Transcript for “Strategies for Collaborating with California’s Community Colleges” presentation by Dr. Janet Fulks and Dr. Nancy Jones, as part of the California College Transitions Summit.
DR. JANET FULKS:Hi. I’m a Biologist, so we looked at each other and thought: maybe they’re going to take a bio break at this point, but I guess we have a long working lunch. So we’ll go ahead and begin with our presentation.
We want to thank you so much for having us here from the Academic Senate. We’re so pleased to be with you, and it’s been several years now that the California Community College Academic Senate has begun to actually think about this whole issue in streamlining pathways and how we can collaborate.
So our question today is: Who holds the key to this transition? And Nancy is a past Academic Senate President, [or excuse me], Current Academic Senate President, locally, and she works with Voc. Ed, and I am our Executive Committee at the statewide level and I’m Chair of our Basic Skills and Non-Credit.
So what would we like you to walk away with today? First of all, we would like for you to be able to explain to each other what we do as Academic Senate because we’re a really odd animal. I’ll try to explain that to you because I think a lot of the bridging and transitioning is going to be facilitated if you know how we work and who we are. As I said to Mariann, we’re not just --- we want to give you our credentials, so that you’ll know what we can do together. We want to explain some of the current challenges.
I think there have been great data shared about what the situation is in the state and some good examples about what’s happening, but I thought that it would be very important for you to understand what challenge we community colleges have, so that we can approach it together hand-in-hand as partners because it’s not a simple bridge that you walk across. There are a lot of components to it.
We want to discuss potential solutions and we’ve got some for you, and Nancy’s going to share some real practical things that we’ve been doing that might be models for the future to work with you individually. And we also as we talked about this and we met with Maryann several times. We were trying to figure out: How do we approach this from a way that’s really honest as far as what our perspective is and what your perspective is and we finally ended up saying: We want you to think about evaluating student-centered transitions and as adult educators you’re tops in that. You’re right there thinking about that. I’m not sure in higher education student centered is always the foremost thing that’s on our decision-making platter. Sometimes it has to do with other things, so we’re looking at a student centered approach. And then finally at lunch as Mariann said, it’s going to be a working lunch and we’re hoping that you’ll give us some feedback as far as potential linkages that we haven’t thought about. We’re really out there open ready to do whatever it takes: write grants, work together, but we need to know if you think the ones that we’ve got going work and if you have other ideas.
So, let me just share with you that this PowerPoint is broken in a way that I couldn’t fix it and Nancy couldn’t fix it, so each line is going to come separately and that frustrates us but just please be patient with us. The California Community College for Academic Senates is very unique. You’re not going to find this existing anywhere else in the world. It is a group where we want to foster faculty participation. We do develop and promote policies statewide. We, in the last couple of years, we’ve been very effective in moving and shaking Basic Skills throughout the state and we serve as the official voice of the faculty, 69,000 faculty, serving 2.9 million students, in 110 colleges. So we have this big base behind us, and our goal is to strengthen the faculty at the local colleges. Just in case you thought, "Wow that’s a pretty hefty idea they had. Why do they want to do that?" It’s actually in our Education Code. So we have the power to do this, the power to be the voice and we’re at every table that talks about community college education policy because we’ve been given it in law.
So there are ten things that we do which we call affectionately the 10 + 1. So we do ten things and one thing and I thought one thing that I might like to talk to you about just briefly if you look at these first sects. If you look down there at number 5, community college faculty have primacy in determining these things statewide and on number 5: Standards and Policies Regarding Student Preparation and Success.
We have an interesting situation that we’re working on this year as we’ve been more focused on Basic Skills we’ve had to look at our success rates, and I don’t know if you’ve seen the basic skills success rate in the state, most of you have, right? The last two decades it has been flat. Right around 50% and 60%. We’re not proud of that and we want to see it change, but it’s been there for 20 years. So we started looking at some of the problems, and one of them is that, unlike every other state that we’ve looked at in the United States, when you come to a community college in California, you will find there are probably no prerequisites for you to take a college-level course. So you can go into Psych. 101, you can go into History, you can go into many of these other courses and there is not a requirement to be able to read or write at college level. And that has to do with a case that was settled out of court,the Maldiff case several years ago.
