MINUTES
October 19 & 25 and November 8, 2011
Attendees 10/19/2011: Jennifer Lange, Anh Nguyen, Salward Amade, Jun Tayao, Giselle Ruiz, Nicole
Morell-Montes, Matt Kritscher
Attendees, 10/25/2011: Jennifer Lange, Bio/CTL, Melissa Cano, Student, Anyd Jones, Student,
Andrew Pierson, Psychology, Alisa Klevens, English/Language Arts, Katie Hern, English, Becky
Plaza, Counseling, Jose R Bañuelos, student, Linnea Wahamaki, ESL. Kent Uchiyama, ESL, Hisako
Hintz, ESL, Carolyn Arnold, IR, Homeira Foth, English/WRAC, Rani Nijjar, Psychology, Jeanne
Wilson, Special Programs, Matt Kritscher, Counseling, Carey Harbin, Counseling, Stacey Moore,
Counseling, Katrin Field, Assessment, Don Plondke, Geography, Eric Lin, Anatomy student, Leilani deGusman, Anatomy student, Marcia Corcoran, Language Arts Dean, Patricia Shannon, SOTA/Chair
Attendees, 11/8/2011: Marcia Corcoran, Language Arts Dean, Carolyn Arnold, IR, Jane Wolford,
History, Alisa Klevens, English, Rani Nijjar, Psychology, Patricia Shannon, SOTA/Chair
Discussion/Minutes
Prior to these meetings, a link to the original Task Force for Student Success Recommendations, and a summary document were emailed to the college. All Groupwise “Chabot” recipients were invited to attend one of three „public‟ meetings: the Staff Development meeting, a meeting held at 430 PM on
October 19, and the Basic Skills Committee Meeting of 10/25/2011. Notes were taken at all of these meetings. Further, those who could not attend any of these meetings or who held additional meetings were asked to forward their comments to Patricia Shannon. All of these notes and emails were summarized into a “response” document, which was reviewed at the November 11 th
meeting and sent to the “Chabot” recipients, again soliciting comments. These comments were integrated and the final document was forwarded to the Task Force and posted on the Task Force response website. A copy of the response follows.
We believe that the intention of the Student Success Task Force Recommendations is to improve student success, particularly among student populations who are often the least likely to persist and succeed. Few of us are satisfied with the current number of students who meet their education goals. We lose far too many Basic Skills students along the way. Thus, many of us strive continuously to improve and to enable more students to be successful.
Specifically, many of the initiatives, pilots, and policies adopted at Chabot College are in line with these recommendations. This response is an aggregate of three different public forums, emails and letters, and conversations with concerned faculty, administrators, staff, and students.
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If all of these recommendations were to be implemented as a whole, the net effect could significantly improve basic skills student success. However, that is unlikely to occur. Instead, we are likely to see piecemeal implementation with those items that can be achieved through purely legislative means being implemented while those recommendations requiring additional resources fall to the wayside. We cannot ignore this likely consequence. It makes us very sensitive to the potential and impact of each part and what are the likely barriers to implementation within our community. Moreover, the recommendations themselves reflect a concern and response to our current fiscal situation. For example, the recommendations use a
“revised” mission statement and priorities that do not reflect the longstanding mission statement of the community colleges. We are deeply concerned and unwilling to relinquish the
“community” in community college.
Community Colleges will collaborate with the State
Board of Education, the California Department of Education, and other statewide efforts to define and address college and career readiness.
Recommendation 1.1 Community Colleges will collaborate with K-12 education to jointly develop common standards for college and career readiness that are aligned with high school exit standards.
We are concerned that the onus for development falls on community colleges. K-12 education knows what is needed for college and career readiness and that many students leave their systems inadequately prepared. That is the core problem, not the lack of common standards.
Community colleges will provide stronger support for students entering college to identify and meet their goals. Stronger support will be facilitated by centralized, integrated and student-friendly technology to better guide students in their educational planning process.
Recommendation 2.1 Community colleges will develop and implement a common centralized assessment for English reading and writing, mathematics, and English as a Second Language (ESL) that can provide diagnostic information to inform curriculum development and student placement and that, over time, will be aligned with the K-12 Common Core State Standards and assessments.
Over the past few years, we have worked to increase the number of students who assess and evaluated the predictive accuracy of assessment scores to student success, particularly in remedial English. While assessment tests adequately predict readiness for college English, they are not reliable predictors of student success within multicourse sequences of remedial
English. With this in mind, we are concerned about requiring the use of a state-wide common assessment instrument, which could in turn require relying solely on the assessment score for placement.
Recommendation 2.2 Require all incoming community college students to: (1) participate in (a) diagnostic assessment and (b) orientation, and (2) develop an education plan.
