Accreditation explained (On Mythbusters)

The explanation starts at about 00:37

Accreditation reports are wack

     Here’s how accreditation works. Your college labors to compose a self-study that’s dutifully written according to the Clueless Educationist Style Sheet, which is guaranteed to produce prose that impresses Paranormal Fans and fifth graders but that sends all literate people into paroxysms of laughter or dismay. Then the Accreds show up, go off to dark corners, and talk to everybody, including every crank and jackass within miles; next, after shaking their heads and making glum academic faces, the Accreds go home and get bitch slapped awhile by Babs Beno. That process ultimately yields a report that slams the college for not having enough “student learning outcomes” imbedded in its “mission statement” or in the seats of the new Performing Arts/Soccer Center—or for a failure to pursue digital delivery rubrics and co-curricular, asynaptic assessments. –Something like that.
     Yeah, then the college gnashes its teeth and wails for like six months, spiraling into an institutional depression; next, it labors mightily (and earnestly) to compose a follow-up report, which ‘splains how the college is taking all the accreds’ semi-confused criticisms super-seriously and running “at least” fifteen new committees to ensure that everybody’s on board with the “process,” which yields “do tasks,” which, naturally, are ugly and unrecognizable as anything any sensible person would ever do. College leaders sign it with their own blood and collapse into another corner. More tears. Everybody frets, muttering, “remember Compton.”

     So, anyway, accreditation self-study and follow-up reports often end up being perverse and artificial monstrosities, full of Orwellian creepoid verbulosity plus profound self-deception—and a dollop of flat dishonesty. I mean, if the Accreds show up and say that you’ve got yourself a nasty “plague of despair,” then you don’t do something sensible, like fire the source of said despair—usually a Chancellor or President or Vice President (or Board, but you can’t fire those people). No. Not in Accred World. Instead, you set up a committee to concoct “rules of civility,” such as, “smile and say ‘howdy do’!” or “respect all others and honor their feelings, even if they’re psychotic, and then draw a hand and tape it to your back.” (Patting yourself on the back. Get it?) –Stuff like that.
     Yeah, and when the Accreds tag you for the hideously unhealthy relationship between groups A and B, but then things change and so A and B are now, like, dating or something—and, in the meantime, C grows to fear and loathe B, threatening districtular collapse.... –Well, in that case, you make up some crap about how you’re “taking vigorous steps” to get A and B together. But, natch, you just let the C and B vexation fester beyond all recognition, cuz it's not relevant to the present accredular demands.
     Yeah, that’s the ol’ accreditation do-si-do. It’s very processular. It’s, um, measurable and, uh, based on factoidal and empirical data (probably pulled out of somebody’s a**).
     With that in mind,

If it were MY NEIGHBOR'S COOL BOXSTER, a college’s accreditation report would probably look something like this:

If it were KEN KESEY'S BUS, a college’s accreditation report would probably look something like this:

If it were MY BRO'S ULTRA-UTILITARIAN COROLLA, a college’s accreditation report would probably look something like this:

If it were an old silver DUNE BUGGY, a college’s accreditation report would probably look something like this:

If it were a SEXY RED FERRARI, a college’s accreditation report would probably  look something like this:

If it were a SLEEK AND AGILE TEN-SPEED BIKE, a college’s accreditation report would probably look something like this:

If it were SOME PUNK KID HANGIN' IN THE LIBRARY, a college’s accreditation report would probably look something like this:

If it were A PAIR OF SENNHEISER HD 800 HEADPHONES, a college’s accreditation report would probably look something like this:

ETC.

OK, IT'S TIME FOR SOME TOTALLY COOL BLUES (1964)

Tom Fuentes and the accreditation crisis at the South Orange County Community College District

Today, at Red County/OC Blog, contributor tylerh will be posting about the accreditation of our two colleges. He has graciously offered to include a link to this post, which offers the "faculty perspective" on this matter.

No doubt tylerh has opined that the South Orange County Community College District’s colleges will likely be reaccredited (early in 2009).

He is probably right.

But why has the question arisen in the first place? It has arisen because, back in January, the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC) sent letters to the two colleges of the district—Saddleback and Irvine Valley)—advising them that if they did not finally resolve long-standing difficulties, they would lose their accreditation.

Back in 2004, the accreditors dinged the colleges essentially for trustee micromanagement and a “plague of despair”—the latter largely engendered by the authoritarian, repellent, and incompetent “leadership” of the conservative Board Majority’s man, Chancellor Raghu P. Mathur.

Back in 2004, instead of canning Mathur and ceasing their micromanagement, the board gave Mathur a new contract and a generous salary (he makes about $300,000), and it continued to throw its weight around inappropriately—for instance, imposing incompetent and irregular elements in follow-up reports to the ACCJC.

