Closing the Achievement Gap in Higher Education: An Organizational Learning Perspective

In this chapter I address one of the most urgent and intractable problems in higher education—inequality in educational outcomes for historically underserved groups—from the perspective of organizational learning theory. Historically, in the higher education research community, the study of minority students has been primarily through the lens of student development theories. (In this chapter, I use the terms minority and underrepresented interchangeably to refer to racial and ethnic groups that are experiencing the greatest achievement gaps as measured by traditional educational indicators such as attainment of the bachelor’s degree: Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, African Americans, Native Americans, Native Hawaiians, and others.) I propose that the theory and processes of organizational learning can help researchers and practitioners understand and address the structural and cultural obstacles that prevent colleges and universities from producing equitable educational outcomes. Organization learning, in both theory and practice, is particularly effective in making the invisible visible and the undiscussable discussable, two conditions that aptly describe the status of raceand ethnic-based unequal outcomes on most campuses. Among the many factors that contribute to the invisibility of unequal college outcomes for underrepresented minorities, an obvious one is that