CHICAGO — Sarita Brown said she believes community colleges can play a critical role in assuring Latino students’ academic success. For one, Latinos are more likely to enroll in a community college than other higher education institution. It’s time, she said, for those institutions to ask what they are doing for Latino students.
The pace needs to pick up.
To illustrate how behind the curve institutions of all types have been, she addressed how media across the country only woke up to the growing Latino population after the release of the 2000 U.S. Census. “This was not a newsflash,” she said, half-jokingly. But for newspapers, it was a “great aha moment.” And that reaction became almost a clarion bell for many such as Brown whose work involves elevating academic achievement opportunities for low-income and minority students.
“If you are comfortable discovering something that is obvious, then you’re likely going to be slow to respond” to covering issues such as the achievement gap, said Brown, president of Excelencia in Education, during a spotlight session at the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) Convention earlier this week.
“At this point, all we can say is there are a lot of us,” she added, referring to the demographic shift marked by Latino population growth that seemed to catch the U.S. media by surprise, and to this day calls for an ever-greater emphasis on and investment in Latino education.
Brown was at the AACC Convention to introduce Excelencia’s new Ladder of Engagement for Latino Student Success. The Ladder has four rungs (from the bottom to the top): awareness and information seeker, practices, intentional and institutional and public accountability. Brown wants community college leaders to partner with Excelencia and access those rungs.
The top of the ladder is the destination, said Brown, who is president of the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that uses evidence-based practices to accelerate Latino student success in higher education. Excelencia’s operating principle, Brown said, is to “use data to inform action.”
