Our Cal FUBAR: making sense of the accreditation mess

.....(This is part of a series of posts concerning SOCCCD's present accreditation difficulties.)

.....Yesterday’s Chronicle of Higher Education included a helpful report on the acute accreditation difficulties here in California (“Community Colleges in California Feel the Heat,” by Paul Basken).
.....Essentially, as I read it, the article explains that a convergence of facts has produced our special Cal FUBAR:

• FACT 1: The Accreds (ACCJC/WASC) toughened their accreditation standards back in 2002.
• FACT 2: The California cc accreditation scene settled into a pattern of college ball-droppery, fueled on one side by poor local (college and district) leadership and, on the other, by a failure of ACCJC vigilance (aka Accred ball-droppery).
• FACT 3: Education Secretary Margaret Spellings’ new Commission on the Future of Higher Education (CFHE) (2006) increased scrutiny on accreditation/colleges.
• FACT 4: the budget situation in California worsened; some colleges failed to hire the staff necessary to complete accreditation reports adequately.

.....According to the article, in one sense, our difficulties trace back to Margaret Spellings’ creation of the CFHE two years ago. That especially affected California community colleges:

In the past year, at least 14 California community and junior colleges have been placed on a probationary or warning status by their accreditor [WASC/ACCJC]. In many cases, the colleges are being cited for their failure to prove the quality of their performance. ¶ Ms. Spellings's panel [CFHE] issued an unambiguous call for such accountability, and her department has sought to enforce it by imposing more-rigorous reporting requirements on colleges as a condition for the accreditation that makes them eligible for federal student aid. The burden of that requirement has begun to show most prominently in California, where the cash-strapped system of community colleges is struggling to keep up.

.....Evidently, budgetary pressures caused such institutions as College of the Redwoods not to complete self-assessments. At any rate, that’s what lots of CA community colleges are saying. The problem is liable to spread across the country as cutbacks prevent colleges’ affording the “staff and attention necessary to produce mandatory self-assessment reports.”
.....Economic difficulties forced California to cut the community college budget for 2002-3, and things are expected to get worse:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, seeking to balance the state's budget, has proposed a 10-percent, across-the-board reduction in all state spending, which would cut about $1-billion from higher-education budgets.

.....Meanwhile (says the CHE article), enrollments are expected to grow at a rate of 3-percent per year at CA community colleges.
.....Less money, more students. Great.
.....The CHE article focuses on the highly regarded College of the Redwoods. After overcoming some bad (enrollment-suppressing) decisions, the college found that it had made another error: “it went 10 years without hiring the staff researcher necessary to produce its accreditation reports,” or so says the college’s interim president. That decision, he says, was part of a general failure of leadership “in getting the accreditation report completed accurately.” The college was placed on warning status in 2006 and then on probation in 2007.
.....The mounting accrediting pressures derive not only from Spellings’ new commission but also from WASC's toughening of accrediting standards back in 2002:

After introducing its tougher standards in 2002, the Western Association's commission for community colleges began finding some of its members caught in a pattern of promising they would produce the more-extensive reviews of academic programs without actually following through. ¶ "The commission believed their claims in the past that they were doing it, or they were going to do it, or they had started to do it and had done some programs and would do the rest," said Barbara A. Beno, president of the community-college commission. "And then the colleges really dropped the ball."

.....I guess Beno didn't notice all of that college ball-droppage. But the Feds sure did:

The federal government soon noticed what was happening. The National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity [NACIQI]… last year began citing [WASC] for failing to ensure that its member colleges produced their required reports within two years. ¶ Faced with the prospect of losing its federal recognition, the commission responded. After placing 32 colleges on warning or probationary status during the previous three years, it added another 11 to the list this past January.

.....—Ah, the notorious “two-year rule.” Though it was adopted back in 2002, ACCJC/WASC had not been enforcing it. Now, it is enforcing it. And that’s why our two colleges in the SOCCCD are in trouble. We’d been giving the Accreds the ol’ “we’re on it” shuffle for longer than that, in part thanks to the manifest contempt with which the Accred process (and the Accred agency) is held by key members of our board of trustees (Tom Fuentes is the chief contemner, with Don Wagner following close behind).
.....Says Babs Beno, "The colleges often have a perception that when they don't meet the standards, that the commission has changed itself…It's a way of avoiding the idea that they're not meeting the standards."
.....Of course, it doesn’t help when Beno shows up, as she did two years ago (April, 2006), and declares that we’re making marvelous progress (overcoming trustee micromanagement, the "plague" of despair, etc.) when, in truth, we’re not.

• • • • •

.....With regard to the budget issue: denizens of SOCCCD know that we’re on basic aid in a county with unusually high property values. That means, in essence, that we’ve been affected by the state budget only by our internal rule, imposed by the board, to fund the colleges as though they were funded in the more typical fashion by the state. I.e., our colleges have experienced a kind of artificially-imposed penury. In fact, our district is sitting on a huge shitpile of money that's starting to draw flies.
.....Re lack of staff: as you know, our board has been particularly miserly with regard to reassigned time (i.e., non-instructional work, such as governance or administrative activities, assigned to faculty). Indeed, in the late 90s, it adopted a “rule” (it is not a binding policy) according to which RT costs are to be capped at 2% (in reality, the cap has shifted to a half percent higher). Meanwhile, the state has imposed more work on colleges—e.g., the notorious “SLO” initiative, more program review, etc.—that is non-instructional but must be done by faculty.

See also
The "two-year rule": the accreditation agency dropped the ball bigtime (DtB: 3/15/08)

Watch ACCJC's Babs Beno tell us she sees "a lot of progress"! (April, 2006)
(Beno appears at 6:27)


Watch the chancellor blame faculty for our Accred problems. Watch Trustee Fuentes essentially rejecting the Accreds' charge of board micromanagement! (March 2006)
(Fuentes' special moment starts at about 3:04)