Reality vs $ at community colleges
Student Success Task Force gets an earful
One of the dominant issues at the fourth and final town hall meeting on how to improve the state’s community colleges wasn’t even in the 70 pages of recommendations from the Task Force on Student Success.
“There was some eloquent testimony today that we need more funding,” Community College Chancellor Jack Scott told the 200 or so people who turned out yesterday for the public hearing in Oakland. “I want you to understand that we know we are underfunded.”
California Community College Chancellor Jack Scott delivers opening remarks at a town hall meeting in Oakland. (Source: Town Hall video)
Like all public education in California, community colleges have been taking it on the chin at budget time. They had an 8 percent cut two years ago, and another 5 percent this year. If revenues don’t pick up and the trigger gets pulled, their funding could drop $100 million more in the middle of this academic year, while student tuition will increase next fall. (For more on the revenue outlook, see John Fensterwald’s article today).
So when the task force was established by the state legislature in 2010 through SB 1143, it was charged with finding ways to improve student success without spending any more money. After months of meetings, the committee came up with 22 draft recommendations aimed at boosting graduation and transfer rates by strengthening support for new students, putting more emphasis on completing remedial classes, and tying students’ Board of Governors fee waivers to their progress toward earning a degree or certificate, or transferring to a four-year college.
At a time when the Occupy movements are emboldening college students and some of their professors to question the economic status quo, the task force solutions seemed to evade the critical issue for many people at the hearing. A few sat quietly holding handwritten signs reading “It’s a tax problem, not a CCC problem.” Others waited for their turn at the microphone.
“My question is really about priorities,” said Jeffrey Michels, an English professor at Contra Costa College and president of his district’s union. Michels admonished the panel for not having enough teachers involved, and said they would have come up with very different solutions based on first-hand knowledge of what would improve student success.
“We would answer that we need more full-time faculty. We would talk about professionalizing part-time faculty. Part-timers need offices and telephones, paid office hours where students can actually reach them. That’s nowhere in here,” said Michels, holding up a copy of the task force recommendations. The audience cheered him.
Squeezed for time
Others raised concerns that the timeline for approving the recommendations isn’t long enough to allow a careful review that might uncover inconsistencies and potential problems down the road. That troubled Emily Kinner, a student trustee at De Anza College in Cupertino, and president of the California Community College Association of Student Trustees.
Jeffrey Michels is an English professor at Contra Costa College and president of United Faculty of the Contra Costa Community College District. (Source: Town Hall video).
“I don’t see a lot of cohesiveness,” Kinner told the panel, highlighting proposals in chapters two and three as examples. The former requires students to develop an education plan containing the courses they need to complete community college, while the latter bars fee waivers from going to students who have more than 110 units, an indication, according to the task force, that the student isn’t serious about finishing college.
Emily Kinner, student trustee at the Foothill-De Anza Community College District, at the Student Success Task Force Town Hall in Oakland. (Source: Town Hall video).
But that doesn’t address the issue of why students are taking so many units, said Kinner, explaining that it can be a vicious circle and a contradiction. To be eligible for some financial aid, students need to be enrolled full time. But so many classes have been eliminated due to budget cuts, that some low-income students end up taking courses they don’t need while waiting a semester or more to get into those they need.
“What happens to the students who do everything right, but they’re capped out on units?” Kinner asked the panel. “Then they’re being penalized.” There are exemptions built into the proposals, but Kinner isn’t convinced that college administrations move fast enough to help students in a timely fashion. (Go here for an article on the lengths some students will go to in order to get the classes they need, and here for a public radio report on the issue).
The process moves into high gear from now on. The Student Success Task Force holds its final meeting on December 7th, then the draft report goes to the community college Board of Governors, which is scheduled to vote on the recommendations at its January meeting. The state legislature is expecting a final report in March.
Before the hearing ended, Chancellor Scott returned to the issue of funding and reiterated that even though there’s no additional money to improve student success, “we can’t fold our arms and say we can’t do anything.” Nevertheless, he appealed to community college supporters not to let the legislature off so easily, especially when they’re raising the prison budget at the same time they’re cutting education. Lawmakers, he said, are “more interested in putting stripes on people than graduation gowns.”