Two years ago, the Chabot Basic Skills Committee adopted a policy advocating a strong start for students, including assessment, orientation, and counseling. However, given the cuts to
Student Services, this recommendation cannot be implemented with our existing resources, and reallocation will not solve the underlying funding gap. We have piloted innovative counseling strategies. Based on a successful pilot, we have implemented quick question access to counselors. We know that alternative delivery modes exist, but for many students, one-on-one sessions are still needed. We also could take steps that limit access and scheduling impact, for example, in setting an application deadline, such as 60 days from the beginning of the fall semester, or we could offer more late start or accelerated classes, and
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these would help us provide a stronger start for students. Either of these steps would require significant internal reorganization and present funding issues, but even if both were implemented, we would still need more resources to ensure that all incoming students get the appropriate guidance.
Recommendation 2.3 Community colleges will develop and use centralized and integrated technology, which can be accessed through campus or district web portals, to better guide students in their educational process.
Technology can help. Many of our students have computers and access to smart phones. The question is, can they use them to achieve their planning and scheduling needs? For example, could we use Blackboard (our current online learning platform) or an e-technology meeting forum to conduct group counseling and orientation? Probably. However, unless we have the infrastructure, including support staff, to train, implement, and support faculty, staff, and students in the use of these tools, they will not address the problem. Moreover, a great deal of the support must be local. We would need additional resources to implement this recommendation.
Recommendation 2.4 Require students whose diagnostic assessments show a lack of readiness for college to participate in a support resource, such as a student success course, provided by the college for new students.
Historically, our new student population has been ~3000 students, of whom over 94% require remediation in either mathematics or English. At this time, we could not address this requirement even if we converted all of our existing psych-counseling courses to student success courses. We would have to cannibalize other disciplines in order to meet the requirement, which is not acceptable. Moreover, research shows that students acquire these skills best when such support resources are tied to the learning context of the students in their other classes: relevance and context are critical. We believe the recommendation should allow for either general or contextual delivery of student success courses. We would need additional resources to implement this recommendation.
Recommendation 2.5 Encourage students to declare a program of study upon admission and require declaration by the end their second term.
First, we recognize that having a plan tends to help students move through the educational process. Most students declare an Education Goal when applying to admission, and these goals are often unclear and sometimes unrealistic. Many new students do not know what they want to do or learn. Their courses and experiences provide the needed opportunity to explore a variety of possible subjects. A key component of education is the opportunity for such exploration. Developing a plan or a path is necessary; however, this recommendation taken with others, may put in place a system where students who change their minds or are undecided (majors or paths) will be penalized. We are also unsure how such a system will work, given the different kinds of educational goals that community college students have — not everyone‟s goal neatly fits in a path or Education Plan, especially students who are undecided and need more focused counseling. We need to make it clearer to students how to traverse the path through college. At the same time, we offer many programs, certificates, and we work with many transfer institutions each with their own requirements. Often, the paths are complicated; thus, students need support in identifying and mapping their paths. Given our current ratio of counselors to students, we lack the resources to implement this recommendation as framed.
Community colleges will incentivize those student behaviors that are associated with their eventual success.
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Recommendation 3.1 The Community Colleges will adopt system-wide enrollment priorities that: (1) reflect the core mission of transfer, career technical education and basic skills development; (2) encourage students to identify their educational objective and follow a prescribed path most likely to lead to success; (3) ensure access and the opportunity for success for new students; and (4) incentivize students to make progress toward their educational goal.
Encouraging students to identify their goals and follow a path that will likely lead to success and ensuring access to the courses and services they need for success are a basic requirement for colleges. We can do better in both of these areas. We can also establish policies that encourage progress. However, incentives (and consequences) need to be carefully evaluated taking our student population into account. We need to ensure that we do not disproportionately impact students who come to us without the necessary academic or social capital to succeed in college.
While we understand the conditions that led to this point, we are deeply concerned about the revision to our mission and the setting of priorities. We are concerned about the profound impact of these shifts to the deep and rich service we provide as a community college.
Recommendation 3.2 Require students receiving Board of Governors (BOG) fee waivers to meet various conditions and requirements, as specified below.
BOG waivers currently require students to make progress. We should rigorously enforce those standards. However, we disagree with a philosophy that requires students to identify and move along a pathway without deviation.
Recommendation 3.3 Community Colleges will provide students the opportunity to consider the benefits of full-time enrollment.
Advising students of the benefits, including the potential for greater success, of full-time enrollment is something we already do. However, most of our students who are part-time are part-time because their personal situations require it. Given the continuing cuts to Student
Loan Programs and other human services and student support, it is unlikely that we would be able to address the issues that keep many part-time students from becoming full-time.
Recommendation 3.4 Community Colleges will require students to begin addressing basic skills deficiencies in their first year and continue remediation as part of their education plan.
