Los Angeles Harbor College – REMOVE PROBATION AND REAFFIRM ACCREDITATION (2013)
In a July 3, 2013 letter to Los Angeles Harbor College the ACCJC wrote that “The Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges, Western Association of Schools and Colleges, at its meeting June 5-7, 2013, reviewed the Follow-Up Report submitted by Los Angeles Harbor College and the report of the evaluation team that visited April 16, 2013. The Commission took action to remove Probation, reaffirm accreditation, and require the College to undergo a visit in conjunction with the Midterm Report in 2015. At that time, the visiting team will verify the College has sustained the changes and improvements that were initiated to comply with Standards and meet College Recommendations 1 and 2 and District Recommendations 1, 2, 4 and 5.”
Note that the letter does not state that the changes and improvements had gone “full cycle” as of the June decision. The claim that the CCSF changes and improvement had not gone full cycle was one of the reasons given for removing accreditation from CCSF. This may show an inconsistency in ACCJC’s approach to its standards.
College Recommendation 1 related to a 2006 evaluation team concern with the planning process at Harbor College.
College Recommendation 2 related to the monitoring of salaries and benefits in relation to available funds. This seems to be more of a district concern since salaries and benefits are bargained at the district level and staffing levels are ultimately determined at the district level as well.
The District Recommendations 1, 2, 4, and 5 related to bond oversight, financial audit issues, the allocation model for the colleges, and the board’s responsibility to act in the public’s interest. The fact that these issues have not recently been brought up with respect to the other colleges in the Los Angeles Community College District must be an indication that these issues have been resolved to the satisfaction of the ACCJC.
Modesto Junior College – PLACED ON PROBATION (2012)
Modesto Junior College was placed on Probation at the Commission Meeting of January 10-17, 2012. They had been placed on Probation in June of 2008 but were clear of sanctions until the 2012 action against the college. The October 2011 Visiting Team was composed of eleven members, only three of which were faculty members.
As with other colleges in multi-college district, Modesto was faulted for perceived failures by the District. The list of District “deficiencies” to meet the Commission Standards included the need for systematic evaluation of personnel, a review of institutional missions and delegation of authority policy, and clearly defined processes for hiring. The college has been directed to analyze community demographics; force faculty to “differentiate between course learning outcomes and course objectives”; and “create venues to maintain an ongoing, collegial, self reflective dialogue about the continuous improvement of student learning and institutional process; and so on.” This is the kind of self-invented education-speak that the faculty on the campuses are being forced to put up with.
The Lumina Foundation and the ACCJC
The Lumina Foundation is a private, Indianapolis-based foundation with about $1.4 billion in assets. It came out of the USA Group. The USA Group, Inc. was founded after the year 2000 and is a large private guarantor and administrator of education loans. It then sold most of its operating assets to the Student Loan Marketing Association (Sallie Mae). The Lumina Foundation was created with $770 million from the sale. The Foundation was renamed Lumina Foundation for Education in February, 2001.
Lumina’s declared mission is to “expand student access to and success in education beyond high school.” Lumina attempts to identify and support what they consider effective practice. They are a public policy advocate and use their foundation to communicate to the public what they believe will work in increasing the number of graduates in the United States.
Lumina helped sponsor the 2011 Annual conference of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). ALEC helps develop right wing legislative “model bills.” Most recently ALEC helped move forward anti-democratic voter ID laws, anti-union right-to-work laws, and anti-gun control laws. It is infamous for pushing some of the nation’s worst anti-voter, anti-consumer and anti-worker legislation. Almost 98% of ALEC's funding comes from Exxon Mobil, Reynolds American, Altria, corporate "foundations" like the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, or trade associations like the pharmaceutical industry's PhRMA as well as other like minded corporations.
Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt announced in September of 2014 that the company will pull its support for the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) because of it extreme right-wing role in legislation development. Google was only the latest in a long list of companies that have ended their relationships with ALEC, including Coca Cola, Amazon, Microsoft, and dozens of others.
A small amount of money comes from legislative dues. The stated goal of Lumina is to increase graduation rates but the method they propose to accomplish that is more data collection and the narrowing of curriculum.
The Lumina Foundation has given the ACCJC $450,000 in grant funding in order to fund a project which they call “Application of the Degree Qualification Profile (DQP) to Two-Year Colleges in the Western Region.” Lumina is attempting to influence accreditation standards that would require the identification of and measurement of desired educational outcomes. This grant is in addition to the $1.5 million given to WASC to redesign its accreditation process. The ACCJC project involves a “Tuning Clusters” project and an “Associate Degree Cohorts” project. The first will have faculty from Riverside Community College, Copper Mountain College and Fullerton College identifying “the learning outcomes, the culminating skills and knowledge” for the new and highly controversial and narrow AAT and AST degrees designed to meet California State University requirements for transfer.
The Associate Degree Cohorts will attempt to identify “culminating outcomes in career-technical degrees, discipline specific transfer degrees, and/or liberal arts (general education) degrees.” The colleges involved in this project include Berkeley City College, Cerritos College, Gavilan College, Grossmont College, MiraCosta College, Mission College, Pasadena City College, Sacramento City College, Saddleback College, Santa Rosa Junior College, Shasta College, and West Hills College Coalinga.