The real cuts haven’t even started, because the state is $20 billion in the hole already. The oft-repeated mantra of “Raise Taxes” is not going to work either. They should know that the top 15% already pay 85% of the personal income taxes in the state. They should also review the fact that the top 15% starts at $75K a year, certainly not ‘rich’ by millionare standards.
Chancellor Scott’s position and comments are telling: “Nevertheless, he appealed to community college supporters not to let the legislature off so easily, especially when they’re raising the prison budget at the same time they’re cutting education. Lawmakers, he said, are “more interested in putting stripes on people than graduation gowns.”
Nobody is examing the very core of the problem and that is, the Socialist experiment in California is on the verge of imploding in a very big way. The Prison population is an ever-expanding result of these policies. If the Chancellor and the Students took a deep look at how the State, Counties and Cities spent the hard-earned Taxpayer dollars, they’d understand the fury and frustration of the real Taxpayer (top 15%) and the dwindling business base.
Everybody wants everything for free and for now, they’re getting it. Take a look at the CalWorks Benefit Model on line and you’ll see that an unmarried mother of two, with zero income collects $36K a year in benefits and that does not include Section 8 housing at $1,200 a month. Look at the WIC website and view the budget. It is $3.5 billion dollars a year. This is only one of many, many programs that are bleeding the endangered species taxpayer to death.
Go to the Los Angeles County Website and look at the Budget. You would be absolutely amazed at the huge amount of money that pours out. Social Services for Los Angeles County is $5.5 Billion dollars. Health Services is $5.3 Billion dollars. Public Protection is $4.6 Billion dollars. If you add up all the percentages, these sectors account for 66 Percent or Two Thirds of the Expenditures!
Even better, go to the Los Angeles County Auditor Website and take a look at some of their Audits, especially for the DCSF or Department of Children and Family Services, with an astounding yearly budget 0f $1.7 billion dollars. The Audit reports are intriguing. For example, there’s an Audit of “Crystal Stairs’”, a CALWORKS Stage 1 Child Care Provider, who the County pays $37.5 million dollars a year to.
Or “Bienvinidos Children Center”, a Foster Family Agency Foster Care Contractor. They have 273 children that the taxpayer pays $1,589 to $1,865 per month for, or $4,890,645 (and that’s PER month, not per year! Or how about the mental health services for “The Associated League of Mexican Americans DBA as “Alma Family Services”? They’re billing the taxpayer at $1.54 to $3.73 a MINUTE! Or $92.40 to $223.80 an HOUR!
No where in our Constitution (except of course, as decided by our benevolent Court System…) does it say the Taxpayer is on the hook to take care of the ever-expanding indigent population in the ‘Safety Net’. What information I provided is a drop in the bucket to what’s being spent. It is astounding in it’s scope and depth.
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Regis, your assertions are off on a tangent and so obviously ideological and biased. And angry, selfish, inhumane. We could endlessly debate where and how our tax money should be spent. I suppose we could just let the old, the sick, the weak, the disabled, children and infants abused, abandoned, or sick, wounded war vets, unemployed, underemployed, victims of discrimination, criminals, etc., just die, or somehow go away and leave us alone as you seem to suggest. But you really should think about the possibility that providing people with the opportunity to improve their reading, writing, math, thinking, planning and organizing skills, and to obtain technical job skills or training through their local community college is not only a better option, but it’s actually CHEAPER in both the long and short run, and the payoff on that investment benefits everyone.
My disappointment with the task force is that they didn’t even address the funding issue, yet many of their recommendations are going to cost MORE money than we already spend. Many of them are unsupported by any logic or rationale that makes sense. Some of them will have unintended consequences, and I don’t see any evidence that they were followed “down the road” to see where they lead, they seem more to be presented as just the right thing to do, regardless of future impacts. Hurray for people like Jeffrey Michels and Emily Kinner.
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Regis, I’m pretty sure that your figure that if someone who makes $75K is in the TOP 15% of taxpayers applies to taxpayers NATIONWIDE, not in CA. I’m sure that in CA, with its high concentration of the nation’s wealth, the top 15% make much more that and their income is probably underreported because the wealthy have savvy accountants who help them find tax shelters. See the NYT article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/29/business/29tax.html that shows that the top 10% of taxpayers NATIONWIDE make $100,000 per year.
