Scott Lay on the Achievement Gap

As you know, during the last several months City College has been especially focused on issues of student equity, continuing a long tradition of working for the success of all our students and I’ve written several times about why I believe this work is important. City College is not working alone; indeed, student equity is a focus at both the state and national level. Many of the same strategies we are employing are also being used elsewhere.

Scott Lay, President and CEO of the Community College League of California, also believes in the importance of student equity and the League’s Commission on the Future is currently drafting recommendations—some of which may surprise you—to close the statewide achievement gap. On May 6, 2010, Lay appeared before the California Senate Budget Subcommittee and gave the following preliminary report. What he said has implications for us here at City College and I hope you’ll take the time to read it:

Good morning, and thank you for allowing me to brief you on the work of the Community College League of California’s Commission on the Future.  Before I begin, I must offer an important caveat that we are a little more than half-way through the commission’s seven months of work and no policy or practice change I discuss has been yet endorsed by the commission or the League’s policy boards.  I do think, however, that there is an emerging consensus on several items that is exciting.

The commission is a 33-member body of trustees, CEOs, faculty, staff and students convened to identify policy and practice changes that can contribute to a momentous goal—a 1.5 million cumulative increase in the number of students emerging from our community colleges with a meaningful certificate or degree.  That outcome is drawn from the necessary California goal of increased graduates to meet the nation’s goal of restoring America’s global lead in higher education attainment.

While the commission is indeed focused on a numerical outcomes goal, there are concomitant values of both access and student equity.  Transfer rates or graduation rates are meaningless if you do not pay attention to the denominator—the number and composition of people being served.

We are not engaged in this exercise to simply meet economic or political mandates.  We are willing to stand up and declare that a system-wide persistent and pervasive achievement gap of 15 to 20% is morally abhorrent.

And we are committed to doing something about it.

Five subgroups are currently developing recommendations through an iterative process that began with the review of nearly 200 policy options derived from reports both internal to the system and from third-party observers.  We are down to 28 recommendations, each of which are measured using SMART principles—Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound.

This is not another community college report that says that if you double our funding, we will deliver unicorns and rainbows.  Indeed, we are among the lowest funded community college systems in the country, but we also operate within the construct of a challenged state budget and Proposition 98.  All of our recommendations will be financed within those bounds or through an otherwise identified funding source.

Let me briefly talk about a few of the recommendations that I believe are rising to the top.

Intensive and Intrusive Student Services and Guidance
If there is one mantra that is echoed in the literature about student success in community colleges, it is that “students don’t do optional.”

This really isn’t a new concept and you find it throughout successful models of education.

I think about my first year of law school at Davis.  We had a mandatory introduction week that reviewed how to study, the importance of financial aid and not trying to work while going to school, and other basics to ensure our success.  During that week, we were handed a schedule of courses that ensured that we stayed on campus four-and-a-half days each week and put us in student cohorts of 30 students.  Our business and medical schools use similar strategies, as do the high-cost for-profit institutions that are attracting an increasing number of our Latino and African-American students.

In contrast, at most of our community colleges this fall, a new high school graduate will be handed a course schedule, a low-ranking priority for online registration, and has a less than 50-50 chance of being assessed, and less than 25% chance of meeting with a counselor.  There’s no wonder we lose 25% of students after one term and another 25% after the first year.

In other words, in public higher education in California, we are providing far more guidance and support to the most advantaged students who get into our professional schools than our most disadvantaged students entering our community colleges.

Now, we are not going to be able to provide the array of services and support that the law school does with $35,000 or so per-student on our $5,300 per student.

Nevertheless, the commission will recommend intensive and intrusive student services that better meet the needs of students.  These likely include mandatory assessment and placement, orientation courses, and the broader use of prerequisites that are contextually relevant.  The CCC Assess program is an example of how we are thinking differently to accomplish these goals.

The California Graduation Initiative
As you have heard, community colleges—like prisons, hospitals, and K-12 schools—are funded by activity and not outcome.  This is important in a state as diverse as California but can lead to unintended consequences.  I firmly reject that any leader in community colleges has malevolent motives and cares solely about “butts in seats,” but that indeed is how our colleges are funded.  I would argue that, unless the state wants to sacrifice access, that model must continue to be the cornerstone of our funding.  The cost of operating a classroom and paying a faculty member does not decline after the third week.

