Angst for an Accreditor (Inside Higher Ed)…The Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges [ACCJC]…placed 41 (or 37 percent) of the 110 California community colleges on "sanction" from 2003 to 2008. A study of other regional accreditors in the United States shows that, during this same period, the percentage of their community colleges being sanctioned, or warned that their accreditation could be stripped, ranged from 0 to 6 percent….
The unusually large number of penalties for California's community colleges prompted an array of interest groups from the institutions to form a task force last year to study the accreditor's actions; its recommendations covered a wide swath of issues but can be summed up as urging the commission to focus on institutional "improvement rather than compliance."
Leaders of the accrediting commission largely rebutted the task force's findings, saying that the agency, in taking a tougher stance on institutional performance, is responding to increased pressure (from the federal government and elsewhere) to hold colleges accountable. … The dispute escalated last month when California's community college chancellor, Jack Scott, writing on behalf of the task force, complained to the U.S. Education Department that the ACCJC was not following its own bylaws in its process for selecting commissioners.
The issue at the core of the California clash – whether accreditation is designed to stimulate change within a college, or assure accountability to external audiences – is a fundamental one in the increasingly agitated national debates over higher education accreditation. And the dispute is the latest sign of tensions between the government, the agencies and their member institutions.
. . .
After submitting their written recommendations in October and meeting with a small group of commissioners shortly thereafter, task force members were initially told that they were not allowed to speak before the entire commission at their next meeting in January. When that decision was eventually reversed, Scott was given five minutes to sum up the task force’s findings, after which there was no public discussion.
Weeks after the meeting, ACCJC officials wrote a detailed critique of the task force’s suggestions and largely considered the matter solved. But, in March, the task force again asked to meet with the commission, this time at its annual retreat. Receiving no response to their request, task force members took offense, and have sought some intervention from the federal government.
. . .
By contrast, some regional accrediting bodies send informal letters to troubled institutions letting them know how they can reverse their fortunes before they come up for formal review again, essentially helping many save face while they privately correct potentially worrisome institutional issues.
. . .
“Administrators are scared of asking questions [about the accreditation process] for fear that, when they’re up for evaluation, there will be some backlash putting their accreditation at risk,” said Ron Norton Reel, president of the Community College Association, a constituent faculty union of the National Education Association, and a task force member. “The spirit that exists right now is one of punishment. We would like that to change to one of accomplishment.”
. . .
“Accreditation is higher education’s system of self-regulation,” wrote Lurelean B. Gaines and Barbara A. Beno, the accrediting body’s chair and president, respectively. “It is a peer review process and [colleges' accreditation liaison officers], as well as faculty, college administrative leaders and trustees have a professional obligation to read, seek to understand, and apply the standards to their own institutions.”
Still, they argue that “it often seems to be the case that those individuals and institutions that most misunderstand accreditation are those who don’t take advantage of existing accreditation training activities.”
Defending the ACCJC’s use of “public sanctions,” Gaines and Beno argue that when the commission made use of informal warnings, they did not carry much weight and were easy to dismiss.
“The genie is out of the bottle on this issue,” they write. “The [ACCJC] moved to all public sanctions many years ago in response to pressures from the Department of Education. The increasing public, student and government interest in institutional quality has created a climate in which more information about accreditation decisions is demanded.… In this time of increased expectations of transparency, it is not in the best interest of higher education’s system of self-regulation to try to regain privacy or secrecy of accreditor actions on institutions."
. . .
“The institutions are our members, and we communicate through their presidents and their accreditation liaison officers,” Beno said in an interview. “These third-party analyses are important, but they can’t supplant the view of the individual institutions. Also, I don’t think our response to the task force was dismissive. I thought it was quite sincere. I just think their work could have been done differently.”
Scott vehemently disagrees with Beno, arguing that he cannot think of a more representative body than the task force and that any suggestions, no matter their source, should be welcome by the commission.
“Other commissions, including [the Western Association of Schools and Colleges], let people voice themselves at meetings,” Scott said. “I just can’t understand their unwillingness to sit down and talk. They should say, ‘come on in.’ But, to put up a barrier and say that they’re not willing to listen to recommendations that are designed to improve the process, I just don’t understand.”….
No comments:
Post a Comment