Interestingly, four of the colleges chosen have a member of the ACCJC Commission from their college. In addition, five of the colleges have an ACCJC staff person who came from the college. Virtually all of the colleges have faculty or administrators that have served on visiting teams. In short, this is an inside game.
The above initiative is a part of an initiative called “Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count.” The initiative is attempting to get colleges to “focus” on “understanding and making better use of data.” Since data collection is one of the primary goals of the ACCJC standards, this privately funded initiative fits right in with ACCJC’s ideological bent.. Achieving the Dream is funded by the Lumina Foundation for Education, CollegeSpeak Washington, the Heinz Endowments, Houston Endowment Inc., Knowledge Works Foundation, and Nellie Mae Education Foundation.
The Lumina Foundation supported the publication of a Policy Brief issued in October of 2006 by Radh Roy Biswas entitled “A Supporting Role: How Accreditors Can Help Promote the Success of Community College Students.” Understanding the paper helps one to understand what has been happening in the ACCJC under the direction of Barbara Beno. For example, Biswas writes “There is a growing sense, among institutions and accrediting bodies alike, that accreditation would benefit from moving toward an ongoing process of continuous improvement based on a culture of evidence, built around the central themes of student learning and student success.” She continues “Institutional expertise around evaluation and measurement is an issue, as is institutional research capacity that can help colleges do this, but more important for colleges is to know what to measure. This will require collaboration between accreditors and their colleges and their faculty members to arrive at a consensus on some common, acceptable measures of student learning and student success.” The ACCJC has been an engine for the increased hiring by colleges of administrative research positions by referencing the need for more research positions in their sanction letters.
In October of 2013 the Lumina Foundation awarded the Institute for Evidence-Based Change (IEBC) a $1 million three-year grant to support an expansion of Tuning USA. The grant is to support work by the American Historical Foundation, the Midwest Education Compact, and the ACCJC. IEBC seeks to align high school exit expectations and college entrance expectations. The IEBC has developed curriculum guides for use in California in the areas of math and English. It is a umbrella organization for the Cal-PASS program. The Board of Directors of the IEBC include Omero Suarez (a past Chancellor in the Grossmont-Cuyamaca Community College District) and David Wolf (past Executive Director of the ACCJC). The Founders of IEBC include several community college districts (Cabrillo, Coast, College of the Desert, Fullerton College, Saddleback College, and West Hills) as well as the Lumina Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the James Irvine Foundation, the Walter S. Johnson Foundation, and the Stuart Foundation.
Will these measures be useful in the various majors that students take ranging from Art to Zoology? And how to measure jobs when the unemployment rate is different in different regions of the country and for different populations? Again we seem to have a group without any on-the-ground experience trying to advise those that are actually doing the work.
A Report entitled “Federal Policy Priorities” was distributed by the Lumina Foundation in May of 2014. It proposes a number of nice sounding but unproven theories of what is needed. The press release included: “Summary: To respond to a rapidly changing higher-education environment that includes more low-income students, first-generation students, students of color, and working adults, a range of policies should be adopted on the federal level to raise degree attainment (a particular interest of the Lumina Foundation, the report’s sponsor). The report is intended to prompt discussion about how the foundation believes higher education should evolve, and how the federal government can help spur change to increase the number of Americans with high-quality degrees and credentials to 60 percent by the year 2025. The report highlights three suggested federal policy priorities:
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Allowing innovation in higher education to improve outcomes for students, according to the report, would help colleges employ new teaching methods, allow for experimentation to develop new delivery models and credentials, and streamline regulations so that high-performing colleges are rewarded with regulatory flexibility. Where colleges are directly funded by the federal government, evidence of high-quality outcomes for students should also be demanded. This would allow the government to direct federal resources to colleges that demonstrate continuous improvement in student attainment, especially students in underrepresented groups.
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To ensure college affordability, the report recommends restructuring federal student-aid programs so that lower-income students are able to afford college, student costs are more predictable and transparent, and incentives are provided to increase degree completion, reduce price, and limit student borrowing. The report recommends a system that would allow students to apply for, view, and monitor the federal postsecondary-education benefits that they qualify for and that would align minimum standards for eligibility as much as possible.
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Finally, the report recommends that federal higher-education policies ensure the quality of credentials in terms of student learning. A quality-assurance system would be outcomes-based and allow for a variety of credentials, providers, and modes of delivery. Doing so, according to the report, would create transparency and encourage colleges to innovate toward higher-quality, lower-cost programs while creating protections for students and taxpayers against waste, fraud, and abuse. In the assessment of student outcomes, students should be rewarded for learning, not seat time. Toward that goal, states and colleges should be encouraged to develop comparable measures of student learning, employment, and other outcomes.”
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Note, once again that the ACCJC appears to be following the lead of Lumina in insisting on outcomes-based learning assessments. No information is provided demonstrating that the above approach actually works to improve instruction or retention. The words are all nice but the implementation might not be nice at all – or actually helpful to those underrepresented students that the piece speaks to. There should be rigorous experiments first to show that success with these approaches are widely applicable before implementing them at the national or state level.
It is difficult for me to conceive of a measure of student learning or employment that makes sense at the university
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