President's Update - February 2020

President's Update | February 2020

February 26, 2020

Dear Colleagues,

As California community colleges work to improve the lives of their students and communities, the ASCCC Executive Committee continues to do the same at the state level by evaluating policy and providing input on the collective behalf of faculty to the Chancellor’s Office and the legislature. Last week was the deadline to introduce new legislation, though many amendments and changes can be expected between now and the governor’s May revision to the budget. The ASCCC also conducted the Part-Time Faculty Leadership Institute and the Accreditation Institute at capacity to provide professional development to faculty and colleges. And we are planning for our 53rd Spring Plenary Session in Oakland from April 16-18. The theme for this session is The Academic Senate: An Equity-Driven System. Please join us to learn about our efforts, engage in dialogue with colleagues, and contribute to our work to serve students from the statewide level.

The Executive Committee adopted three goals during the summer of 2019 on which to focus our collective efforts this year: faculty diversification, implementation of guided pathways, and the role of faculty in governance processes. The first two goals were also part of last year’s priorities, and the judgment of the Executive Committee is that they will continue to be significant goals for at least the next four years and three years respectively. I have addressed each goal separately in this message. In addition, important information regarding our transfer goals is included.

Please forward this message to all constituents at your college. All stakeholder work is interconnected, and the system is strongest when we work together and keep each other informed. As always, academic senate presidents should feel free to contact the ASCCC at info@asccc.org should they require any assistance or have questions. We are here to serve the 62,000 faculty and 2.4 million students in all academic and professional matters.

On behalf of the Executive Committee, I hope each of you finds strength and wisdom as we engage in our collective work of serving students.

Respectfully,

John Stanskas, President

Transfer

During the Fall 2017 ASCCC Plenary Session, the delegates passed resolution 15.01 F17, which directed the ASCCC to work with the CSU and the UC to identify a single pathway in majors with an Associate Degree for Transfer. Throughout 2019-20, the Intersegmental Committee of Academic Senates (ICAS) has had a standing agenda item on transfer to discuss such alignment.

Seven Transfer Model Curricula (TMCs) seem to directly align with the UC Transfer Pathways (UCTP) and would benefit from a single model of transfer to either of the students’ public transfer options in the disciplines of anthropology, business administration, economics, history, mathematics, philosophy, and sociology. The UCTP degrees in chemistry and physics reflect the model preparation required by four-year education plans for students. The model curriculum designed for engineering has already been endorsed by the CSU Academic Senate and can be crafted into associate degrees that reflect common engineering preparation. The ASCCC leadership invited the UC and CSU Academic Senates to engage their own systems’ processes to facilitate a single pathway per discipline to prepare students for transfer. Our UC colleagues have identified the major’s preparation required in 21 transfer pathways and are willing to guarantee admission to community college students who meet the 3.5 GPA threshold. Currently, the UC Office of the President is mapping completion pathways at each undergraduate campus for students who follow a proscribed pathway with community colleges to ensure that students can finish their bachelor’s degrees within two years of transfer.

This past year, the ASCCC worked collectively with our higher education partners to identify a path forward. However, processes in the three segments vary significantly, so much so that this effort highlighted weaknesses within existing processes. The CSU Academic Senate has been unable to supply the CSU faculty needed to effectively facilitate the TMC process required to create the Associate Degree for Transfer. Alongside this issue, the CSU Chancellor’s Office is unable to engage in meaningful dialogue on action that would advance service to transfer students, as that office has indicated that the CSU system lacks funding to expand past the existing mandates of SB 1440 (Padilla, 2010). Discipline discourse that is also happening now is affecting the CSU’s ability to coalesce around a superset of discipline preparation courses that all CSU campuses would determine to be similar.

All of these issues would indicate the appearance that the transfer of community college students is not a priority for our higher education colleagues in the CSU system. In an attempt to address this situation at the last ICAS meeting in February, the ASCCC requested our system colleagues to adopt the set of transfer principles highlighted below:

Transfer students are best served when they are presented with a single set of lower division major’s preparation that they may use to transfer to either the CSU or the UC.
If alignment is not readily available, intersegmental discipline faculty should convene to discuss how to reach consensus on a single pathway.
Sometimes, alignment is not possible. In that case, a concise statement to students explaining what careers or outcomes a CSU pathway prepares a student for and what careers or outcomes a UC pathway prepares a student for should be crafted to accompany the different paths.

The faculty representing the UC and CSU systems at ICAS declined to endorse such a proposal at the February meeting.

