Open Letter to the California Community Colleges Task Force on Student Success

Open Letter to the California Community Colleges Task Force on Student Success

December 3, 2011

Dear Task Force Members,

We, the English Department of Chabot College, have carefully considered the recommendations put forth and respond as follows:

We, like you, care passionately about our students and are frustrated at the impediments to learning at our college, most of which directly result from a lack of resources. We, like you, want to provide the classes that students want and need to receive certificates, earn AA degrees, and transfer.

However, we strongly support the mission statement of our college, which is to serve our entire community in all its diversity. Our students vary in so many, many ways, from age to socio-economic level, race to ethnic self-identity, language fluency to academic skills, self-knowledge to personal needs and goals. One student needs ESL classes so that she can help her granddaughter with her homework. Another, recently back from Iraq, seeks a creative writing class which can ease post-traumatic stress. Many others, first-generation college students from working class and low-income backgrounds. Some of our students come with clear academic and professional goals, and we as a college need and want to be able to offer the classes and support to help them get there. Many others come to explore, embarking on a process of self-discovery. California Community Colleges have historically been affordable, open-access institutions, designed to serve every member of the community and educate – in the broadest sense of developing mind, body, and spirit – the residents of our state. To this end, we do not support state-wide statutes that will prevent us, as academic professionals, from being able to make decisions on behalf of our specific, local community. We oppose standardized testing, and we oppose standardizing curriculum, as we oppose standardized assessment designed for placement; we hope the State will instead trust that we have the experience and expertise to create appropriate assessments, tailored to our classes, which in turn, are tailored to our understanding of our particular students.

Of utmost concern is our belief that many of the recommendations currently being put forth by the Task Force, if implemented, will hurt our students. Although the recommendations speak of “incentivizing” students for making such “choices” as enrolling full-time and completing their basic skills work first, we recognize that implementation of these poorly thought-out, if well-intentioned, recommendations will, in fact, amount to penalizing our students, the majority of whom work part-time or full-time out of economic necessity, and many of whom support families. It should also be noted that 94% of incoming students to Chabot currently assess into Basic Skills math and/or English classes (many require both). While we all would like to see students enroll in basic skills courses right away, we could not offer that number of basic skills English courses, even if every English teacher at our college taught nothing but basic skills every semester. And if we did, this would, of course, penalize the students who don’t need basic skills, but rather seek to complete Freshman English for transfer, as well as all of the students who are looking to fulfill GE units in humanities through our literature courses, as well as all of the students who are looking to take English courses for personal or professional enrichment and growth.

Another unintended outcome of the “Basic Skills first” recommendation would be to put pressure on us, as instructors, to pass students before they are ready, effectively lowering our standards, pushing us to simply “move them on” to make space for others, or to prevent us, as instructors, from continuing to serve hard-working but less-skilled students, who are making progress, but not necessarily yet “succeeding” (i.e., passing) at a prescribed rate. Out of this same desire to help our students, not penalize them, we oppose recommendations limiting repeatability, and we oppose the mandate that we align our course schedule based on student-articulated educational plans. We know that education is sometimes slow, and the path sometimes meanders, but we believe those students who require or simply desire that time for development and exploration – tax-payers in California—should be permitted time and space to do so.

Many students enter college not yet having the self-knowledge or experience to form a clear “pathway” and we don’t want to force any students to stick to a pathway (perhaps chosen somewhat randomly) that they later decide is not right for them; we, as educators, should not only provide classes that those students “chose for themselves” before ever having stepped into a college classroom. At the same time, those students who do have the experience and self-knowledge to embark on a path should absolutely have those classes available to them. In the last few years, however, due to state budget cuts, we haven’t had nearly enough English courses to offer a seat to every student – not the grandmother, not the war veteran, not the 18 year old looking to earn GE units and “decide what to do,” not the 30 year-old looking to transfer quickly, not the 40 year old professional who realizes he could move up at work if he had better writing skills. The current iteration of this Task Force effectively asks us to do more, with less, while compounding pressures on students and faculty alike to achieve goals which are far more individuated and complex than the document reflects; education is a process, often circuitous and sometimes downright messy.

This lack of resources is the most important thing we would like the Task Force to consider. We don’t have adequate resources to fund advising, counseling, or tutoring, let alone teach our students. We don’t have classes to offer them. We don’t have adequate computer labs and other needed facilities. And as was the case with No Child Left Behind, creating new rules and expectations on students without support or funding will have dire consequences, leaving many, many more, behind. We recommend that the Task Force consider the serious problems caused by a top-down, one-size-fits-all system of education in other states, and the implications, particularly on our most disadvantaged students, of burdening them with more threats, more pressure to move quickly and stay on one path, particularly in a time when the State is so unable or unwilling to fund the classes they need. We should remember that a lack of resources to accompany No Child Left Behind created the “teach to the test” mentality in our K12 schools, possibly a contributing factor to the high percentage of our students who assess into Basic Skills; too many students lost their art and music programs as schools buckled to the pressure of standardized testing; teachers lost the freedom to teach inventively and to teach to their own strengths and interests; students lost out, and so we all lose.

As educators, we will continue to look into ways we can better advise students, and the particular impediments to “success” at our own college which we can influence. Ideally, each college will have the freedom to explore different approaches, as well as to communicate these among ourselves, allowing each to implement the approaches that work best for the community of that college. But we cannot, for the sake of our students, reduce our definition of “success” to churning out certificates or degrees or getting students through pathways. We honor education and our students far too much for that.

Respectfully submitted,

Chabot College English Department