We don’t think that’s serving our students well because when we looked at our graduation, our success rates in those classes, they were lower than our basic skills college success rates. We’re thinking we have not been very good at directing them and we’re working on that right now. But there’s a lot of discussion and piloting that has to go on.
We also talk about many other processes which you’ve probably talked about on your campuses and with your students, but we have a great deal of authority based in law to be able to affect them. So what that,I hope,says to you is that,if you’re in an adult ed. program on a high school campus or anywhere, if you really want to look at transitioning and linkages and bridges, find the Academic Senate President at the nearby community college. They can help to guide you to people that will make the connection.
Now, I hate to say this, but if you do come and you go from the administrative level and try to work your way down, you may not have quite as warm a reception. Here’s a key, check it out with the local Senate President and work with the faculty and then get the guidance from there and they may say,"Oh well, you need to speak with this administrator," but I guarantee you that it will be a much warmer reception.
(Nancy: So from those from Orange County, I’ll help you where I can.)
JANET: Yes. Go talk with Nancy. Mariann asked me to just explain a little bit about well, how is the Chancellor’s office different than and you may see here that they have a mission and a vision which is very much more like a government organization and they’re to guide us and they’ve done just a great job in incorporating us in decision making but this is basically where they’re at and we have a very broad mission in Ed. Codethat we meet and most of you know that. We have to greet and meet and adopt everyone and we have to help everyone get to wherever they want to go. So it’s unlike the UCs and the CSUs, who have a much more narrow focus.
Mariann’s asked me, “Well, how do you cooperate with the Chancellor’s office?” and my response was maybe five years ago we wouldn’t have said this,but currently I can say that we cooperated at every level. When something comes up, we’re called to the table and consultation counseling and we participate in giving our opinionso it’s always got to be moderated by the amount of budgets available and other practical things but we sit on many of the policy making committees. And recently as far as curriculum and program go, program go, we’ve been the leaders in making policy that have to do with educational things, and so as you think about transitioning and bridging you can also think about the statewide academic Senate and we have a website and we have a lot of access where you can get your concerns to us there. And then finally we have found that everything works better when you collaborate. Nothing works well when you just say, “This is my right. We’re going to do this!”
The basic skills initiative in California for the last four years has been a remarkable change. It’s a culture change. It’s something that I hope this budget crisis doesn’t --- not able to squelch, but I feel as though it’s going to be very challenged. So as far as working with high schools and administrators and working through the 110 colleges,ourBasic SkillsInitiative has been huge.
Now we’re going to move on to this Student Centered Approach to Transitioning and that’s enough about why we’re here and why Mariann invited us and what we do and what we hope we can do with and for you.
First of all, I think you’ve heard it several times adequate guidance is really important and in California community colleges we’re actually legislated. We have legal mandates that we have to fulfill that we have to do matriculation, and I’m not sure how many of you heard this but that took an over 50% cut and the funding for matriculation is now flexible. So how much guidance students really get is something that although we will say in every document we print is the most important thing for those students that come to us-- we’re not able to maintain that funding base, and we’re worried about the challenges this year.
We have learned through the basic skills initiative that we need to respect the time, talent and needs of all of our students. They are not purely academic. The great number of them are vocational. They have ESL needs. They just want to be good parents that can help their students with homework. We have to do a lot of things to meet those kinds of needs that the students have.
We discovered in the last couple of years that we have not been so clear in our expectations of what those students need to have to be successful, so we’ve been working this year-- and I’m really pleased that some community college faculty out here that have been working recently on a project that I’ll talk about-- to clearly identify expectations at every level up to college and transfer level.
We want to streamline those pathways because as we have previously stated people are not going to be able to go straight through those pathways the way that traditionally we thought they might. We know that the average community college student works 36 hours a week, and we know that if you take a 15 hour load, that’s 45 hours a week of work, and we know that most of them have children.
So we know that we’ve got to be realistic in what we’re doing and we must streamline their pathways. And then we want to give them credit where credit is due. Nancy’s going to talk to you about some of this. If they’ve something in Adult Ed and that is really worthy of credit bearing work, we want to give them credit for that. We’re not in competition: to say we’ll give credit and you won’t. We want those students to proceed as quickly as possible and we want to help them have reasonable expectations of success.