However, there is an emerging consensus that an additive, categorical, incentive-funding structure that recognizes momentum points and effective activities would be an exciting way to get community college faculty, staff and students focused on outcomes.  Following the Washington-state model, a college could be rewarded when it got a student across the 15-unit threshold or successfully through college-level math.  We would additionally integrate activity point—when a college increases the numbers of students completing federal aid forms or meeting with a counselor to complete or update a student education plan.

This is in the concept stage, and we think it can be funded using a portion of the maintenance factor stream of funds already dedicated to community colleges.

A Culture Shift
Finally, as community college leaders, we must embrace student success as the most important benchmark of our work.  We have all attended too many parties celebrating new facilities or successful fundraising campaigns.  I dream of the day where such events would celebrate closing the achievement gap or recapturing a leading role for California in college achievement.

Trustees and CEOs must embrace student success as a key measure of institutional success.  And, while we do amazing things to turn lives around—including my own—we cannot celebrate our current outcomes as a percentage of our mass student base.  And, before we ask faculty members to reinvent their teaching styles or return to the basic skills classroom, the institutional leaders must be the first ones to step up and take responsibility.

We are further a system that is doing quite little professional development at a time when the economy is shifting dramatically and our student demographics have inverted.  Our campuses are being rebuilt with bond dollars but we have failed to invest in the people—trustees, CEOs, faculty and staff—who we need to create the environment and culture of success.  We must ask all of our employees to do more to help meet this incredible student success challenge, but we also need to give them the tools to do so.

Thank you for this opportunity to share what I believe are some highlights of the emerging work of the commission.  I look forward to delivering the commission’s recommendations to you and doing everything we can to meet the economic and moral imperatives of matching California’s historic national lead in student access with similar achievement in student success.

Congratuations to our New Academic Senate Officers

The new Senate officers for 2010-2011 are:

Karen Saginor — President

Kim Wise — 1st Vice President

Fred Teti — 2nd Vice President

Venette Cook — Secretary

Congratulation!

Board of Trustees Facilities and Infrastructure and Technology Committee Meeting — 5/13/10

Financial closeout of the Mission Campus construction is, believe it or not, still being negotiated. There is some disagreement about whether or not some vendors deserve more money than the District has already paid them for their work.

Construction of the new Chinatown/North Beach campus is back on schedule and going smoothly. A community outreach committee is working with the neighbors in the area to make sure that any inconveniences due to construction are mitigated and understood.

Construction on the Multi-Use Building is being finished. The heating and smoke evacuation systems are being tested. Punch work will begin in June and furniture will go in late in June. We are on track to have the building open for occupancy by the third week in July.

ADA upgrades around the District should be finished by August 1^st, two months ahead of the court-mandated deadline.

The plans for the soccer field behind Batmale Hall are still being reviewed by the Department of State Architects (DSA) and we cannot move forward with any construction until we have DSA approval.

The new Chief Information Technology Officer should start working before next fall’s semester.

Students of the Great Depression

In a May 3rd New York Times Magazine article, David Leonhardt writes about the impact the depression in the early part of the 20th century had on education in the U.S. and tries to draw lessons for us today. Here’s a teaser:

“In her recent speech, [Melinda] Gates spent a few minutes praising the impressive tenacity of the community-college students she has met. She described one who napped in his car between a night shift and a morning class and another who juggled caring for her infant son with studying chemistry. Unfortunately, not all students can manage to be so tenacious and creative. Even more to the point, perhaps, the rest of us have not been, either. The policy makers, administrators and even voters whose decisions shape today’s colleges have come to see a job half-done as an acceptable outcome. Until that changes, it is hard to see how the country will have another great education surge.”

Board of Trustees Planning and Budgeting Committee Meeting — 5/11/10

The committee discussed the District Annual Plan, the timetable for the new Strategic Plan, and the Program Review process, especially with an eye for the Board’s role in these processes. The committee heard a report from the Program Review committee about the status of the program review process and the overall findings from the process this year.
The committee took no action on these items.

The committee also discussed the proposed parcel tax to support CCSF and the polling process leading up to that, including the polling questions.

