Saddleback College

Saddleback College is a California public community college serving nearly 30,000 students, and gets its name from the slump (or saddleback) between Santiago Peak and Modjeska Peak, which serve as a scenic backdrop to the college. Established in 1968, this South Orange County institution transformed from a small rural college to a large urban college known for its academic quality and premier cultural and recreational activities. During my visit, I was able to tour the sprawling campus and the construction underway to help rethink how the college engages with new and returning students. What was most interesting was the collaboration between faculty and college leadership in their focus on using data to close institutional opportunity gaps.

For years, the college engaged in sincere college-wide talk about addressing opportunity gaps based on race and ethnicity but saw little or no movement in closing those gaps. Stakeholders participated in conversations using institutional data, and over a year ago, the college had the realization that true systemic change might be more possible with a course-level approach.

Saddleback College Establishes Process for Providing Instructors Individualized Disaggregated Course Completion Data

With an emphasis on collaborating with college constituent groups, Saddleback’s Office of Research, Planning and Accreditation (OPRA) worked with faculty leaders to develop an instructor-level equity report that presents data in a straightforward, useful way and links it with access to resources and tools to address equity gaps in course completion. Administrators agreed with faculty that the data would not be used in the faculty evaluation process. In fact, to avoid “shaming,” only instructors have access to their course data.

Providing these equity reports to instructors followed the college’s success in addressing opportunity gaps based on income. During the pandemic, the focus was on basic needs and other barriers to student success that were out of the control of faculty, the employee group on which Saddleback’s strong reputation is based. Specifically, the college was doing a good job addressing hunger and houselessness and ramped up its services to meet the demand for health and mental health care. This work enabled the college to narrow opportunity gaps based on low income.

However, despite these efforts to remove non-academic barriers for students, race and ethnicity-based gaps persisted, suggesting that these gaps did not result solely from financial and/or basic needs differences. While numerous efforts to focus on equity gaps related to race and ethnicity in the classroom were implemented, including professional development workshops, a toolkit of effective equity practices, and college-wide book reads, these initiatives failed to result in the swift and necessary changes the college had envisioned.

Meanwhile, as Saddleback College’s president, Dr. Elliot Stern, interviewed candidates for new faculty positions, a finalist already teaching at the California State University shared that faculty at most CSUs receive reports of their course completion, with disaggregated data, for each semester at the start of the following semester. When Dr. Stern first shared this practice with faculty leaders, some voiced fear of “shaming” instructors. Others expressed the futility of asking them to reflect on their classroom practices without providing enough training on how to use the data nor encouraging the use of available tools to positively impact those race and ethnicity-based opportunity gaps.

While Saddleback has some of the most robust data dashboards of any community college in the state, with a whole equity dashboard devoted to disaggregated student success data, usage data for those dashboards led college leadership to conclude that the availability of “passive” data and robust references to it may not be sufficient when it comes to addressing issues which cause discomfort. Race and ethnicity-based equity gaps in course success were such issues.

Accordingly, President Stern asked the OPRA lead, Shouka Torabi, to work with faculty leaders to develop an instructor-level equity report that would be emailed to each and every instructor following the end of the previous term. Understanding the importance and value of collaborating with faculty, OPRA’s approach was to ensure inclusivity in all parts of the process. This approach included working with faculty leaders already actively engaged in assessment and planning, no strangers to what the data on equity revealed.

Through this collaborative process, the goal was to ensure that all voices were heard and that concerns were addressed. As such, OPRA and faculty leaders were able to address the false perception that students don’t succeed in classes simply due to non-academic barriers.

Concerns were discussed in several committee meetings, primarily comprised of faculty. Two pieces that were critical in increasing collaboration and buy-in of the instructor-level equity report included:

Conveying that the college was using a two-pronged approach in addressing achievement gaps of disproportionately impacted students that included both non-academic barriers and academic barriers (such as the Student Needs Survey that the college sends to all for-credit students at the beginning of each semester); and
Providing valuable resources taken from local, state, and national best practices within the classroom to respond to opportunity gaps in instructor-level course success data. The college did not want to provide evidence of a problem without suggesting possible solutions. It also found that providing these resources through faculty leaders allowed for better discussion and understanding of the need for more action.

Faculty leaders worked with OPRA to develop the one-sheet instructor-level equity report, which included resources and the data report, as well as trainings for all faculty on how to use the data and resources on the one-sheet. The trainings were offered both before and after the initial roll-out.

The equity data one-sheets were rolled out in early spring 2023 and have been warmly received. Many faculty were grateful to be receiving this data. The instructor-level data release, in turn, has spawned interest in program-level and school-level opportunity gaps. To support this interest and work, OPRA will be working with chairs and deans to provide data for their discussions, with individual instructor information redacted so that conversations can happen without shaming. There is renewed interest in professional development for equitable classroom practices, and the deflections to discussion of income and basic needs have stopped (as the college continues to work to eliminate those gaps as well).

The biggest lesson, according to Stern:

“Our approach to the use of data, like our approach to equity work more broadly, must be active, not passive. The folks on the ground who will close equity gaps were not looking at the dashboards. When we got the data to them in a way they needed to see it, the whole discussion changed.”