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- All Subjects: Consulting
- Creators: Department of Economics
Chandler Unified School District (CUSD), a large school system in Arizona that serves 45,000 students from preschool through high school, has been unable to escape similar structural and frictional inequities within its schools. One instance of a racially charged student performance at Santan Middle School motivated CUSD to take a more immediate look at equity in the district. It is during this response that our team of New Venture Group consultants engaged with Matt Strom, Assistant Superintendent of CUSD, in analyzing the important question of “how CUSD can take steps towards closing equity gaps within the district?”
CUSD defines an equity gap as any difference in student opportunity, achievement, discipline, attendance, etc. contributable to a student’s ethnicity, gender, or socioeconomic status. Currently, certain student populations in CUSD perform vastly different academically and receive different opportunities within schools, but as was our problem statement, CUSD is aiming to reduce (and eventually close) these gaps.
Our team approached this problem in three phases: (1) diagnosis, (2) solution creation, and (3) prevention. In phase one, we created a dashboard to help principals easily and visually identify gaps by toggling parameters on the dashboard. Phase two focused on the generation of recommendations for closing gaps. To achieve this goal, a knowledge of successful gap-closing strategies will be paired with the dashboard. In our final phase, the team of consultants created a principal scorecard to ensure equity remains a priority for principals.
Jake Hernandez grew up in Houston, Texas where his frequent visits to the Museum of Fine Arts introduced him to the works of Mark Rothko and Piet Mondrian. Inspired by these artist’s use of color, Hernandez has leveraged his own understanding of color theory and mathematics to explore the complexity of this element for his honors thesis. In Colored Squares I and II, Hernandez created a process of random color generation from a set of blue, red, and yellow pigments to explore color in the absence of human bias. Since artists' personal biases and inclinations towards color affect our exploration of this element, Hernandez wanted to eliminate these obstructions to investigate color to a much greater extent. In Colored Landscapes I, II, and III, Hernandez used the primaries again in a more expressive style. Drawing inspiration from his travels across Europe and North America, Hernandez created new landscapes all his own. These studies offer a substantiated argument for the limits of art itself, showing artists have only explored a very small fraction of art's possibilities and that more exploration can be done in color and the other elements of art.