Our Basic Skills research affirms that remediation, particularly in English, tends to improve success across the curriculum. Thus, students should begin remediation as soon as possible.
However, approximately 94% of our new students who assess require either mathematics or
English remediation. Historically, our freshman class has been about 3000 students.
Beginning to redress all of these students‟ remedial needs by the second semester of their first year could significantly impact our ability to offer CTE and transfer-level academic programs on campus. Thus, this recommendation could not be implemented, as written, without severe disruption to the entire college. This is not simply a fiscal problem. It is about competing interests, resources, sequences, policies, and needs across the college.
We are also concerned that such a requirement will put an emphasis on English and mathematics remediation to the exclusion of other disciplines. Students who attended the public forums or commented by email believe that being labeled as remedial or basic skills students is a stigma and puts up a barrier to their success, preventing them from taking other classes. The Chabot Basic Skills Committee adopted a policy that holds „we are all basic skills educators.‟ We believe that students can acquire the higher order thinking, reading, and
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writing skills they need for college success in courses across the curriculum concurrently with remediation. Such efforts complement and reinforce what Basic Skills students learn in their developmental courses in English and mathematics. We continue to pilot and implement innovative applications of this policy.
In summary, we concur that students should begin remediation early, rather than late.
However, because of the impact this requirement could have for colleges, we advocate gradual implementation and we recommend encouraging a wide latitude in defining remediation, including student success courses, linked tutoring or study groups, a variety of linked learning support, and interdisciplinary efforts. Here is a place where incentives and alternative funding models could be very helpful. Implementation of this recommendation without significant impact to transfer-level and career offerings would require additional resources.
Community colleges will focus course offerings on meeting student needs.
Recommendation 4.1 Community Colleges will use the requirements for a student to complete a program of study, along with state and local data, including enrollment trends and labor market demand to develop course schedules and determine course offerings.
Our current curriculum and enrollment management processes already use program and local community needs to develop schedules and offerings. Each college has to balance the needs of a broad mix of students, new and continuing, who are pursuing a wide variety of education goals. We provide the broadest possible access to basic skills, transfer-level courses, and career certificate and program courses with increasingly limited resources. For each college, these decisions are based on the needs of the students.
We believe that this recommendation undercuts the capacity of educators to decide what courses best meet those needs. We believe that this recommendation also guts the capacity of the college to meet community needs that are neither academic nor job related. This recommendation is meant to provide the fiscal teeth to Recommendation 3.1, by limiting what the college can claim for apportionment to those classes that meet the revised mission and priorities. Further, this recommendation gives the Chan cellor‟s Office additional authority to make policy decisions, removing local control over the college and its programs.
The community college system will develop a cohesive statewide framework for the delivery of basic skills educational services.
Recommendation 5.1 Community Colleges will support the development of alternatives to traditional basic skills curriculum and incentivize colleges to take to scale model programs for delivering basic skills instruction.
We are deeply concerned that care be taken about incentive programs. Certainly, our existing framework provides very little opportunity for the college to implement radical change, and providing those opportunities, specifically in redesign of curriculum and innovative instruction, is needed. However, in a situation in which funding is desperately needed, we are concerned that people will make change simply to obtain the funding rather than making change as a consequence of careful research and study.
Recommendation 5.2 The state should develop a comprehensive strategy for addressing basic skills education in California that results in a system that provides all adults with the access to education in mathematics, English, and English as a Second Language (ESL.)
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These students are not being served anywhere, and they need to be. Improving English and mathematics skills is a path to better and higher paying jobs for these students. In addition to determining where they are best served, the legislature should also ensure that funding is designated solely for their education and not shifted into other program support.
More specifically, we ask that the task force include specific language recognizing skills-based
ESL courses as vocational courses since they directly improve our students‟ employability by giving them skills that allow them to advance at work or to secure better jobs. These courses are thus fulfilling the report‟s aim to provide courses that lead to greater employability. Even if they do not lead directly to a CTE certificate, ESL courses provide students the English they need to work and better themselves. Unless they are protected by specific language, ESL courses will be cut by pressured administrators to save money, and this will undermine the very intent of one of the task force‟s main recommendations: to channel resources into programs that directl y improve our students‟ employability.
Locale drives what is needed for ESL. We have deep concerns that centralized assessment, policy, and program control will remove the capacity of our college to respond to the needs of our community. We are concerned that budget concerns will drive pedagogical decisions
(moving to accelerated programs), and that a push to full-time status will disenfranchise many adult learners.
The community college system will develop and support the continued and focused professional development for all faculty and staff.
Recommendation 6.1 Community colleges will create a continuum of strategic professional development opportunities, for all faculty, staff and administrators to be better prepared to respond to the evolving student needs and measures of student success.
