Need New CA College Accreditor

SOAPBOX

SEPTEMBER 20, 2015C

New community college accreditor needed now

Task force exposed accrediting commission’s problems,

recommends replacing it

BY JOSHUA PECHTHALT, CFT

State Community College Chancellor Brice Harris has released his long-awaited Accreditation Task Force report, and the news is not good for the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges.

The report, however, is good news for California, because it puts accreditation – the process of monitoring and reporting that provides assurance to students and taxpayers that a college offers a quality education – on a path toward renewal.

Joshua Pechthalt

The blue-ribbon task force, comprising faculty, administrators, college presidents, elected officials and other expert stakeholders, has starkly exposed the commission’s problems and recommends replacing it with another accreditor.

This is a welcome development. Unfortunately, it may not happen overnight.

Two years ago, the California Federation of Teachers, representing a majority of California’s community college faculty, filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education regarding the commission’s failure to comply with multiple accreditor standards – the behaviors by which an accreditor is measured to keep its own authorization. The department, agreeing, issued a letter detailing the commission’s lack of compliance with 15 standards. This opened the floodgates:

▪  The San Francisco city attorney won a court decision that the agency broke four laws in its effort to shutter City College of San Francisco. The college remains open.

▪  California’s Joint Legislative Audit Committee criticized the commission for its City College of San Francisco decision, absurd levels of secrecy, disproportionate rate of sanctions compared with other accreditors, and inconsistent treatment of colleges.

▪  The Community College Board of Governors rescinded regulatory language that had given the commission sole authority over accreditation of California’s community colleges.

▪  Assemblyman Phil Ting, D-San Francisco, authored Assembly Bill 1397 to make the commission more transparent and accountable. Receiving strong bipartisan support, Ting nonetheless placed it on hold until January to give the state chancellor a chance to move his task force’s recommendations forward.

The task force, finding the “California Community College system and its member institutions have lost confidence in the ACCJC,” concluded the colleges need to transition to another accreditor.

This represents a sea change in perceptions of the agency; the California Federation of Teachers’ critique has become mainstream opinion.

The faculty union’s formerly lonely position was partly due to the obscurity of accreditation itself. Necessary for students to earn transferable credits and financial aid, a college’s accreditation is always a complex process.

But in the hands of the commission, accreditation became needlessly bureaucratic, time-consuming, expensive, secretive and focused on things far removed from the classroom. It also became extraordinarily punitive, involving harsh sanctions leading to high levels of faculty anxiety, endless paperwork, student fears of disaccreditation and consequent enrollment losses.

As students fled sanctioned colleges, often to attend more expensive private schools, many endured terrible educational and financial outcomes.

Another reason the shift took so long was fear of the commission’s sanctioning powers and reputation for vindictiveness, which kept many college leaders silent. State Sen. Jim Nielsen provided a glimpse of what they were up against with the commission’s President Barbara Beno when he told colleagues, “I have never dealt with a more arrogant, condescending and dismissive individual.”

Change, finally, is coming. However, the path to another accreditor faces obstacles. The chancellor suggests the transition could take 10 years. This timeline contradicts his report, which notes, “Further delay in resolving the issues with the accreditor will have adverse effects on our colleges, on our students, and on California’s economy and future.”

Important considerations lie ahead, such as which accreditor makes sense. A new Accreditor must agree to take on California’s 113 colleges, and the U.S. Department of Education must recognize the new Accreditor’s expansion of responsibilities. These steps will take time, but not 10 years. The problem is clear. It needs fixing before more damage is done.

Joshua Pechthalt is president of the California Federation of Teach

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/op-ed/soapbox/article35795502.html#storylink=cpy

AFT: Why Strong Unions Are Good

When Unions Are Strong, Families Are Strong

by Randi Weingarten, Pres. AFT

Republicans have staked out endless signature issues: shutting down the government, vilifying immigrants, denouncing rights like paid sick leave and equal pay because they are "women's issues," privatizing education, and -- wait for it --obliterating the rights of working people to negotiate together for better wages and benefits that can sustain their families.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie recently said that our teachers union deserves a "punch in the face." Fellow presidential longshot and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker wants to nationalize his plan to destroy public sector unions. Yet unions are now more popular with Republicans than Christie and Walker are. That's right, thelatest polling shows that while Christie and Walker have negligible support among Republican voters (1.5 and 3 percent, respectively), a full 42 percent of Republicans support unions.

In fact, support for unions is increasing. Last month's Gallup poll showed that in just one year, support for unions grew five points to nearly 60 percent. And according to the Brookings Institution, more than 50 percent of nonunion workers say that if an election was held in their workplace tomorrow, they would vote for union representation.

So why would a governor advance an agenda that both presses his finger on the scale of inequality against working people and places a dead weight on the economy, as it has in Wisconsin? Especially since we know that when working people are supported, as they've been in neighboring Minnesota, the economy is strengthened?

The same wealthy special interests and CEOs who back Walker's policies and manipulate economic rules in their favor want to make it even harder for working people to come together, speak up and get ahead.

