President's Update - March 2019

President's Update | March 2019

Dear Colleagues,

The Academic Senate for California Community Colleges is gearing up for our Spring Plenary Session in Burlingame, our 50th anniversary of providing leadership, empowerment, and voice for all faculty across the state in service to our students. Please register and plan to attend this special occasion as we celebrate our golden anniversary and provide a forum for information and dialog that informs the work we do at our colleges to serve our communities. We have invited system partners, legislators, chancellor’s office staff, and all past members of the Executive Committee to attend and contribute to the dialog with you.

This term has been busy, and, as always, this update is intended to provide you with information on several items we are working on at the state level and the four areas designated as priorities by the Executive Committee. 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 us at info@asccc.org should they require any assistance or have questions. We are here to serve the 60,000 faculty and 2.1 million students in all academic and professional matters.

Respectfully,

John Stanskas, President

Funding Formula

Colleges have struggled to adjust to the impending change to community college funding mechanisms. The ASCCC has been vocal about issues that arise in our college processes, especially curriculum committees, that encourage decisions that do not seem to be in the best interest of students but are intended to maximize college budgets under the new formula. Legislative staff requested that we offer our recommendations regarding the formula in writing, keeping in mind the assumption that the performance-based mechanism is not going to be removed. We did so and argued that while we remain opposed in principle to performance-based funding, if the state wishes to retain the performance aspect of the formula, the ASCCC has three suggestions for improvement:

1. Level the point system for associate degree awards so that all educational goals and achievements of comparable unit values are counted equally.

2. Award colleges only once per year per student for the highest award achieved as a means of prioritizing per-student success, as opposed to incentivizing maximizing awards more generally.

3. Keep the performance metric portion set at 10% of the total allocation to ensure funding stability and to support college exploration of how best to serve students.

This written message has been disseminated to system partners, legislative staff, and the Chancellor’s Office and has initiated earnest dialog around these suggestions. The full letter is available here.

Legislative Update

This legislative cycle is shaping up to be one of the busiest in California’s history. The ASCCC is tracking legislation pertaining to academic and professional matters as well as other bills that may be of interest to faculty because of their potential impact on college communities across the state. Of particular interest this year are the following:

AB130 (Low) and SB 3 (Allen), creation of a new coordinating body for public higher ed.; SB 291 (Leyva, 2019), financial aid for CCC students; AB30 (Holden, 2019), expansion of dual enrollment programs; AB 302 (Berman, 2019), allows homeless students to sleep in parking lots; and SB 484 (Portantino, 2019), auto-awarding of degrees.

The complete ASCCC legislative report can be found here.

Response to Resolution Fall 2018 07.03

The delegates at the Fall 2018 Plenary Session passed resolution 07.03, “Improving Participatory Governance with the Chancellor of the California Community Colleges,” which specifically directed the Executive Committee of the ASCCC to provide a report to the field at the spring area meetings regarding the current state of consultation at the state level. That report is available under the Area Meetings tab of each area.

2019 Academic Academy

The ASCCC Executive Committee recently approved the 2019 Academic Academy, focused on The Student Experience, for September 13-14. Proposed themes include student equity, faculty diversification, accessibility for technologically mediated instruction, open educational resources, and guided pathways, all of which influence and enhance the student experience at our colleges. Please identify colleagues who should attend and begin professional development requests now for those who may wish to participate, as some of our colleges will have been in session for a month but others will not have begun their fall terms by September 13.

Faculty Diversification

The ASCCC partnered with the Chancellor’s Office to host the Building Diversity Summit in Los Angeles on February 8-9 and conducted three regional meetings for faculty to engage in a discussion and analysis of the implicit bias inherent in any system, including ours. As we prepare to transition to the next academic year, the ASCCC has partnered with the Chancellor’s Office to lead a Board of Governors task force about practical next steps to address faculty diversification and will work over the summer to produce a report for the September Board of Governors meeting. We have also insisted that the Equal Employment Opportunity standards required in Title 5 need to be updated, and we are working through the EEO standing committee of the Chancellor’s Office to engage stakeholders in this work.

AB705 Implementation

The Board of Governors has adopted the Title 5 regulations to implement AB705 in accordance with the recommendations from the California Community Colleges Curriculum Committee, 5C. This spring, colleges will need to evaluate student support mechanisms in place for the next academic year. Each college should also work to devise a method of evaluating the success of the model the college has selected for fall 2019 and determining how it can improve service to students in spring 2020 and fall 2020 based on that evaluation. The ASCCC has partnered with the RP group this spring through a series of regional meetings to evaluate MIS coding changes associated with the implementation of AB705 as well as to discuss how data can inform future semesters based on the planning colleges have done for fall 2019. Results of these regional meetings will be presented at the Spring Plenary Session. In addition, the ASCCC maintains a discussion board with questions the ASCCC receives from the local colleges and the answers provided. This discussion board is available on our AB705 Resource webpage along with the FAQs and guidance memos published by the Chancellor’s Office and the ASCCC.

Guided Pathways

The ASCCC Guided Pathways effort continues to support faculty and academic senates as they implement frameworks appropriate to their colleges and communities. The ASCCC Guided Pathways Task Force is diligently supporting faculty through webinars and has accessible CANVAS resources for all things guided pathways. In addition, we are willing and able to send GPTF Resource Teams at no cost to support colleges as they navigate their local efforts.

As per the Chancellor’s Office memo, all 114 colleges have already completed the qualifying requirements for Guided Pathways funding. No action is required to receive the second-year allocation. However, colleges will be transitioning to the Community College Research Center (CCRC) “Scale of Adoption Self- Assessment” to focus more directly on the design and implementation phases of Guided Pathways. An initial submission is due on April 30, 2019. Each college should then submit and certify a final version in NOVA by September 30, 2019.

Strong Workforce Program

The ASCCC and Chancellor’s Office effort to produce a toolkit and professional development activities for local senates and equivalency committees continues to near completion. The toolkit will be available in spring 2019 for further vetting at regional meetings that will be scheduled late in the spring term to showcase the findings and provide insight to colleges as they evaluate and update their equivalency processes in an effort to expand their hiring pools.

In addition, the ASCCC continues to work with the Chancellor’s Office to evaluate how best to advise colleges on effectively granting credit for prior learning. Title 5 regulations are expected through the standard review process and will be presented at the Spring Plenary Session with a goal of having the regulations ready for first reading by the Board of Governors in May.

OERI Update

The ASCCC has formally launched its comprehensive statewide Open Educational Resources Initiative, OERI, in spring 2019. A series of webinars are scheduled throughout the spring term to inform local colleges about current resources. All webinars will be archived. For the rest of the academic year, the OERI will focus on determining gaps in OER availability such as text-equivalents, ancillaries, and homework systems as well as increasing OER awareness, developing a plan to meet identified OER needs, and supporting local OER efforts. A critical element of the OERI’s work is the identification of an OER Liaison at each of the colleges to ensure that the OERI is both getting information to and receiving information from all of our colleges. If your college has not identified a liaison yet, please do so and send your liaison’s name and contact information to info@asccc.org with the subject line OER Liaison. The OERI looks forward to working with all 114 of our colleges.

Upcoming Events

Apr. 11-13, Spring Plenary Session, Millbrae
Apr. 25-27, Career and Noncredit Institute, San Diego
Apr. 30-May 3, ACCJC Partners in Excellence, Burlingame (cosponsored by the ASCCC)
June 13-15, Faculty Leadership Institute, Sacramento
July 10-13, Curriculum Institute, Burlingame
Sept. 13-14, Academic Academy: The Student Experience, Southern California