During all of these years of accreditation difficulty, the most consistently defiant trustee has been Tom Fuentes, the former chair of the OC GOP, who is now up for reelection in November. He has displayed open contempt for the accreditors, even declaring, during board meetings, that, contrary to the ACCJC, it is not trustee micromanagement but rather the “macromanagement” of “others” that burdens our colleges. The others, of course, are the faculty, whom he routinely demonizes.

Unfortunately for Mr. Fuentes and the district, circumstances have changed on the accreditation front, for, not long ago, the Department of Education, in the course of pursuing its peculiar reforms, took ACCJC/WASC to task for its failure to enforce standards.

Thus it was that, in January, the colleges were informed that “institutions out of compliance with standards…are expected to correct deficiencies within a two-year period or the Commission must take action to terminate accreditation. …[T]he college has lapsed significantly beyond the … two-year rule and needs to ensure that these recommendations are completed resolved at the time of the October 2008 report.”

This has placed the colleges in a difficult situation, for how, after these many years of “hostility, cynicism, despair, and fear,” are the colleges supposed to emerge with the requisite chirpiness, idealism, and hope? Mathur is still the Chancellor, depressing morale and causing an alarming administrative turnover. The board remains defiantly behind their man, despite his manifest incompetence and unpopularity. (In December, it was revealed that, for many years, Mathur had allowed the district to drift toward noncompliance with the 50% law, a situation that recently forced the district to engage in a hasty and disruptive faculty hiring initiative.)

The conservative readership of OC Blog will no doubt be receptive to Fuentes’ efforts to blame the situation on a recalcitrant and "overpaid" faculty that refuses to be led by Mathur and that pursues only power. But I do hope that they will listen to Board President (and Fuentes ally) Don Wagner, who, for five months now, has been working with faculty (and others) to address our accreditation difficulties and draft the accreditation report on behalf of Irvine Valley College. Since he’s begun to work closely with faculty, he has expressed only praise and admiration for their excellence and hard work. I do hope that you will ask him whether the problem with the district is its faculty.

In the end, owing to the hard work and dedication of such groups, the colleges will likely avoid accreditation disaster. But if they do so, it will be despite Mr. Tom Fuentes.

In the Area 6 trustee race, Fuentes is running against Bob Bliss, a retired Saddleback College professor. Like Fuentes, Bliss is a conservative. But, unlike Fuentes, he will not place our beloved colleges in jeopardy.

For a more detailed account of our accreditation predicament and how we came to it, please see Tom Fuentes and SOCCCD's accreditation crisis.

Tom Fuentes and the SOCCCD's accreditation crisis

(A local political blogger asked me for some background on our district’s accreditation situation. I provided him with some notes and sources. I’ve provided an edited version of those notes below:) 

     What follows is a brief account of the accreditation situation of the South Orange County Community College District—SOCCCD, which comprises Saddleback College in Mission Viejo, Irvine Valley College in Irvine, and the ATEP facility at the old Tustin helicopter station (this money pit has yet to fully launch). 

     To avoid confusion, I should mention that districts are not accredited; rather, individual colleges are. Nevertheless, individual colleges can run afoul of the Accrediting Agency’s standards owing to problems or misconduct at the district level. (Compton College’s recent loss of accreditation largely concerned trustee and administrator misconduct.) 

OUR BOARD 

     Our board is dominated by right-wing political ideologues—Tom Fuentes and Don Wagner—who, to differing degrees, buy into right-wing stereotypes regarding state employees and unions—especially “teachers unions.” You know: college faculty are lazy and overpaid and they teach students atheism and homosexuality. Fuentes is more extreme, more ideological, and craftier than Wagner. Wagner, however, does sit on the board of Education Alliance, a group whose roots are in the early 90s effort to reduce faculty unions’ political muscle in California and whose original funding came from Christian Reconstructionist Howard Ahmanson, Jr. The following is a TV interview that illustrates the contempt with which Fuentes holds district faculty (he makes false claims 

