Researchers at two new centers at Morgan State University will conduct research, engage with the community, and implement real solutions to address educational disparities and crime in urban areas.
Without a strong foundation, you can’t construct a strong building. And without a good education, a child cannot flourish. “A quality education gives you access to a choice-filled life, and if you have a choice, the last thing I think people want to choose is violence, the juvenile justice system, crime,” says Meria Carstarphen, director of the National Center for the Elimination of Educational Disparities (NCEED) at Morgan State University. “It’s all about giving hope to people who have never been able to break out of this without some lift.”
Crime is not uncommon in urban environments due to a lack of resources and difficult circumstances, and it’s no coincidence that educational institutions in these areas are historically underfunded and undervalued. “This is where you see cycles of poverty, cycles of illiteracy, cycles of violence, and lack of engagement,” says Carstarphen, who has been a teacher, administrator, and superintendent. “These are all things that happen when you have disparities that have followed certain student demographics for lifetimes.”
Morgan, a historically Black research university in Baltimore, is looking to change that by reframing the conversation and transforming the culture around how society approaches education and crime. Two new centers, NCEED and the Center for Urban Violence and Crime Reduction, will not only conduct research, but also engage their communities and implement solutions to make real change happen.
As an HBCU in the heart of a major city, Morgan is uniquely poised to ask the tough questions and make a difference. “We’re right in the middle of an urban environment and surrounded by public schools, so we have firsthand witness of what needs to take place, and we have the resources and the passion,” says Alexa Morris, senior manager of programs in the Office of Technology Transfer and community resident. Not content to stay in an ivory tower, Morgan faculty have a long history of reaching outward to nearby residents to find out what they really need, and the university’s students provide more than 20,000 hours of community service each year.
An educational reconstruction
According to Carstarphen, the COVID-19 pandemic made existing disparities even more obvious. For example, children in low-income areas often didn’t have access to the technology required to make tele-education work. “The pandemic gave us a chance to start thinking about how we could do schooling differently—how we could utilize the rate of change in technology, how we could think about leadership and diversity, and these are things we want to explore with NCEED,” she says. Although many leaders started thinking more about these issues, it was largely a missed opportunity because very little real change occurred, she adds.
With $3.7 million in annual funding from the state of Maryland, beginning in July of last year, NCEED is now strategically building a faculty and staff who will take steps to eliminate educational disparities. The center plans to hire 10 more faculty, and they currently have one graduate student and one postdoctoral fellow.
Elementary and middle school students visiting Morgan State University for Young Scholars Day. This program, hosted by NCEED, is designed to expose children to college life, encourage their academic studies, and build relationships with neighborhood schools within the community. PHOTO: PROVIDED BY MORGAN STATE UNIVERSITY
“We—and I’m a person of color—have been part of an educational system that was never designed for us,” says Carstarphen. “We have been trying to fit into a design and a system that has systematically rejected the idea of doing a high-quality job for Black, Brown, poor, and special-needs children as a norm.” Inspired by Frederick Douglass, abolitionist and advocate for racial equality, Carstarphen says the country needs a full rethink of how we teach children—an educational reconstruction centered around the systemic issues underlying these disparities.
For NCEED, research and implementation go hand-in-hand. Faculty are working to both unravel the root causes of educational disparities and take meaningful action. The center’s strategy is based on six central pillars that together form a holistic perspective. “It’s the smarts, but also the heart of what it means to develop a young person and to give them every chance in life,” says Carstarphen.
The program called Family, Student, and Teacher Academic Resilience (fSTAR) constitutes one pillar, and it has already started engaging with the community and developing policy. With fSTAR, local elementary and middle school students visit the Morgan campus. “We’re giving the kids exposure, bringing them onto the university grounds and letting them know what you need to do to be prepared for college,” says Carstarphen. The program also involves students’ families. Carstarphen says this program will be key to future conversations around obtaining resources and scholarships to enable all children who show interest to attend college in the state.
Other pillars include teacher training and support, and curriculum and pedagogy. A faculty member is already implementing strategies centered on the literacy pillar. Another one is cultural proficiency, or diversity, equity and inclusion. The final pillar addresses the social, emotional, and psychological well-being of urban children.
The team is still taking shape, but even at this early stage, they are submitting proposals for funding on various topics. For example, one proposal is focused on artificial intelligence and the next generation of educational technology, and what that means for children of color whose schools may not be properly equipped to support such advances in technology.
Assessing educational success
An important part of building a new educational program, especially one that aims to reconstruct the system, is measuring success. Because NCEED researchers are reframing the conversation and planning to make meaningful change to the way educators, students, and communities think about education, the old metrics of test scores and dropout rates will not tell the whole story.
Carstarphen says that they will look at test scores, but administrators currently put too much emphasis on that metric, which doesn’t report on many other valid aspects of a child’s development and preparedness. “Changing the culture and perspective of the entire educational system is about opening our minds to the experience for minority kids or kids who haven’t had a great experience in school, to go beyond meeting a target for academics and looking more broadly at what they need to be successful,” she says.
Building on that new mindset, educators may need to look beyond scores, grades, and graduation rates to consider whether students are ready for college or the myriad other options out there. Schools should be helping children become citizens of the world who can be successful in a rapidly evolving economy and make informed decisions that affect them and others, she says.
The time is right for a larger national discussion focused on a new platform for higher education, according to Carstarphen. “We at NCEED and Morgan State could be a great voice in that conversation from a unique perspective because so many children who are minorities are in these systems and sit in these classrooms.”
Demolishing crime and violence
As a multidisciplinary center, NCEED is planning to collaborate with other Morgan schools and centers, including the Center for Equitable Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Systems and the Center for Urban Violence and Crime Reduction, another new center.
With an annual allotment of $2 million in funding from the state, the Center for Urban Violence and Crime Reduction within the School of Social Work is planning to hire 10 new faculty members. “There’s no better time for this center,” says Von Nebbitt, the Center’s director and associate dean of research for Morgan’s School of Social Work. As stated in the center’s mission, the team will use a research approach that includes community voices to better understand, document, and reduce crime in understudied and underserved populations.
IMAGE: © ALEX DARTS/SHUTTERSTOCK.COM
At the heart of the center’s research are efforts to engage the community, guided by the principles of community-based participatory research, known as CBPR. All voices, such as those of religious leaders, law enforcement, educators, government officials, and residents, will be included. These representatives will form a community advisory board and an expert panel group that will guide implementation decisions. As a result, leaders hope to redefine how the causes of crime and violence are assessed and explained, and they will craft preventive interventions through research. “With the advances in technology the last two decades have given us, and the massive amounts of big data social media has created, for the first time in history, social and behavioral scientists are able to use data to calculate models that identify factors associated with the likelihood of an adverse event. With this information at hand, we can develop programs that avert violence as opposed to respond to violence,” says Nebbitt.
Leaders of the center are already reaching out and listening to the community. For example, they met with Catherine Pugh, the former mayor of Baltimore and community organizations to discuss potential collaborations, at what will be an annual event. They have partnered with Youth Opportunity Baltimore to collect data on food- and housing-insecure residents between 18 and 24 years old, and they have also connected with a community organization called KEYS Empowers to explore ways to work together. A goal of a partnership with the University of Maryland College Park Center of Violence Prevention is to develop a public health and safety scorecard to assess progress on various public safety measures.
In the end, Morgan aims to break the cycle of urban crime and violence by addressing the underlying issues, which include a lack of quality educational resources. Through NCEED, the Center for Urban Violence and Crime Reduction, and other centers, Morgan aims to address real needs in urban communities. Nebbitt says, “We are a network in the community, and that builds trust.”