Flex day activities at our campus are utilized for college and district announcements and critical department business such as scheduling, budget cuts, SLO assessment, and program review, and funding is non-existent. This is necessary because gathering faculty and staff together to work on these tasks is impossible when classes are in session. We use our flex days to promote professional development, including basic skills pedagogy, to the best of our ability when these extremely high priority tasks are complete, but funding for planning and activities is nonexistent.
Holding more Flex Days is highly resisted by the faculty because they see it not as a gain of professional development time, but as a loss of instructional time. Facilitating a large shift in teaching practices is difficult in afternoon-length workshops, multiple-day intensives are needed. We recommend that the state finance additional days in the academic year to accomplish major professional development tasks. Funding would also need to be provided for adjunct faculty to attend the full session, and specific guidelines for adjuncts who teach at multiple schools would need to be developed.
We are also very concerned about using professional development time for activities
"mandated" by the state. The document is unclear as to the exact meaning of this. We would prefer that the state give general goals, and each college can specifically determine their institutional goals and activities that could be supported using resources made available by a state professional development network.
Recommendation 6.2 Community Colleges will direct professional development resources targeted at both faculty and staff toward improving basic skills instruction and support services.
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There are no professional development funds. We use what resources we have to the best of our ability, but the lack of funding makes this very difficult. See above.
Chapter 7. POLICY STATEMENT: Enable Efficient Statewide Leadership and Increase
Coordination Among Colleges
Recommendation 7.1 The state should develop and support a strong community college system office with commensurate authority, appropriate staffing, and adequate resources to provide leadership, oversight, technical assistance and dissemination of best practices. Further, the state should grant the
Community College Chancellor’s Office the authority to implement policy, consistent with state law.
We realize that the Chancellor‟s Office has very limited resources, perhaps inadequate resources for the responsibilities placed on the office. However, if this recommendation is implemented as expressed, we are concerned about policy implementation and local control.
Recommendation 7.2 In collaboration with the CCC Cha ncellor’s Office, districts and colleges will identify specific goals for student success and report their progress towards meeting these goals in a public and transparent manner (consistent with Recommendation 7.3).
See below.
Recommendation 7.3 Implement a student success score card.
We have deep concerns about definitions of success. Early in this document, a broad definition was provided. However, through the balance of the recommendations, a narrower definition of success seems to have been used, that is, where success is a prescribed path that moves students as quickly as possible through basic skills and into either transfer or career endpoints. We believe this cuts out broad segments of our student population — students who return to our college after being laid off or who seek new skills to obtain positions in new or different fields, and it actively discourages students from experimentation or exploration. The score card should measure success across the broad definition proposed in the introduction.
Recommendation 7.4 The state of California should develop and support a longitudinal student record system to monitor student progress from elementary through postsecondary education and into the workplace.
From a research perspective, this would be intriguing. However, we believe that such systems represent an intrusive oversight of the education process that will achieve little. We believe that it represents still another burden for record-keeping and oversight for an already overburdened system.
Both the redirection of existing resources and the acquisition of new resources will be necessary to implement the recommendations contained in this report.
Recommendation 8.1 Consolidate select categorical programs .
We do not support flexibility or block grant categorical funding. Flexibility severs the categorical funding from its legislative intent defined in statutory Ed Code requirements. It also eliminates Chancellors Office oversight of the implementation of Title 5 regulations at the local level. This oversight is essential for program integrity and fiscal accountability. We are
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concerned that consolidation could mean that within each new proposed category, funding allocation becomes a question. Existing programs that serve underrepresented populations could be lost, depending on who makes the decisions.
Recommendation 8.2 Invest in the Student Support Initiative
Our research shows that there are things we can and should do to improve student success. We can support students throughout their college experience in many ways —through academic and support services and through effective policies and clear communication. The draconian cuts to education make providing that support difficult, if not impossible. Early in this document, the statement was made that we should limit access —the very thing community colleges were intended to guarantee— to foster success. We are resisting limiting access because for many of our students, we are the only option. The Task Force should also resist limiting access. We should argue and demand additional funding because we serve more students than any other
California college system for the lowest cost (per student). Given the breadth and depth of the needs we meet, we are astoundingly successful. Yes, support the initiative, and please fight harder for the funding we need for both student support and academic instruction.
Recommendation 8.3 Establish an alternative funding model to encourage innovation and flexibility in the delivery of basic skills instruction.
Again, we urge caution with regard to using incentive programs for encouraging innovation.
Yes, alternative models are needed, but innovation should be made based on best practices and research, not as means for obtaining funding.
Recommendation 8.4 Do not implement outcomes-based funding at this time.
We concur.
The current research does not suggest that outcomes-based funding serves students.
Related Recommendation for an Accountability Score Card
See earlier comments on score card.
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