about faculty workloads and pay): Fuentes’ (and to a lesser extent, Wagner’s) prejudices re faculty help explain why the board has stood by their man, the stunningly unpopular Chancellor Raghu Mathur, a conniving and ambitious incompetent, whose chief qualification is his willingness to do the board’s bidding. (Ironically, Mathur became an administrator when he was a member of a corrupt clique that controlled the faculty union in the 90s. In 1996, using the union’s political war chest, the clique paid for deceptive and homophobic fliers to secure the election of a “board majority.” In exchange for this support, the board maintained high faculty salaries, settled the clique’s scores, and promoted the administrative wannabes among them, including Mathur, who was made President of IVC. All of this is fairly well documented. See, for instance, the OC Weekly’s Adventures in advertising.) If you know anything about former OC GOP chair Tom Fuentes, then you know that he pursues politics strategically, maintaining and adjusting a networks of friends, allies, patrons, and prospects. Fuentes clearly regards Mathur as a member of Team Fuentes and Fuentes’ multi-faceted, endlessly creeping machine. That machine meshes with the machinations and agenda of OC "Republican Mafia" chief Mike Schroeder, who counts among his advisees OC DA Tony Rackauckas and former OC Sheriff Mike Carona (who nowadays awaits trial for corruption). Both Rackauckas and (especially) Carona have made appearances at the colleges, apparently at Fuentes' request.

     Mathur and Fuentes have a history that goes back to before Fuentes’ entry onto the board in 2000.

ACCREDITATION: 

     I won’t review our district’s chronic troubles with the accrediting agency, which trace back to 1997 or so. I’ll stick with recent events. In 2004, each college underwent the usual accreditation review process, which involves the filing of a report (by each college) followed by receipt of an Accreditation action letter. That time, unsurprisingly, the Accreds (ACCJC/WASC) tagged the colleges essentially for 

• Trustee micromanagement 

• A continued plague of fear and despair at the colleges (caused largely by Mathur’s reliance on fear and his unremitting micromanagement) 

• Unclearness about roles and responsibilities (of groups such as trustees, faculty, et al.) 

     Now, in truth, the Accreds (I mean our particular agency, ACCJC) have been all bark and no bite for quite some time. And so it is understandable that some denizens of the community college scene are skeptical of Accred threats and concerns. Such skepticism combined with the board majority’s dismissive attitude toward the Accreds and the Accreds' standards set the stage for ongoing trustee shenanigans and game-playing, especially by Fuentes, yielding the demand for further “progress” reports. (This story is told in the documents listed below.) Fuentes routinely expresses contempt for faculty; but, at least until 2008, he also routinely and openly expressed contempt for the accrediting agency (ACCJC/WASC) and the accrediting process, apparently even adopting the wacky notion that the system is fixed and that, in reality, “the faculty” write everything, including the agency’s findings. (I overheard him say this myself. Others will report similar Fuentean comments.) The following 9-minute video from 2006 presents Fuentes as open contemner of the ACCJC and its charge that SOCCCD trustees engage in micromanagement: Mathur, a man who knows little but who knows how to exploit others' prejudices, by all accounts has for years worked to portray faculty leaders (to largely clueless and absentee trustees) as seeking to “control" the colleges and the district. And so we should not be surprised that Fuentes—in the above scene and elsewhere—has asserted, contrary to the Accreds, that the problem with the district is not so much board micromanagement as it is “the macromanagement of others,” namely, faculty. At bottom, Fuentes is a conspiracy theorist, and like most of that ilk, evidence to the contrary of his view is invisible to him. (I’ll mention only in passing that, since December of ’96, members of the board majority, none of whom are educators or intellectuals, have embraced a “top-down” model of management and have often applied the language of business to our colleges. Meanwhile, the Ed Code and statutes are meant to give to faculty considerable authority over such matters as hiring, course development, and program development.) Unfortunately, during the writing of our last “progress” reports in 2007, trustees meddled with the process, violating various standards and guidelines. Wagner insisted on inserting incompetent and defensive language into the report, to which the faculty senates objected mightily on grounds of accuracy and professionalism. Nevertheless, Wagner (and Mathur and Fuentes) had their way, and so, late in ’07, the reports were submitted, complete with undocumented and poorly written elements. In January of ’08, the colleges received the harshest Accred action letters to date. 

THE D.O.E. 

     In recent years, the Bush Department of Education has pursued its peculiar reforms, and this eventually led to, among other things, a harsh review of ACCJC/WASC, much of it deserved. In particular, the DoE tagged the Accreds for failing to enforce their own standards, allowing institutions to write progress report after progress report. The Accreds clearly failed to enforce in particular the “two year” rule, according to which problems (e.g., board micromanagement) are to be “addressed” (i.e., fixed) by a college within two years. Or else. (See Community colleges in California feel the heat and The two-year rule.) Thus the action letters received in January (this is the last we’ve heard from the Accreds) stated in no uncertain terms that all problems must be “addressed” or else accreditation would cease. Final reports from the colleges are due (to the Accreds) in October (i.e., in two months). The Accreds will make their decisions in January . 

