Community Colleges Need Central Management to Cure Ills

It is natural to defend territory, to hold onto power. It is politic to compromise.

Human nature and politics are now at work on California’s community-college system. Forces within the system are preparing to defend their turf against state control. Signs of this possibility surfaced this week when a commission reviewing the Master Plan for Higher Education recommended that the two-year colleges be brought into line with the four-year system.

The community-college system is on a downward spiral from what it was intended to be under the 1960 master plan, which set up the following structure:

The University of California, with its nine campuses, is our first branch of higher education. It is controlled through the governor and the Legislature by the Board of Regents, which hires a chancellor who directs the entire operation. Each campus has its chief executive officer, who is entirely responsible for its operation. Programs may differ from campus to campus, but central direction ensures that standards are the same.

The California State University system (19 campuses) is our second branch of higher education and has essentially the same structure: state board, state director and campus director.

Community colleges are supposed to be the third part of higher education, but, having many vestiges of the kindergarten-through-12 structure, are neither high school nor higher education. There is at the top a statewide Board of Governors, which hires a state chancellor. At the bottom is a chief executive officer for each of the 106 community colleges. Inefficiently, between the top and the bottom are 70 community-college-district structures. In 50 districts there is only one college with one chief executive officer. In 18 districts there are two or three colleges. One district operates five colleges; another runs nine.

In each each district the public elects (at significant cost) a board of trustees--five or seven persons--in the manner of a K-12 school board. The boards have authority over budgets, employees, educational programs and academic standards, but the trustees are part-timers and have no independent staffs to provide them with objective information. Instead, they hire and rely on a chief executive officer for all information.

Also, in each district there is a bargaining agent elected by teachers and one or more elected by other staff members.

Trustees (70 x 7), district administrators (hordes of them) and district bargaining agents want to retain their positions and their power.

Ten statewide organizations of trustees, administrators and teachers recently published a document, “Toward Excellence in California’s Community Colleges.” It is remarkable for the unanimity achieved by 10 organizations and for the soundness of its recommendations concerning community-college access and transfer, degree, certificate and remedial programs. The unanimity was achieved, however, by touching no organization’s territory--and that is not sound.

Last month the Little Hoover Commission, California’s watchdog agency for governmental efficiency, released a report on the community-college system, and the findings point up the unsoundness of the present system. Among the commission’s conclusions:

--Having state and local boards is a “confused” structure that results in “lack of financial accountability at all levels.”

--Local trustees are less accountable than before Proposition 13 because they get 60% to 80% of their budgets from the state rather than from local property taxes, and because, “generally, less than 15% of the registered voters vote for the trustees.” (In 1984-85, 43 districts spent more than their revenues; the Los Angeles Community College District has had deficit spending for the last five years.)

--The 70 districts comply with state requirements in different ways (sometimes not at all) and report district information in such inconsistent forms that the state chancellor’s office cannot compare enrollments or program costs and has “inadequate authority to intervene, whereappropriate, to set spending limits” or other requirements.

The cure for those ills is to wipe out the 70 anachronistic districts and set up a statewide system of two-year colleges in the manner of the UC and CSU systems.

Community-college organizations will kick and scream and raise the banner of “local control.” But these colleges are not charged with providing equal, compulsory education for all children in a district; they enroll adults, who should be free to apply to any college in the state. Local concerns could be addressed by voluntary advisory boards. Los Angeles’ Trade Tech and Peirce would retain their specialized functions under a state system.

The proposal to convert the 70 districts into 10 is bad. Los Angeles with nine colleges and Peralta (based in Oakland) with five are the worst-run districts in the state. They show how regional bureaucracies blur accountability and destroy their colleges by killing the spirit that makes good and successful education possible.

We should not accept the assumption that 106 colleges cannot be run from one office; we should look for a way to do it.

California’s community colleges enroll more than 1 million students. More than half of all Californians have attended community colleges; more than half of all Cal State graduates have attended community colleges. People who might never have gone to college are now making a return on the taxpayers’ investment by paying higher income and sales taxes, and costing the state less in social services, because of the community colleges.

Only through central management, like that of the UC and Cal State systems, will the two-year colleges be truly the third branch of higher education in California.