insight into some of the struggles and obstacles that our students are facing on a day-to-day basis, right, there was a fascinating experience. And about seven or eight years ago, I transitioned into the role I’m in now and it was about that time when we became, or we were trying to become, an Achieving the Dream institution. You see, this is kind of like the cool club, this is a this is an organizational structural network of community colleges, as Dr. Ellis mentioned, where you have similar mindsets to want to do better. We want to do better by our students, we want to help ensure that we're not just opening the doors to access, although that is a critical component of our work, but it is also about ensuring that we're meeting students where they are in their journey, by providing student support services and in many cases, redesign the way in which we have engaged our work. And so decades and decades ago where community college mission might be solely focused on access, high school diploma, GED or equivalent, and a pulse, we would welcome you. You are a part of our family. That hasn't changed, but what has changed is this laser focus on that plus student success and in doing that work also looking at it from the lens of equity, and from the lense of closing gaps so that every student has the opportunity to succeed no matter who their family is, no matter what their upbringing was, no matter what high school they may have gone to, or what city they may have transferred in. So that’s the box I get to play in now. I get to serve as the liaison to our achieving the dream work, I've got my ears on the ground on the national level, staying in touch with a national studies, the national best practice, and contributing and being able to help tell CSN’s story on the national stage, to be able to show and leverage the good work that's coming from our faculty and our staff on the national level, so that other institutions can benefit from the studies and the research that were engaged in here. Meghin: Well great, thank you, I think that helped set the stage for for why you're here with us today. I was hoping you could talk about some of the specific work is done in the last seven 7 or so years with Achieving the Dream, some of the strategies we've actually implemented and I think you also may have some data that you can share with us about how that work is paying off for students? James: You bet, so, I think you hit the nail on the head with the last part of your of your question that's around the data, right? So to really make structural change happen, you really need to understand the problems, or the challenges that you're trying to resolve, and oftentimes that is looked at from a quantitative data standpoint, but that's not where it needs to end, that’s where it needs to begin. So back in 2012 and we were fortunate enough to join the Achieving the Dream Network, we not only a branded ourselves as an ATD institution, but we also adopted the model. And here it is: first, we take a good critical look at various data metric, from college completion, from persistence from one semester to the next, to course completion, to how they're doing in math and English. I mean, you can slice the data metrics any which way you like. But we also disaggregated that data to discern if there were certain student populations, be it gender, or ethnicity, or right out of high school, or not right out of high school, socioeconomic status, a myriad of different slicing points to discern if there are any student groups who are outperforming or underperforming the average and that is where, as Dr. Ellis was referring to earlier, that is where those achievement gaps begin to emerge. Then we understand why, and so this is where the qualitative research study comes in. Now we start really dig in and asking our students, what are some of the barriers that you're facing, help us understand why the you or why this particular student group is not performing at the same level as some other student groups, and often times those students didn't make it, those students aren’t here, so it's tough to focus group these students, but what we discovered in our data and this is the piece that drives us and this is the piece that we recognize our work is not yet done, although we're making progress, is when we disaggregated out Student Success data on course completion, on persistence from one semester to the next leading to college completion or credential completion, what we found was our African American student population, followed by our Hispanic student population were not performing at the same levels as are Caucasian population and our Asian population. Similarly, our low socioeconomic students were not performing at the same levels of students who were not in that category. These are the achievement gaps. Meghin: I think we should pause right there for a second to say that this is not just to CSN problem, right? What you're seeing in the data, that happens at K12 schools, it happens at other schools across the country, they see these achievement gaps, so,it is something that were obviously focused here on CSN, but I just want to let folk know who listening and whether they know it, or don't know now you know, this is not just an issue that affects you CSN, but it's great that we're doing the work to close those gaps this is the way we talk about it. James: That’s right, Meghin, and that’s precisely why there are organizations like Achieving the Dream. This is the laser focus that’s happening across the country. And to your point you're right, it's a K-12 scenario, it's a graduate school scenario, it's obviously in the community college space and 4-year college space as well, so you're right. This is the laser focus, so this is the national message, this is where the work is happening and for those colleges that are doing it right, they’re not putting their head in the sand saying we're just going to look at are lagging data and determine what our graduation rate is and be settled on that, because there's much more to the story when you make these kinds of desegregation, so that's that's the premise of the work. So what we've discern then based on that data in those early days, and we replicate those studies every year, is we begin to design interventions, student Success strategies that will help us first test a strategy to see if it would help lift and close, lift all students and close these achievement gaps and do so in a scaled way, so there's a continuous improvement methodology to our work. We’ll hear some of the strategies that we've incorporated. What our students told us back in 2012 and 2015 is it don't know how to do college, students are walking in the doors, previously we were giving them an application for admission, we were inviting them to do advising if they wanted to and then we’d say, go get your classes, classes start on Monday. Well that's all fine and good, this was