Finally, the committee heard a report on the college’s financial situation for 2010-2011, which looks at least as bad as it did for the current fiscal year. The committee decided that they need to meet more often at least through June and they proposed to meet next Wednesday, 5/19, after the Institutional Effectiveness committee meeting, probably starting around 7:30 and as a committee of the whole. The meeting time and date will be finalized after consulting Board President Marks.

My Recent City Currents Article

This year marks the 50^th anniversary of the California Master Plan for Higher Education. It is an opportune moment to remember that almost since Europeans landed on this continent education has been the site of civil rights struggle. For many decades, college education was primarily for the upper classes only. Americans fought to democratize education throughout the 19^th century and into the mid-20^th century as we desegregated schools and provided education to more than just a relatively homogenous group of students. Key Supreme Court decisions, civil protests, courageous individuals and groups, and other demonstrations of the public will around these issues drove the effort and we slowly made progress toward providing a meaningful education for all our citizens. The late 1960s and early 1970s might be considered the peak of our nation’s collective will around these issues. Ethnic studies and other related departments were formed. Schools were held accountable. Data were collected. We could see concretely the changes in our institutions. The Master Plan, passed in 1960, demonstrated that California was at the forefront of these issues.

Unfortunately, at some point in the last 30 years, education as a locus for civil rights struggle was lost. Debates over how to collect and report data and what should be measured have become more important than actual progress for people. Today, many pretend that class, race, gender, sexual orientation, physical ability, language, and other dimensions of difference in society do not matter. They say that they don’t see those differences; they only see people. To make such assertions is either to be ignorant of or purposely elide the real disparities that exist in our society, where women still make less than men for the same work, where people of color are still disproportionately unemployed, where the LGBT community still suffers hate crimes, and where the gap between the rich and the poor continues to grow.

City College, along with the other community colleges around the state, is on the front lines of the modern day movement for civil rights. I believe, as I know you do, that education is the key to our state’s economic development and, more importantly, to a more just and tolerant society. Education teaches us to respect and appreciate the differences among peoples. Education provides access to jobs and resources and promotes sound decisions about those resources for future generations. Thus, when we accept the challenge of educating all our students, we are creating the future we want to see.

As we continue to look for ways to close the achievement gap at City College, we should remember that this work is part of a proud tradition of teachers, community organizers, pastors, and other local leaders that stood up for what they believed was right. Every day, watching and listening to my students, I see that the fight for civil rights is just as relevant and necessary now as it was 50 years ago. I recognize the wealth of skills and experiences that my students bring to my classroom and I strive to help them use their knowledge to succeed in the class. Every semester, in the midst of that process—sometimes failing, sometimes succeeding—I understand anew that it will be through working together with our students, that we will close the achievement gap. Each one of us, in our own ways, can contribute to reaching this goal. And when we reach it, our school and our society will more fully realize the vision on which they were founded.

Board of Trustees Meeting Notes — 4/29/10

A CCSF student spoke to his perceived lack of due process around a complaint with in the college.

Another student, and the mother of two children who also have attended the college, spoke to the great experience that she and her children have had at CCSF. Her son has been accepted to a NASA internship over the summer.

During Peter Goldstein’s report on the District finances, he emphasized that the upcoming budget year will be at least as challenging as the current one is, perhaps worse because many of the solutions the college found to address the deficits this year were one-time fixes. The Chancellor added that the state is very unlikely to increase our revenues over the next two years. The Chancellor characterized the situation as a crisis. Despite this situation, we must increase the number of classes we offer in the next academic year, because we are under base enrollment this year. Maintaining our current funding levels from the state will mean adding classes next year that we cut this year.

During the report from the community hiring monitors, the Board heard that one of the contractors working on CCSF bond projects are not hiring San Francisco residents. Another is not hiring women. There are also several obstacles to hiring more local workers at the Chinatown/North Beach campus construction project.

The Chancellor presented a report on student equity and the achievement gap at CCSF. He affirmed that there is an achievement gap at the college and he asserted that the two most important issues at the college currently are: fiscal stability and the student achievement gap.
Most of the items in the plan have broad support at the college. The plan also includes timelines to address the English, math, and ESL sequences that will begin to be implemented by January 2011. You can download the entire plan at: http://www.ccsf.edu/NEW/ccsf/en/about-city-college/shared-governance/academic-senate.html
As part of plan, the Chancellor will be forming a task force to address these issues as a top priority. The Chancellor said he would be forming this task force in the next week.

