EXCERPT FROM FACCC'S RESPONSE LETTER

"The Faculty Association of California Community Colleges (FACCC) lists among its core values commitment to student access, opportunity, and progress and sees community colleges as a driving force for economic growth and social cohesion. We are therefore passionately concerned, as you know, with student success, and we support all efforts on the part of the State Chancellor’s Office and the Legislature to make the California Community Colleges better places to teach and learn.

The Draft Recommendations of the Student Success Task Force, published September 30, 2011, have not been well received by faculty throughout California; despite what are clearly good intentions, the document appears deeply flawed, with many suggestions that have not been adequately tested against the realities of our diverse learning communities, which faculty are often in the best position to understand and communicate.

As faculty throughout California have reviewed the Task Force’s recommendations, we have determined that taken together, they represent a significant narrowing of the community college mission, and such sweeping changes should not be endorsed by the Chancellor’s Office or by the Board of Governors without substantially more time for public discussion, review, and particularly faculty input.

We note that many of the system’s key needs are not adequately addressed by the recommendations, including restoring both general and categorical funding (cut during the current economic downturn); increasing the number of full-time faculty; professionalizing part-time faculty positions; and addressing student equity gaps.

Furthermore, the recommendations appear to advocate a general shift away from local decision-making towards more centralized authority, which is exactly the wrong approach to education-reform. System-wide goals are valuable, but classroom faculty and counselors are in the best position to respond to the specific needs of local students and communities. Scheduling, registration priority, even professional development, must be guided by local needs.

Even some of the most seemingly straightforward proposals, like adding a unit-cap for the purposes of financial aid or priority registration, can look quite different from the perspective of an EOPS counselor (who knows how many units an underemployed “member of the working poor” can accumulate while trying to better his or her situation) or a professor whose department offers a “high-unit major.”

FACCC strongly urges you to consider carefully both the general concerns and specific suggestions offered by faculty throughout the State in response to the SSTF plan, and to recommend more time for reconsideration and revision in light of these responses before you consider endorsing any proposal to the Legislature."