In addition, the writer Jonathan Swift (famous for writing Gulliver’s Travels) already proposed back in 1729, for people like you, a solution for the problem of taking care of the poor. See his “A Modest Proposal” here: http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html.
I wholeheartedly support Kathy Lee G.’s comment, including her applauding of Jeffrey Michels and Emily Kinner, in addition to her point that the SSTF has not yet addressed how their recommendations are going to cost MORE money. Recommendations to create new statewide bureacratic measures like a “student success score card,” standardizing assessments, come up with ways to police stricter new regulations on things from BOG fee waivers to how basic skills classes are funded, come up with new technology (because there’s no proposal for more counselors and counseling staff, which is desperately needed) to help students do self-counseling to develop educational plans, and then “strengthening the state Chancellor’s office (e.g. adding more staff and operating budget)” to oversee all of this is sucking more precious resources away from instruction and student services that students need now more than ever.
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Karen, my take on this is not idealogical or biased whatsoever. It’s common sense. The “Children” are always dangled as victims that we need to support from pregnancy to prison. The ‘Safety Net’ that the Feds, State and County spend hundreds of billions if not trillions is in danger of running out of ‘other people’s money’. The Super Committee failed and we’re borrowing 40 cents of every U.S. dollar we spend. LBJ’s ‘Great Society’ experiment is a colossal failure. The new plantation owners are the Feds themselves and now we have generations of these people on the dole.
Did I ask for these people to have multiple kids that they can’t support? If you can’t feed them, then don’t breed them. Nobody has any business having children on my dime. I waited until I was thirty years old with a good job before I had my three children. I’m willing to support people who’ve come upon hard times, but here in the High Desert, I see daily, way too many people who’ve made the “Safety Net” a lifestyle. I’ve lived next door and in close proximity to Section 8 ‘clients’ and I’ve seen first hand what it’s like living next to low lifes, who have ZERO interest in learning anything.
I provided examples, such as how Los Angeles County spends their money and I believe that this is a classic Piven – Howard ‘Weight of the Poor’ strategy and it is working out really well as the strain of providing services to a huge population of indigents has brought us to the brink.
As far as money for education, I can see the LAUSD is doing a real great job at graduating that huge imported ‘peasant class’ and spending huge amounts of money doing it. I know what will solve it! Let’s throw more money at it! That will make a difference! (Not!).
Go take a look at the budgets and ask yourself, why the Government is spending my money the way they are? The money comes from those who pay taxes, real taxes, not sales tax. I’ve done the analysis using the 2000 Census. As an example, Hispanics make up 78% of the LAUSD. But if you look at what they make, 55% of them make under $40K a year. That means that the vast majority of this population doesn’t pay any Federal Taxes at all and in fact, get money back as EITC or Earned Income Tax Credit. You should know what each child costs per year and I’ve seen estimates from $6,500 to $12k a year, depending on the district. What that means, is the largest population here, is taking out way more in Services than they’re putting back in. If you don’t believe that, then why is California $20 Billion dollars in the red?
What would be cheaper in the long run is to slowly pare back the huge amount of services the Feds and the State provide.
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Karen,
Very funny that Irish guy and I am a fan of Eugenics too. I’m more of the Thoreau school of Philanthropy. Regarding the children and population in general, the ever-expanding population really isn’t necessary. Manifest Destiny is done, the lands are settled, no more people needed. Next, technology has eliminated by at least half, the number of people needed for any particular occupation. In my childhood, three LA County Sanitation Employees were on a trash truck: one to drive and two on either side in the back, to dump the galvanized steel cans. Now you only need one guy and he does twice the work.
Supply and Demand are real things. If you are in the desert with four other people with one orange between all of you, then that becomes a very valuable orange. If you are by yourself in the middle of an orange grove in Ventura, with oranges littering the ground, well the value goes down considerably. We have the same problem with our population. They the many, strive for the limited.
Regarding the taxes. Please take a look at the California State Budget (page 49) and see who pays the taxes. Indeed, those that are making $50K – $99K a year pay a considerable amount of the taxes (15%) and those making 100K+ pay the other 80%. Looking at the same graph, just how much taxes do the people making $50K and less pay? Care to guess?
http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/pdf/BudgetSummary/RevenueEstimates.pdf
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