A former City College student, incarcerated during World War II because she is of Japanese descent, spoke about being awarded an honorary degree at last May’s CCSF graduation. The audience at the meeting gave her a standing ovation. The Board voted to confer honorary degrees on all former City College students who were unjustly interned during that time.

Students spoke about disenfranchisement during the recent election for Student Trustee. A decision was made to run the Student Trustee election online only, causing significant voting difficulties for many students.

Student leaders from Southeast and Evans campuses asked for more classes and services at those campuses, including counseling and other student support.

The Board voted to spend about $33,000 to poll the City of San Francisco to determine if the city’s voters would support a parcel tax to support City College’s general fund, helping the college through this very difficult fiscal environment.

The Board made the following administrative appointments:

• David Yee as Interim Dean, School of Science and Mathematics
• Fred Chavaria as Interim Dean, School of Behavioral and Social Science
• Minh Hoa Ta as Interim Dean, Faculty Support Services, Course/Room Scheduling
• Rose Marie Roberson as Interim Dean, International Education and Retention Programs
• Phyllis McGuire as Associate Vice Chancellor of Workforce & Economic Development & Grants, now reporting to the Vice Chancellor of Policy and Research (a currently vacant position).
• Terrance Hall as Dean of John Adams Campus and the School of health and Physical Education.
• Bob Davis as the Interim Dean, School of Liberal Arts & Castro/Valencia Campus (there was great deal of discussion concerning this appointment)

Several people mentioned the loss of Debbie Porter, a long-time stalwart in the college’s classified staff. The Board closed the meeting in her honor.

Board of Trustees Institutional Effectiveness Committee Notes — 4/21/10

The committee met to discuss the college’s performance indicators and annual plan/management performance measures and to consider revisions of these metrics. The discussion was fairly informal, almost a brainstorming session, going over some of the past documents that try to assess the college’s success in reaching its goals and possible improvements and/or additions to the performance indicators.

Joint Meeting of the ad hoc Committee of the CCSF Board and the SFUSD Board – 4/15/10

The meeting was called to discuss the Gateway to College Program, currently operating at the Southeast Campus, and it’s future at the college, especially its location.

Members of the college, including Veronica Hunnicutt, Laurie Scolari, and James Macale reported on the program’s work. The report included some of the positive aspects of the program, as well as ways that the program could improve. Concerns were raised about whether the Southeast Campus was the right location for the program, with Dr. Hunnicutt defending the campus and the program’s placement there. Members of the community also spoke to the importance of the leaving the program at the Southeast Campus. They also made significant suggestions about how to improve the program for students.

One of the issues that arose was lack of communication and coordination among District employees. The Trustees explored those issues at some length and District workers committed to improve the situation.

The committee tended to want to leave the program at Southeast and, being aware of the SFUSD Board’s tendency to want to move the program, they asked the Chancellor to work with the SFUSD Superintendent toward a better program, hopefully at Southeast Campus.

Board of Trustees Planning and Budgeting Committee Meeting Notes — 4/13/10

The committee discussed a possible progressive parcel tax in the city of San Francisco to support the college’s general fund. The proposed parcel tax is “progressive” because the amount of tax charged to single-family homes would be less than to multi-family, commercial, and other parcels of land. Unfortunately, it’s unclear whether state law allows a progressive tax for community colleges and the issue is being investigated by the college’s legal counsel. Parcel taxes have not been used for community colleges in the past, but currently San Mateo is going to put a parcel tax on the June ballot for their community college. The discussion included timelines, public polling, the current reputation of the college, and the effect of a parcel tax on a potential bond measure in 2011.

The committee heard a discussion of the current budget projections for the next two academic years. Projected budget deficits at the college for 2010-2011 range between $4.0 million and $12.2 million. Projected deficits for 2011-2012 range between $10.0 million and $17.7 million. Yes, these are all deficits.
These projections include step increases for all District employees and at least a partial restoration of classes cut during this academic year.