The community college system is united in addressing this important academic and professional matter – degree requirements and student preparation and success – that is at the core of the work of academic senates. Representatives of the chief instructional officers, chief student services officers, chief executive officers, trustees, and the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges all offered their support at the Chancellor’s Office Consultation Council meetings in December and January. We are also aware of the intense interest of the legislature and advocacy groups external to the community college system that intend to introduce transfer legislation in the 2021-2022 legislative cycle. We will continue to advocate fiercely for community college students and their fair treatment commensurate to that of students native to the CSU or UC systems and insist that the community college system and the ASCCC should lead these efforts to reform.

Faculty Diversification

The governor’s initial budget in January did not include the full recommendation of the Vision for Success Faculty and Staff Diversity Task Force as adopted by the Board of Governors and endorsed by the ASCCC. The governor did include $15M for model mentoring programs but not the funding for professional development and full-time faculty hiring. We continue to advocate for these important components of meaningful and lasting structural change efforts to root out the systemic biases inherent in the community college system.

Even absent further funding, we can accomplish significant changes. The ASCCC has reached out to system partner colleagues—the Chief Executive Officers, the CCLC Trustee Board, the Chief Instructional Officers, the Chief Student Services Officers, and the Association for Chief Human Resources Officers—for liaisons to assist in the work we have undertaken. Our goals are to address the following:

Evaluate and emphasize the second minimum qualification—sensitivity to and understanding of the diverse academic, socioeconomic, cultural, disability, and ethnic backgrounds of community college students—such that its value is equal to discipline-specific qualifications.
Create model hiring and appointment processes.
Develop tools to engage colleges in systemic change dialogue.
Evaluate and revise the EEO Standards.

Each of these organizations responded enthusiastically with members to contribute to the collective work. The ASCCC hosted an in-person meeting in January with members of the Executive Committee and our partners, and our committees continue to work on these goals with their assistance. While we will not finish all of these tasks in the current academic year, we hope to make significant progress in each area. This work can only be strengthened with the assistance of our system partners.

The ASCCC has also been participating in the planning and programming for the Faculty and Staff Diversity Symposium to be held March 19-20 in Sacramento. The event is at maximum capacity and is designed to support the professional development efforts required to make progress in terms of diversifying the system’s workforce. The ASCCC Spring Plenary session, April 16-18, in Oakland will also highlight our efforts to date and solicit feedback from the attendees.

Governance Processes and the Faculty Role

Another goal identified by the ASCCC Executive Committee is an emphasis on the role of faculty in governance processes. We will continue to provide professional development and technical assistance while evaluating processes and practices. This evaluation includes the roles and responsibilities of academic senates and curriculum committees, the only two bodies specifically called out in regulation other than bargaining units.

This goal also includes supporting academic senates as they engage in the work of transfer alignment, guided pathways evaluation, evaluation of new placement procedures, and hosting local conversations about systemic bias and faculty diversification. Any of these topics may lead to difficult conversations and in the worst-case scenario can pit groups of faculty against each other. Local academic senate presidents and their academic senates must be supported and equipped to engage in their legal duty to advise the board of trustees and administration on how each college will best serve its students and community.

In order to continue to improve collegiality and communication at the state level, I invited Chancellor Eloy Ortiz Oakley to attend the Area B and Area C meetings with me on March 27 and 28. We appreciated his attendance at Area A and Area D in the fall and his openness to hearing the concerns expressed by academic senate representatives present. His attendance at Area B and Area C is intended to provide the same opportunity to the faculty leaders in those areas.

Guided Pathways

The ASCCC Guided Pathways effort provides massive support to faculty and academic senates as they implement frameworks appropriate to their colleges and communities. The ASCCC Guided Pathways Task Force (GPTF) maintains accessible CANVAS resources for all things guided pathways. In addition, we continue to send GPTF Resource Teams at no cost to support colleges as they navigate their local efforts. The dialogue at colleges has been rich and fiercely student-centered. No matter where a college might be in the implementation phase, all of the colleges should be proud of their commitment to serving students well.

Part of the guided pathways onboarding process focuses on campus implementation of assessment for placement changes. Currently, nearly two-thirds of colleges have stated that they are implementing the default placement rules published by the Chancellor’s Office, and conversations with college faculty and administrators have revealed that the focus of fall 2019 preparation has been compliance-driven. To best serve students, colleges must move from a compliance-driven perspective back to evaluating how to shape placement that truly meets the needs of their students and serves their communities best. This approach may be more nuanced and should reflect evaluation of student capacity for success as well as providing students enough information to have real agency in their educational journeys. Crafting an onboarding process that facilitates that crucial exchange of information between the student and the college is essential. Academic senates have an essential role to perform in using data to evaluate current processes and determine how to improve service to students.

