Melanie Martinez - 2023

Authors

Melanie Martinez

Files

Publication Date

11-10-2023

Digital Publisher

Digital Commons at St. Mary's University

Disciplines

Higher Education

Keywords

Culturally Relevant Evaluation, Race & Racism, Critical Pedagogy, Hispanic Serving Institutions

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

Collection

McNair Scholars Symposium

Format

MOV

Medium

video

Description

The Hispanic-serving Institution (HSI) designation is a test of character. Colleges and universities in which 25 percent or more of the student body self-identifies as “Hispanic” can qualify as HSIs. If a sufficient percentage are low-income, and if the institution has low core expenditures, it is also eligible to receive Title V funding. Remarkably, there are no mechanisms in place to ensure that Title V money is used to narrow gaps in the school’s opportunity and reward structures. The vacuous, undefined space that characterizes Title V functions as something of a projective test that reveals each HSI’s true values and assumptions about what counts as fairness and equity. Institutions that genuinely care about Latinx students intentionally center them in their grant applications; others assume that helping all students means helping at least some who identify as Latinx. This paper discusses the on-going failure of the US Department of Education to hold HSIs accountable for spending Title V funds in ways that are beneficial to Latinx students. In so doing, it critiques the neo-liberal metrics by which HSIs are judged and recommends new methods of assessing the impact of the designation and the use of Title V funds. It concludes by arguing that lessons learned from the vast literature on culturally responsive evaluation and assessment (CREA; Hood et. al., 2015) can be used to guide strategic planning in ways that shift power into the hands of the students whose identities made the funds possible.

Publisher

Digital Commons at St. Mary's University

City

San Antonio, Texas