President's Update | May 2019

Dear Colleagues,

The end of the academic year is often a time of exhaustion, celebration, and reflection as another class of graduates transition to transfer institutions and employment. At the state level, May is a frantic month of legislative activity, budget negotiations, and a rush to wrap up the work of state-wide policy committees. This update is intended to keep you apprised of the system-wide work to celebrate the tremendous work we have done this year to improve our service to our students and communities, and reflect on our accomplishments and path forward. 

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 62,000 faculty and 2.4 million students in all academic and professional matters. 

On behalf of the Executive Committee, I hope each of us finds a little time for peace and reflection this summer so that we are ready to begin again when we return. We have been honored to represent you at the state level this year.

Respectfully,

        John Stanskas, President

Legislative Update

The ASCCC is tracking several pieces of legislation and has taken formal positions on the following:

• AB 302 (Berman, 2019), allows homeless students to sleep in parking lots; Support
• SB 3 (Allen), creation of a new coordinating body for public higher ed.; Support as amended
• AB130 (Low), creation of a coordinating body for public higher ed.; Oppose unless amended
• SB 291 (Leyva, 2019), financial aid for CCC students; Support if amended and
• SB 462 (Stern, 2019), CCC Forestland Restoration Workforce Program; Oppose unless amended.

In addition, the ASCCC stated a policy position in support of student parents as directed by resolution at the spring Plenary Session.  The complete ASCCC legislative report can be found here. 

Funding Formula

Colleges have struggled to adjust to the impending changes to community college funding mechanisms. Projections of revenues for colleges have reportedly swung wildly over the course of the year, and these changes are causing a significant destabilization of the budget processes of colleges. The ASCCC has been vocal about issues that arise in our college processes, especially curriculum committees, that encourage decisions that may not be in the best interests 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 the maximizing of 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.

The system’s stakeholders, legislative staff, and the Chancellor’s Office have all engaged in dialog about the best approach to improve the mechanics of the formula. The ASCCC remains opposed to any performance-based measures as lacking any conclusive research that these measures drive outcomes. We stand by our original suggestions as submitted the legislature that are grounded in the best interest of students through the lens of faculty dedicated to academic and professional matters.   

2019 Academic Academy

The ASCCC Executive Committee recently approved the 2019 Academic Academy, focused on The Student Centered Experience, for September 12-14. Proposed themes include student equity, faculty diversification, accessibility for technologically mediated instruction, open educational resources, and guided pathways, all of which can influence and enhance the student experience at our colleges. As the theme of the Academic Academy suggests, we are inviting our community college students to attend this institute to provide their experience and insight into the breakout sessions offered. Please identify colleagues and students who should attend and begin preparation of 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 12. 

Professional Development 

The ASCCC has worked diligently to ensure the availability of professional development to colleges regarding legislation, implementation of programs, and improving the quality of service to students. The following list offers a snapshot of our efforts for the 2018-2019 academic year thus far:

• 34 technical assistance visits to colleges
• 986 attendees at 24 Regional or Area Meetings on a variety of topics including curriculum, AB705 implementation, faculty diversity, and equivalency,
• 1289 registered attendees at 24 Guided Pathways webinars,
• 787 registered attendees at 22 Open Educational Resources webinars, and
• 2247 registered attendees at eight institutes or plenary sessions.

Strong Workforce Program 

The ASCCC and Chancellor’s Office effort to produce a toolkit and professional development activities for local academic senates and equivalency committees is complete. The toolkit is available to provide insight to all members of the college community 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 will be presented later this month to the Board of Governors specifically addressing veteran populations after creation and approval by the Credit for Prior Learning Workgroup and the California Community Colleges Curriculum Committee. To view or comment on the proposed regulations, visit the Chancellor’s Office website for the Legal Division under the tab for proposed regulations. 

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. The input collected from 250 faculty at the Spring Plenary session has been synthesized and distributed to the task force to inform this work over the summer. 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 & Diversity Advisory Committee of the Chancellor’s Office to engage stakeholders in this work. This goal will continue for at least the next year as a priority of the ASCCC as we move from awareness to concrete steps to improve the diversity of our system. In addition, this work has sparked the need to address larger issues of equity and systemic biases next year.  

AB705 Implementation

This year we have engaged the collegial processes available to us to ensure the faculty voice in the implementation of assessment procedures at our colleges. A variety of ideas continue to circulate regarding the best implementation plan, and, unfortunately, information has been presented as requirements that simply are not part of the law or regulation and may not be in the best interests of students,

One specific area that has sparked ongoing debate is the delivery of reading and study skills instruction. Many colleges have felt that they have been encouraged to disband reading programs or to absorb those programs and their faculty into English departments. Reading remains a fundamental skill for all academic work and especially for other basic skills such as math and writing. Reading instruction may be delivered in a variety of ways, and each college must decide how to serve students in this area within the requirements of AB 705. Certainly, reading instruction may in various ways be provided in cooperation and in conjunction with writing programs to the benefit of both disciplines. However there is no mandate to dissolve or disband reading programs as a whole. We also caution colleges to remember that reading and English have separate minimum qualifications and that faculty in these areas have separate training, and these differences should be respected in any curricular revision or departmental reorganization involving reading programs.

The ASCCC has attempted to separate fact from fiction and clarify the choices available to colleges. With 114 different communities and plans for implementation, we can expect to learn a great deal about what is working and what is not as the next academic year unfolds. Academic senates should be leading the dialog on their campuses about the impact of curricular choices and should work with their administrative colleagues to devise a method of evaluating the success of the model the college has selected for fall 2019 and determining how they can improve service to students in spring 2020 and fall 2020 based on that evaluation.

The ASCCC has partnered with the Research and Planning 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. In our conversations with the Chancellor’s Office and the legislature, we have all agreed that this process will be iterative. No college should expect to have the perfect formula, and all colleges should be prepared to make data-driven decisions as they evaluate and adjust their service to their students and community. The ASCCC maintains a discussion board with questions the ASCCC receives from 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 provided massive support to faculty and academic senates as they implemented frameworks appropriate to their colleges and communities this year. The ASCCC Guided Pathways Task Force supported faculty through webinars and maintains accessible CANVAS resources for all things guided pathways. In addition, we have sent GPTF Resource Teams at no cost to support colleges as they navigated their local efforts. The dialog at colleges has been rich and fiercely student-centered. No matter where we might be in the implementation phase, we should be proud of our commitment to serving students well.

Next year we plan to continue to support colleges and focus our efforts more directly on program review processes, guided onboarding processes, technical assistance, and equity minded frameworks. 

Upcoming Events

• May 22, 10am Minimum Qualifications/Equivalency: Minimum Webinar #2
• May 22, 11am Minimum Qualifications/Equivalency Webinar #3
• May 22, 12pm Guided Pathways Webinar – Developing Practices and Materials for Counseling
• June 7, Executive Committee Meeting, Bass Lake
• June 12, Legislative Pre-Session to the Faculty Leadership Institute, Sacramento
• June 13-15, Faculty Leadership Institute, Sacramento
• July 9, Executive Committee Meeting, Sacramento
• July 10-13, Curriculum Institute, Burlingame
• Sept. 12-14, Academic Academy:  The Student Centered Experience, Long Beach