Dateline Pasadena — ‘Tis accreditation season, but what’s it all about anyway?
Are students and faculty responsible for getting the college put on warning?
Certainly we are actively helping getting us off warning.
Do you know how Pasadena City College violated the standards of the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges?
Here is the down-low on the nine violations:
1: Pasadena City College’s planning processes — need to integrate program review for allocation of resources
Status: Committees have been working on this since last semester. It continues this year. There now is a timeline and a revision to PCC’s convoluted planning process.
2: PCC needs regular evaluation of all employees at regular intervals. A random sample of 12 files of admin- faculty-classified-adjunct records showed 75 percent of them were missing evaluation documents.
Status: Oops. Human Resources should get this under control.
3: Standardize performance evaluation process for adjunct faculty.
Status: Oops. Human Resources should get this under control.
4: Follow approved code of ethics in each area. Ethics policies are being disregarded or not enforced.
Status: A new committee has been formed on campus to deal with the ethics review by the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges. For some reason, they are in the process of writing another code of ethics. PCC already has ethics policies for each group (Board of Trustees, faculty, classified staff, management). Nothing is wrong with those, according to the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges. The problem is, like many polices at PCC, they were not being followed or adhered to.
5: PCC needs to stabilize administrative structure.
Status: Ya think! The Faculty Senate wrote a resolution on a desire to revert back to divisions. The new president of the college always has been amenable to having a structure that works best for the school. This is underway.
6: Develop, implement and assess professional development program.
Status: The Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges commented that at the time PCC didn’t have an approved Professional Development policy. But back in May, a Professional Development policy was created and sent to the Board of Trustees. There continue to be problems with professional development on campus, though. An ad hoc group developed Flex Day activities for the college, deciding to remove Equal Employment Opportunity training from the morning session and spending thousands of dollars on their pet project theme “growth mindset.” The new faculty orientations continue to be conducted, ignoring the Faculty Senate’s previously voted-on recommendations. An empty classroom, formerly for the Academy of Professional Learning, is just sitting there when space is at a premium on campus.
7: Board of Trustees’ policies need to be followed in getting input from all constituent groups. Transparency is needed, along with collegial communication with Board/President/Senate.
Status: The Board of Trustees needs to follow their policies, get (and this time listen to) input from the campus (can anyone say ‘Winter Intersession’?), be transparent, be collegial. This is one of the main reasons students had to figure out other ways for them to pay attention and host rallies and protests. Because they were not listening, were not transparent and were not collegial, the students and faculty gave the Board of Trustees votes of no-confidence last semester. The Board lost a lawsuit for violating the Brown Act.
Hopefully, the voting populace of Pasadena will vote in two new, competent trustees tomorrow.
8: Evaluate organization structures and processes (integrated planning for institutional development).
Status: This is under way within the administration.
9: Student Affairs and Student Services need to assess its outcomes.
Status: Pathways, eStem, MathPath, are you doing assessment like the rest of the college?
Let’s not forget the issue of “enhanced monitoring” for two reasons:
1. The college is being asked to provide information concerning job placement rates and how job placements are being tracked once students finish their career tech programs. Curious, doesn’t the Office of Institutional Effectiveness take care of this?
2. More than half of PCC’s courses were assessed, but the other 46 percent were not. No benchmark was given.
Source: http://www.pasadena.edu/accreditation/2015-accreditation-results-and-recommendations.html
On an unrelated note, several curious emails have arrived about who we are. Does it matter as long as the information is accurate? Public information is public information. If you are not interested, please reply with “Remove” in the subject line.
Have a good November.
PCC Coalition of Students & Faculty for Student Achievement
http://takebackpcc.wordpress.com/about_us/