his notion of adulting, right, there’s this notion of responsibility and maturity, but when our students are telling us they don’t know how to do college, that tells us we need to do things differently. And so from that work we designed interventions around mandatory advising, mandatory college orientation, placement testing to discern and placement testing preparation to discern where a student is at in their college readiness and then providing new strategies to the deployment of that curriculum around math and English. There’s a lot of remediation reform happening as well. So there’s probably a dozen or two students, I know we don’t have time to talk about them today, but that gives you a good flavor. Meghin Great, well I think that's very helpful to actually talk about what some of those strategies are, you know some of that mandatory advising, that orientation, that helps people picture what we're actually doing when we talk about such big concepts here. And a few minutes ago we talked with Dr. Ellis about CSN being named a leader college with distinction and that's because of some of this work, right? James: Right, let’s talk about some of those results, obviously if you’re measuring a student at the time of entry when they first enter the door for college, you need to give them time to graduate and so as we tracked as we call that longitudinal data trend, we have now begun to experience the cohort that entered in 2013 or 14 has now had time to complete their college degrees, in some cases four year degrees and now we can track graduation rate. Then we disaggregate that graduation rate by the same desegregation variables what we talked about earlier, right, ethnicity, and socioeconomic, etc. Here’s the great news, we have seen or achievement gap close among some of our student populations. From a persistence standpoint, form a completion standpoint, from a completion of our gateway Math and English standpoint. Our Hispanic students are now performing at the same levels as our caucasian and Asian students, that’s a win. Unfortunately, it's also uncovered some some not-so-good things and some continued areas of focus for us. Our African American student population, for example, in that same study, flatlined, they did not increase at the same level as a Hispanic students did, what does that tell us we need to do? We need to go back to the drawing board, discern from an equity lens standpoint what can we do to help this particular population of students, our students, excel at the same level as the rest, so that's where our work continues. Meghin: And with that, we now turn to our College President Dr. Federico Zaragoza, who we call Dr. Z for short, so thanks for being with us Dr Z. Dr. Ellis and James shared with us some of the things that CSN has done to close the achievement gap and why that's important, why that's a laser focus hear as James said, but we know there's a lot more work that that we need to do to close all those gaps and make sure that all our students are graduating, completing, transferring, and prospering, as you always say, Dr. Z. So can you tell us what comes next for CSN, how do we keep pushing this work forward? Dr. Z: The heavy lift, I think for community colleges across the country is taking pockets of excellence, these data findings that often times reflect either pilots or subsets of the overall population and taking it to scale. Changing the student experience so that it is supported by a system where students are first and that the support systems and the instructional systems are all geared to make sure again complete graduate, transfer and prosper. So yes that is the next step moving this initiative, staying the course and expecting that we do this at scale. When you do move to scale you are going to see student success rates increase significantly. In fact, CSN, from one reporting year to another, and this is our official IPEDs data that we report to the Office of Education show that we doubled our graduation rates and our transfer ratem that's called the Aspen Indicator, we went from 20 to 40%m so implementing the Achieving the Dream initiatives does drive student success. Meghin: What do some of these strategies look like in the future to bring some of our programs to scale? I've got all three of you with me, so who wants to maybe take the first bite at that big question? James: I’ll start and we can jump in and move from there. The scalability is where the needle moves, when you show through your research that you're moving the needle with a certain subset of a cohort that's promising, but you don't really begin to reap the benefits of that for the for the scaled students, for the 36,000 students at the college until you bring these pilot programs to scale. So here's some strategies that were looking at right I mean we're we're redesigning our advising model, in fact, it’s under revision right now and halfway there, right? So when we first started this work years ago, our advising to student ratio is 1100 to 1, right, Dr. Z, and now what is our mission? 350 to 1. Isn’t that incredible? And that’s not with anymore resources, redirecting existing resources, mostly, right because that's what needs to happen. We talked about students being debilitated by choice, you give a student an application and many students, you know what little over half our students are coming right out of high school right, and here you are, you give them a college application, you ask for their name, their birthday, their veteran status perhaps and then you ask them that magic question, what do you want to be when you grow up, tell us your major, right? Well our data showed that our students were changing their major four times in the time they were. Meghin: Right, because we have how many majors here? James: Over 180 options! So you can imagine as a student is here rolling down to drop down list of what I want to be when I grow up list of majors and their self-selecting into one of them without any human reaction, no human intervention, no aptitude testing. Maybe their mom, their dad, their brother, their sister, their tio, their tia, their pastor, whoever it was, said you ought to be a nurse so they said I want to be a nurse, but they’ve never talked about the realities of what that looks like, is that a good fit for them, do they understand the chemistry and the anatomy and physiology classes that are in their path, and if they do great and if they don't we probably ought to have that conversation with them at the front door. The purpose I'm trying to get at is, we're designing strategies around this notion of purpose first, asking students to engage an aptitude and assessment testing, to discern where their strengths are, providing students with regional job outlook data, so we say hey you want to get into environmental management, that is fantastic, let’s talk about what that career field looks like at the front end of your career in