The USC Rossier School of Education’s Center for Urban Education has launched the California Benchmarking Project to help increase the number of community college students, particularly African-Americans and Latinos, who successfully complete their first transfer-level course.

Funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Ford Foundation, the project is a joint endeavor between the Center for Urban Education and the California Community College system.

Teams from the three lead colleges – Long Beach City College, Los Angeles Southwest College and Rio Hondo College – met for an all-day session recently at USC’s Davidson Conference Center to plan strategies for the project over the next 12 months.

Each of the three colleges has put together 10-person “evidence teams” of faculty, administrators and counselors who will conduct research on their campuses. The colleges will provide leadership in the development of practitioner-driven assessment.

Approximately 20 California community colleges will be project partners and serve as a peer group for identifying effective practices. In addition, eight California State University and University of California campuses will be project liaisons to reflect the four-year college responsibility for improved transfer effectiveness.

The teams will hold monthly meetings over the next year. Among their activities will be monitoring and setting goals for increasing successful course completion rates from term to term (performance benchmarking); diagnosing successful instructional, administrative and counseling strategies by investigating effective practices within colleges (diagnostic benchmarking) and among peer colleges (process benchmarking); and developing implementation and evaluation plans to analyze effectiveness by race and ethnicity on an ongoing basis.

Benchmarking was developed as a more effective way for colleges to assess and improve their performance. Previous accountability systems required colleges to report metric indicators – typically numbers referring to student persistence and educational attainment rates – to spur improvements in their performance.

Over time, however, policymakers learned that colleges often resisted the bad news captured by many of these indicators. The methods used were criticized for trying to characterize college performance with poorly matched “one size fits all” indicators.

California is now leading the way by establishing accountability systems that ask colleges to combine metric and diagnostic benchmarking with inquiry processes that foster institutional improvement and change. College practitioners, including faculty, administrators and counselors, are being called on to investigate their practices in new and highly self-reflective ways.

Estela Mara Bensimon, director of the Center for Urban Education, and USC Rossier School of Education assistant professor Alicia C. Dowd are the project’s principal investigators.