So I’m going to talk to you about a couple of challenges in bridging to the community colleges. There are four that I want to talk to you about. The first one is counseling. The second one is academic preparation. The third one is assessment and placement and the last one is course alignment. And then, Nancy is going to talk to you about solutions to these.
So, first of all, counseling is essential. It’s an essential practice. We put out about three of the publications that we made as a result of the Basic SkillsInitiative that we’ve had. One of them is a simple book on basic skills. It’s a literature review which divides effective practices into four main areas: Organizational and Administrative Practices, Program Components, Staff Development and Instructional Practices,and then givesexamples for each of them.
For those of you from National Research Organizations you might say well this is pretty simplistic, but I’ll tell you what for our faculty it’s been revolutionary because we’ve been able to at least look at what we can do and move forward and say this is an effective practice and counseling in matriculation is one of those very important practices.
Again,the challenges: we’ve been cut by 62%. What do we do? We may get another cut next year and some of my colleagues feel that although we didn’t want to have to do matriculation, because it was mandated and we were being compliant,we always wanted to do it because it was the best practice. We’re now really worried about what the future will be. You may know this. That it is not a student practice to get any kind of counseling, particularly for adult students. And also a lot whether or not they get counseling depends upon on their own personal aspirations and their family background.
Though this is some data from the Community College Survey of Engagement and you may or have not have seen this but we know for a fact after hundreds of community colleges have given their students the opportunity to respond, 47% have not seen a counselor. They will simply ask their friends and family, and we know in most cases their friends and family don’t really know much more than RateYourProfessor.com, if that.
So who holds the keys then to counseling and fixing that problem? We don’t know right now. We need some help. We need to know how to get those keys into the student’s hands. Some of it is education. I had a great basic skills math teacher tell me that every day she takes roll, and one of the questions has to do with location on campus for counseling,and that way she’s embedding that in her daily practice.
So that’s one way to get over it but it won’t solve the problem. So another challenge: academic preparation. How many people are familiar with the EAP? Can you raise your hand if you’ve heard of it? Okay. Not very many of you. This is something that is an exam that was created by the CSUs. It tests all of the high school juniors that would like to go to college, and it’s an early assessment. That’s what EAP stands for (Early Assessment Program) to try and tell them whether they are ready for college level work or not. It’s based off of the CST – the California Standards-- and by the way, I was just at a meeting with the adult American Diploma Project and I was told we have the highest – some of the highest and most specific standards in K through 12 of any state in the nation. The problem is we don’t expect everybody to make those standards. And we test them in the CAHSEE at a lower level at a 7th and 8th grade level for math and only 10th grade level for English. So we have good standards there.
The EAP results of this last year showed…I’m going to pause on this because it blows me away every time I say it: of the 300,000 plus juniors in high schools that took it, that had completed all their A through Z requirements, so they were CSU-ready, as much as you could be ready at the junior year, only 17% were ready for college-level English.
How do you bridge that? How do you get them to Credit? These are the top students in the high schools. What do we do to meet that challenge? Well, one thing that we can do is we can format and align our courses, and we can make our expectations known earlier, so as of this meeting last Monday, the community colleges have signed on to the EAP, and as students get their results from the CSU test (the EAP)-- which simply says, thumbs up, you can go to college, you’re ready, or thumbs down, of which 83% got thumbs down.
We want to change that message. We want to say Thumbs up, head off to CSU or UC. Not thumbs up? Hey,do we have a program for you. And we want to figure out how we can meet those programs. Here’s one thing that we found. Idon’t know if you’re familiar with Lee Schulman. He’s a great guy with the Carnegie was President of the Carnegie Institute. He shares that in traditional education, somehow, somewhere in our ancient history we determined that we were going to say that time is the variable that is constant.
You must achieve this within one semester and that success would be the variable that varies. And therefore the most important thing is time and when you do that you create potentially a bell curve, where some people will pass. A big group will kind of get everything and another group are bound to fail because the variable that will not change, the constant, is time. Can you imagine if they did that when you went to a hospital?Hi. You get one week in the hospital. Some of you will get well, some of you will be okay, and a few of you are going to die, but time is the most important variable. That’s what we’ve done.