academics. Let’s talk about what the job outlook looks like in our region, let’s talk about what the industry sectors are that drive many of our job placement opportunities. Let’s talk about the number of nurses that our valley's going to need as you think about what health career you're going to get into. These are now the conversations that are happening at admissions and making then therefore deliberate choices in what they are going to study as a student, and then providing them an academic map, here’s your courses, sequentially, that you need to take in this order and in this timeframe, and we're doing a lot of work around accelerating those course experiences and packaging them in a way that can be accomplished in biteable chunks and with momentum, right? And then a lot of curricular work right, particularly about math and English. Dr. Z: Yes and James I would also add, that the addition to all of the instructional and curriculum work that's happening is we’re also trying to connect create an environment, the climate where students belong, where students have that expectation of success at all levels, and so it's a very holistic approach that seems to be working and scaling that is an issue, not only changing processes, but also changing the culture and aligning our resources behind the students. We talked about removing barriers and at the end of the day it's removing barriers, both within the context of the institution but also as a community, a lot of this work cannot be done solely by institutions, we require the support of the community, our employers, James talked about aligning and how all of that needs to be put in the contexts so that it's what students understand. That’s why advising is so important. It’s really creating, in Spanish, there’s a word called ganas, it’s one that I always remind students of, and that’s desire. And connecting desire with structure and I think that we've learned that students don't do ‘optional’ very well. We need to provide structure and intentionality with a purpose and I think that that's the exciting work that's happening, we're beginning to see now elements that work nationally being instituted in policy in the state of Nevada. So this co-requisite model is a different way of student success but it's putting students right in the midst of an achievement kind of aspiration to complete courses in the gateway areas and especially in math and algebra, there's some very important work going on in that area and I think Dr. Ellis can talk to us a little bit about the corequisite model and what we see nationally and why we’re excited about coming to see CSN very quickly. Dr. Ellis: Right, so, just briefly, let me talk about mathematics, this is also true for English but math tends to be the primary barrier that most students face in their coursework, and what we're seeing is very much what you just heard from Dr. Z and from James, and that is that it's more than just mathematics, it is the entire looking at what makes students succeed in particular connecting with the workforce. Workforce has told us that not all students need college algebra, what are quantitative skills that you need for your career, how do you make math relevant to me as an individual, and so you have in the pathways that James was talking about, different math courses that students need for their future careers, to get them there as quickly as possible, you don't want them to have to go through four or five courses to get to that math course. So what we found from research is if you started with a hundred students, only four completed the math course, that's not acceptable. So what we've learned from research as we need to make this accelerated, we need to get students what they need as quickly as they need to get them see their goal and degree. So what you have is an accelerated college prep and what that does is take students, meet them where they are, as James said, but give them the support structures they need to be successful in mathematics. That doesn't necessarily mean four or five courses, that means get you in the math course you need, for example, Harvard now require statistics for medical doctors, not calculus, amazing change. So how do you get the students that are going into this work in statistics, what math do they need to be successful in statistics, get them that support system, get them going as quickly as possible so that they can be successful in what career they are, and I really commend other work that's going on here at CSN because they are again looking at being a national leader and how you really developed a co-requisite. When it's been piloted another places, it has had amazing results for students being successful so that you have literally, instead of four you have 50 students completing the math that they need. So it’s great, great research that we’re seeing. Meghin: So that reminds me, James mentioned the Environmental Management program and I was talking with those folks recently and they brought in a gentleman from industry and he was talking about how a lot of the students come out to the field and they're very science and math background, but a lot of that job and a lot of that work is writing reports that get submitted to city government, county government, local government, and those reports have to be written well. So they designed,in that program, a writing class specifically about writing those reports, it's not just your general writing course, so it helps the students see, here’s why you’re taking this writing class because this is what you're going to be doing in your career and your job field, so I think a lot of that work is probably helpful for our students too, but I know the math is sort of a different beast and that's a that's a big one so.., Dr. Ellis: Yes, so the right math, for the right student ,for the right program, for their future and I'm really impressed with some of the things going on with English as well that you just mentioned because for many students, you know, that writing is just a daunting task, but would it it relates to what they want want to do, all of a sudden it makes sense and they really, excel, yeah. Meghin: When that light bulbs comes on, it's almost like you can see it, when a student gets it and it makes sense. I am afraid that's all the time we have for today this was a really big topic so I appreciate you guys coming in and making it understandable for folks who might be listening in the audience again I just want to say thank you so much for joining us Dr. Ellis, James and Dr. Z. You've been listening to CSN Subject Matter, the College of Southern Nevada’s weekly radio program in conjunction with KNPR. I am Meghin Delaney from CSN’s Communications Office. You can learn more about CSN by visiting csn.edu. You can also find CSN on any social media site out there you, if you search you'll find us. We look forward to helping you succeed and I'll see you next time.