Community Colleges Criticized on Teaching

California’s community colleges don’t put enough emphasis on teaching, and they lack incentives to improve, according to a report released Tuesday by the state’s Little Hoover Commission.

The commission said some colleges do well at giving opportunities to people who would otherwise have little chance to succeed in life. But it chided colleges for assuming that “the path to success is paved with tolerance and neglect.”

Colleges offer few effective teacher-education programs for faculty members, the report said, instead spending staff development money on personal development courses of dubious value--cooking classes, for example.

Additionally, faculty members may be hired with little or no teaching experience and their teaching skills are given insufficient weight in tenure decisions, the report said.

As an example, it cited a list produced by the system’s Academic Senate of seven equally weighted criteria for awarding tenure. “Teaching effectiveness” is on the list; so are such criteria as “collegial/community service.”

“Nothing is more critical to preparing Californians for the New Economy than emphasizing quality teaching in our community colleges,” the report said.

James Mayer, executive director of the commission, said he hopes the report draws attention to the community colleges, which enroll seven out of 10 college students in the state.

“This is not just an educational issue,” he said. “I don’t see how we can continue the pace of prosperity without the community colleges.”

The commission offered a number of remedies, focusing heavily on providing financial incentives for reform. Funding formulas, now weighted heavily toward simply filling as many classroom seats as possible, should be altered to favor increased student success, the report said.

It said changes could be made to favor colleges that improve course completion rates, recruit and serve disadvantaged students, improve transfer rates and move students into high-wage jobs.

The report even suggested financial incentives to encourage students to complete classes, such as fee increases for students who repeatedly drop and re-enroll in courses.

Brice Harris, chancellor of the Los Rios Community College District, praised the report’s focus on teaching, but said the commission had underestimated efforts already being made. “I take issue with the report’s implication that there is not a quantum amount of high-quality teaching going on,” he said.

The 13-member Little Hoover Commission was created in 1962 as an independent state oversight agency and is generally credited with being evenhanded, said Charles Ratliff, former deputy director of the California Postsecondary Education Commission, who called the report “forthright.”

The 150-page report is titled “Open Doors and Open Minds: Improving Access and Quality in California’s Community Colleges.” It is the most recent in a series of sharply worded critiques of the state’s community college system, and its conclusions echo those made by other critics inside and outside of the system:.

Among its findings:

Colleges tend to concentrate on enrollment growth, for which they receive the most new funding, and neglect student advancement. They pay too little attention to such issues as whether students who wish to transfer to universities actually do so and whether calendars are designed to promote access. Muddled governance and simplistic funding formulas do little to improve the situation.

The result is misplaced priorities. Besides faulting the colleges for neglecting teaching, the report cites Sacramento-area community colleges, which offer so few technical courses that it would take them 24 years to supply the workers local high-tech firms say they will need in the next two years.

Meanwhile, physical education classes rank third in overall community college course enrollments.