(Spring 2025) – We’re speaking with Mayra Nayeli Martín, SMART’s Senior Director of Programs, and Mary Thomas, SMART’s Senior Director of Training and Evaluation, who will be facilitating a workshop at the upcoming National Partnership for Educational Access (NPEA) conference. NPEA elevates and amplifies a broad coalition of voices committed to educational access for students from under-resourced communities, kindergarten through college. In 2024, SMART received the national “Excellence in Educational Access” award from NPEA and the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, affirming our commitment to ensuring all students, regardless of background, have equitable pathways to college.

SMART defines equity as the state in which success is no longer predictable by social, cultural, or economic factors. Equity is both a liberating process and an outcome, ensuring every child receives the resources they need to reach their academic and social potential.

Hi, Mary and Mayra! You’re going to NPEA’s annual conference again this year — Why do you feel it is important for SMART to be at this conference?

Mayra: This is a really unique conference. There are a lot of like-minded, equity-focused individuals and organizations that come to this event. I think this year, even more than last year, it’s important for us to become more deeply connected to this work for us to support our team in growing our impact.

Mary: Yeah, it’s rare to be in a conference space where we can authentically and intentionally talk about equity work. We want to share our learning and engage in conversation with others. We will be interacting with a lot of organizations or school staff who are doing similar work but may be thinking about things differently.

Mayra: It’s also the depth of knowledge at this conference; the ability to learn from others who have been through many iterations of this work is really special. 

You presented last year for the first time. Can you give a quick overview of what your presentation was about?

Mary: Our workshop title was “Working towards Equity Leadership: A Framework for Developing a Year-Long Professional Development Series.” Mayra and I led a yearlong professional development initiative for SMART staff from 2022 to 2023 in partnership with the National Equity Project on working towards equity for Scholars and families. So, the focus of our NPEA presentation was what prompted us to start this work, how we designed this development series, and how we have continued to engage with equity work. We provided an outline and prompting questions for participants to identify their equity commitment and plan for professional development in their context, developing the framework of being equity leaders.

You’re presenting again this year — what will you cover in this year’s workshop?

Mayra: This one is called “Designing for Equity: Counteracting Bias in Student Recruitment and Selection Through the Use of Data and Design Thinking.” We’re going to share our multi-year process of changing our student recruitment and selection processes. Folks will leave with an outline of a plan on how to identify bias in recruitment and selection and focal areas for them to be able to create an outline to do that work at their organization

Mary: Our workshop will be an extension or a next step of last year’s presentation. We talked about these kinds of big mindsets of “what does it mean to be an equity leader?” And now we’re going to zone in on how we have redesigned the student selection process throughout the years to our current process.

Why is this an important topic at SMART and something you want to share with others?

Mary: To make sure that every part of our program reflects our mission, we need to start with our youngest students at our entry point, which is the summer between fourth and fifth grade. Because we have an early intervention model at SMART, we have the opportunity to impact a student’s educational journey. We hope that our unique approach to selection can challenge people to reframe or reconsider what a college-ready student looks like even at such a young age.

Mayra: How we start with students impacts how we end, so starting strong is really important. We want students to be on their way to college because they’re a part of SMART, not be a part of SMART because they’re already on their way to a college degree. And that means looking at students holistically.

How has your thinking about SMART’s selection process evolved over the past five years or so?

Mayra: We spoke to similar organizations in 2020 to learn about their selection process to start from scratch to create our own. And when we re-created our process, we thought, “this is it.” But, what we learned over the last five years is that this is a continuous process in which you have to reflect deeply on what’s working and what isn’t. We would make a change and realize, “oh, some of the changes we made created some inequities.” So, we had to then rethink that, again. It’s an evolving process, where there’s always more to learn. Something we’re doing now is thinking about, “what are the inequities happening in San Francisco? Which students and families face the greatest barriers or are furthest from opportunity?”

Mary: And to answer those questions, one of our major changes has been in using SFUSD and state data on high school graduation and college readiness rates to identify students and families who have the greatest need for SMART. We want to help disrupt those patterns of inequity in educational outcomes.

What were some of the challenges you identified within SMART’s selection process? How have you worked towards overcoming these challenges?

Mary: When I first started in 2019, staff evaluated students at the end of summer using a rubric of a lot of different metrics. They would score them one, two, or three, and staff would have a conversation based on that. Something we noticed was that all of those who were highest recommended were female students and/or Latine and API students, which is consistent with teacher bias in the classroom against boys of color and Black students. Staff would have a conversation to kind of balance it out, but it was something that we needed to fix.

We introduced a summer advisory model, so our full-time staff could really get to know students and families. We’ve also focused on a lot of mindset work with staff around anti-bias using asset- and strength-based approaches to Scholars and families. Kids are 10 years old when they apply to SMART, and we have to understand, you know, they’re children, they’re going to make mistakes. It took us a long time to get to a point with staff where I feel like they are catching their own internal biases, and are now familiar with asset-based language, restorative practices, and responsiveness to student behavior.

Mayra: We also used to have an interview day for a student, where students would do a half-day interview and activities with other students. We would sit and observe them. With equity in mind, you realize that selecting students based on one day’s interaction was inequitable and so now, with the advisory model, we evaluate each student throughout the whole six-week journey, which gives every student an equitable process and shot to get into the program. Something else that’s unique about our process is the Selection Day, where all SMART staff demonstrate equity in action through a full-day conversation, engaging in conversation about students and families in an equity-based way and making decisions that are equity-focused.

Mary: And every student on our rosters gets devoted time to get talked about. 

What message do you want attendees to take away?

Mary: We know that inequity is both systemic and interpersonal. So, to counteract inequity, we need to design equitable systems, using process and data, as well as work on the interpersonal aspect: mindsets and approaches. Just as inequity is systemic, equity can be, too.

Mayra: I want folks to leave with ideas and best practices to counteract bias within student recruitment and selection, and to feel empowered with resources to be able to do this work at their organizations to support the students and families they serve.