This year, the ASCCC plans to continue to support colleges and focus our efforts more directly on program review processes and the linkage to institutional planning, guided onboarding processes, technical assistance, support for college evaluation of placement implementation, and equity minded frameworks. Many of these frameworks could benefit from re-examination in light of the tremendous work colleges continue to do within locally defined guided pathways frameworks. Guided Pathways regional meetings are scheduled for March 13 and 20 and April 24. Travel reimbursement funding of up to $150 is available for local academic senate-appointed guided pathways liaisons. The ASCCC also continues to offer professional development through Guided Pathways Workshops and a webinar series for this spring. Webinars will be held twice per month on Wednesdays at noon. They will be announced on our website, here, along with archived webinars.

Open Educational Resources Initiative

The Academic Senate for California Community Colleges Open Educational Resources Initiative is pleased to announce its participation in Open Education Week. Open Education Week is a global event that seeks to raise awareness of free and open sharing in education and the benefits it brings to teachers and learners. Coordinated by the Open Education Consortium, the event showcases projects, resources, and ideas from around the world that demonstrate open education in practice. The open education movement seeks to reduce barriers, increase access, and drive improvements in education through open sharing and digital formats. Open education includes free and open access to platforms, tools, and resources in education, including learning materials, course materials, videos, assessment tools, research, study groups, and textbooks, all available for free use and modification under an open license.

The ASCCC Open Educational Resources Initiative (OERI) is a state-funded, faculty-led effort to increase the use of OER in California’s 114 community colleges. Despite the system’s size, mechanisms for communication among the faculty are well-developed and systems are in place to recognize curricular commonalities across the colleges that all prepare students for work or transfer to private institutions, the California State University, or the University of California. While the OERI’s focus thus far has been on community colleges, the initiative is celebrating Open Education Week by sharing its work with the broader OER community.

Upcoming Events

Please note that additional professional development is in the planning stages and will be available on our website at www.asccc.org. As academic senates plan the allocation of their human resources through the end of the year, this list is intended to provide a calendar of events that local academic senates and their designees might want to attend in order to bring information back to the college.

OERI Webinars
Mar. 02, 1PM, OERI Webinar, Resource Showcase
Mar. 03, 1PM, OERI Webinar, California Community Colleges – Local OER Efforts
Mar. 04, 1PM, OERI Webinar, From Locally Developed ZTC Pathways to Statewide OER Degrees
Mar. 05, 1PM, OERI Webinar, Coordinating Statewide Efforts in the Golden State
Mar. 06, 1PM, OERI Webinar, What’s Next to Move the Needle?

Guided Pathways Webinars
Mar. 04, noon, GP Webinar, Using the Scale of Adoption Assessment as a Tool for Improvement
Mar. 18, noon, GP Webinar, Bridging the Gap Between Credit and Noncredit
Apr. 01, noon, GP Webinar, Measuring the Success of AB705 Implementation
Apr. 22, noon, GP Webinar, Guided Pathways and Data
May 06, noon, GP Webinar, English and Math Pathways and Noncredit
May 20, noon, GP Webinar, Year 4 of Guided Pathways, Where Are We Going?

Area Meetings
Mar. 27, Area A Meeting, Madera Community College
Mar. 27, Area B Meeting, Foothill College
Mar. 28, Area C Meeting, LA Southwest College
Mar. 28, Area D Meeting, Long Beach City College

Guided Pathways Workshops
Mar. 13, Guided Pathways Workshop, Fresno City College
Mar. 20, Guided Pathways Workshop, Santiago Canyon College
Apr. 24, Guided Pathways Workshop, Merritt College

Upcoming Plenary Sessions
Apr. 16-18, Spring Plenary Session, Oakland

Executive Committee Meetings
Mar. 06-07, ASCCC Executive Committee Meeting, North Orange Continuing Education
Apr. 15, ASCCC Executive Committee Meeting, Oakland
May 08, ASCCC Executive Committee Meeting, Sacramento
Jun. 05-07, ASCCC Executive Committee Meeting, South Lake Tahoe

ASCCC Events
Apr. 30-May 2, Career Noncredit Institute, San Mateo
Jun. 18-20, Faculty Leadership Institute, Newport Beach
July -8-11, Curriculum Institute, Riverside