Because of federal assistance, the Brown Education Alliance is reaching out across the country seeking to bring "equity and diversity" to struggling schools.
The alliance recently received a federal grant allowing it to work with school districts and state departments of education "to create ways in which states can better support the work of school boards," said Adeline Becker, executive director of the Brown Education Alliance, a non-profit organization that provides technical assistance and consulting on inequity issues in school districts along the East Coast. It is not clear how large the grant is.
"Brown does have a commitment to community outreach," Becker said. "We do have a commitment, particularly after the slavery study, to be looking at issues relative to minorities, and that's intrinsic to our work."
The alliance has both a research and a development component, meaning that it works with both areas to analyze the current conditions of schools and to make suggestions for improvement based on the states' education budgets, she said.
Given that districts with many minority students are often in the worst condition, Becker said the Education Alliance looks at the low performance of particular populations or demographics, performs curriculum audits and examines teacher quality.
The alliance, which is staffed entirely by Brown students and faculty, has projects across the Eastern Seaboard and is expanding across the country. There are projects currently underway in Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine, New York, Louisiana and Washington state, Becker said.
Because of its historical focus on equity and diversity, the Education Alliance has a particular focus on support for students learning English. Recently the alliance received a different federal grant to send 40 local teachers to Brown to earn master's degrees in English as a second language education and cross-cultural studies.
Though a number of districts have contacted the Education Alliance about its work with those learning English, "We're broader than that," Becker said. The Collaborative Alliance Network, or CAN, for example, is a network of representatives from institutions of higher education and K-12 administrators who, along with the Education Alliance, work to improve the recruitment of students of color into teaching.
"There's a well-known and - in many places - expanding divide between the demographics of the teaching population and the attending populations," said Scott Fletcher, chair of the University of New Hampshire's education department and member of CAN.
Fletcher said that especially in urban areas, there is a "divide in the cultural experience" of students and teachers.
Though there are other programs like the Education Alliance at universities across the nation, none has exactly the same goals or practices as Brown's department, which is a good thing, Becker said.
"There are a large number of students from diverse backgrounds. Having a variety of institutions is important to the nation - we're not all the same."