DOCUMENTS: 

     All of the relevant documents (including the colleges’ “progress” reports, the Accreds’ “action letters,” etc.) are readily available at the two colleges’ websites: Saddleback College: accreditation Irvine Valley College: accreditation For each site above, the first document listed is the crucial Accred action letter of January ’08: January 31, 2008 ACCJC letter to Saddleback College (pdf) January 31, 2008 ACCJC letter to Irvine Valley College (pdf) I quote from the Saddleback Accred letter (page 2): I also wish to inform you that … institutions out of compliance with standards or on sanction are expected to correct deficiencies within a two-year period or the Commission must take action to terminate accreditation. …[T]he college has lapsed significantly beyond the … two-year rule and needs to ensure that these recommendations are completed resolved at the time of the October 2008 report. Essentially, the “recommendations” (i.e., problems cited) are: • The college needs to complete writing of “student learning outcomes.” (SLOs are absurd requirements born of educationist twaddle and conservative “performance” demands. Saddleback failed to take care of the requirements on time.) • The board must cease its micromanagement. (Examples of micromanagement include the board's ending the colleges' memberships in the American Library Association because the AAA are a bunch of "liberal busybodies" and the Fuentes-led action of denying approval of a Study Abroad trip to Spain on the grounds that Spain had withdrawn its troops from Iraq and had thereby "abandoned our fighting men and women." After a public outcry, the board reversed its decision.) • All groups must come together to overcome “hostility, cynicism, despair, and fear….” (The hostility, etc., of course, is largely created by Mathur, who rules with fear, as various recent actions illustrate.) The “recommendations” listed in the IVC letter are similar, though they do not include mention of “student learning outcomes.” 

THE ACCREDS SEEM TO MEAN BUSINESS 

     There are indications that, in the last year or so, the ACCJC is more stringent in its demands and much less tolerant of college foot-dragging re accreditation “recommendations.” See, for instance, this recent LA times article: Los Angeles Southwest College is put on probation: District officials call the move by the regional accrediting agency 'an overreaction' and 'completely unprecedented.'. I should add that, upon receipt of the ’08 Accred letters, the politically ambitious Wagner apparently saw that the board’s (and especially his own) arrogance had now placed the colleges in danger of losing their accreditation. Since early ’08, Wagner, now president of the board, has worked hard to deal with this crisis. In the spring of ’08, each college formed a “task force” to address the crisis and to write the report. Wagner joined the IVC “task force,” and, by all accounts, he has worked hard and in good faith with faculty (and administrators, et al.). They’ve done great work. (See "All college meeting" video, Part 1 and Part 2.) Owing to his task force experience, which has stretched for many months, Wagner seems to have gained considerable respect for the faculty he has been compelled to work with. During board meetings, he now refers to their excellence and dedication. It would seem that he no longer embraces the daft notion that faculty leaders seek to “take over” the district or its colleges, whatever that was supposed to mean. Meanwhile, as near as I can tell, Fuentes remains an unrepentant demonizer of faculty. If, in the end, our colleges are reaccredited, it will be in spite of Tom Fuentes.

Indications of a willingness to kick academic butt

Recently, I attended a meeting in which faculty and others discussed Saddleback College’s accreditation difficulty. The Accreds had sent the college a letter in February essentially requiring the college to “address” long-standing recommendations (in a report due Oct. 15)—or else.

Clearly, one reason the Accreds’ latest threat has not inspired much reaction in some is the conviction that the Accreds are all bark and no bite. Given their history, that view is understandable. The SOCCCD’s two colleges have been dinged for trustee micromanagement and a “plague of despair” for years. (Hell, they were carping about that ten years ago!) We’re still living under such dingage. And we’re still accredited.

But things change. At the meeting, I explained the special circumstances that we are now in: some time ago, the Dept. of Education spanked the Accrediting agency (ACCJC/WASC) hard for failing to enforce its own rules—for being namby-pamby. Prima facie, this gives the Accreds a motive to finally kick some academic butt.

It’s a bit more complex than that—we’ve reported on the details here on this blog for quite some time—but, essentially, we’d be taking a hell of a chance ignoring or discounting the Accred’s threat to pull the colleges' tickets. (Both of our colleges got such letters.)

Well now hear this. Our old pal Jeff Gottlieb over at the Times is reporting on some Accred butt-kickage in LA (Los Angeles Southwest College is put on probation).

According to Jeff, “Los Angeles Southwest College has been placed on probation by the regional accrediting agency, an action local college officials call unwarranted.”

Here’s the kicker. The president of Southwest asserts that “It's completely unprecedented to put a college on probation where there was no previous indication the college was in trouble….”

He notes, reports Jeff, that “probation was primarily given to colleges that failed to respond to accreditors' recommendations from previous visits.” That’s not Southwest’s situation.

So, here’s evidence that things have changed in Accredville re butt-kickage. Take note.