All across the country, though, people understand that unions are good for their families. Journalist Denis Hamill recently wrote about the sea change when his father's factory was unionized: Workers' terrible pay and working conditions improved immediately. Unionization was a lifeline, lifting families out of tenements and into the middle class.

That's still the case, as a new study from researchers at Harvard University, Wellesley College and the Center for American Progress shows. Children in areas with higher union membership have more economic mobility, and children in union households have better outcomes.

Unions also give women a leg up. According to a new report from the Institute for Women's Policy Research, the wage gap between men and women narrows for union women, from 77 cents for women in general compared with every dollar a man earns, to 89 cents for union women. And a union contract makes an even bigger difference for women of color.

Unions like the American Federation of Teachers are strengthening our families, schools and economy -- at the bargaining table, ballot box and beyond.

Take what we're doing in McDowell County, W.Va. -- the eighth-poorest county in the nation. Our union brought together public and private partners who have collectively invested more than $16 million in the last four years. The county, which was built on the coal industry, is being transformed by things it never had before--like widespread broadband access, dental care and addiction treatment.

And in New York City, our union's work in encouraging infrastructure investments by pension funds is creating jobs by helping to finance the building of the new LaGuardia Airport. Five years ago, we made a commitment--through the Clinton Global Initiative with the AFL-CIO and the Building Trades -- to invest $10 billion of our members' pension funds into infrastructure. We've already created tens of thousands of good jobs, and the LaGuardia project furthers this commitment.

Yet we are still the object of unrelenting attacks. Politicians like Christie and Walker, and the wealthy special interests that support their plans, want to eliminate unions because they see anything that helps working families get a bigger piece of the economic pie as eroding their power.

The U.S. Supreme Court case Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association is their latest tactic. Focused exclusively on public service workers -- like teachers, nurses and firefighters -- the case could undermine unions' efforts to make our voices heard on issues that affect all of us: fighting for smaller class sizes, working so we can all retire with dignity, holding billionaires accountable for paying their fair share, and making sure employers understand we are working harder and harder just to get by.

Walker has said that the way to eliminate unions is to "divide and conquer." But that's not what Americans want. Hardworking Americans know that, as Hillary Clinton has said, "When unions are strong, families are strong. And when families are strong, America is strong."

Follow Randi Weingarten on Twitter: www.twitter.com/rweingarten

L.A. Port at Record Levels,

Electronics, auto parts and clothes from Asia are streaming through the second-busiest U.S. port at record levels, signaling retailers’ confidence in the economy and consumers’ eagerness to buy.

The Port of Long Beach -- which is poised to overtake neighboring Port of Los Angeles next year to become the No. 1 shipping gateway in the country -- had a record month in July, with cargo volume up 18 percent from July 2014. Figures being released later this month will show unprecedented traffic again in August, and early signs in September are “very very encouraging,” Jon Slangerup, the Long Beach port’s chief executive officer, said in an interview at Bloomberg’s offices in New York last week.

Overall, the two ports are handling 4 percent more cargo this year than last, Slangerup said. With consumers showing no letup, he predicted a record year for Long Beach in 2015, taking out pre-recession highs set in 2007. West Coast ports are poised to regain share lost earlier in the year, when backlogs led clients to divert cargo to East Coast destinations like Savannah, Georgia, he said.

“When you look at the macros, you look at unemployment, consumer confidence, savings, available discretionary spending, all of those numbers suggest that we have more to spend,” Slangerup said. “The economy here is super strong relative to the rest of the world, and the strongest I’ve seen it in a very long time.”

Traffic at the Port of Los Angeles has been less impressive; after the second-best month ever in March, volume was down in three of the next four months. Still, the overall trend is encouraging, and orders for next year suggest volumes will pick up late this year, saidGene Seroka, executive director of the Port of Los Angeles.

“It’s not just a big one-time spike during the peak season,” Seroka said.

Both ports lost business during a dispute between the labor union for 20,000 dockworkers and their employers, which all but paralyzed the 29 commercial seaports on the West Coast for four months. Slangerup said in February that labor issues accounted for 80 percent of a bottleneck that kept as many as 36 vessels idling at sea for days at a time.

In the interview last week, however, he said he realized that labor had “very little to do” with the disruptions, that the difficulties had more to do with organizational glitches and inefficient cargo-handling practices.

Since March, truckers, shippers and terminal operators at both Southern California ports have been meeting to better coordinate operations and speed cargo through the port complex. Union representatives have joined the conversations.

“They recognize that by being at the table in our discussions with everybody, just how critical a link they are and how they have the ability to make and break it,” Slangerup said. “They get it. They lost a lot of hours.”

The Federal Maritime Commission granted Los Angeles and Long Beach permission on Feb. 26 to work together by taking measures such as creating a pool of truck chassis to haul cargo containers. The logjam largely disappeared by May.

Retailers such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Home Depot Inc. have expressed confidence in the Port of Long Beach, while maintaining a four-corner strategy that includes cargo through other gateways, Slangerup said. Port officials have met with more than 300 customers, some of whom spent millions of dollars daily on alternate routes.

“Nobody is going to spend 30 percent more just because they don’t like the system,” Slangerup said.

The adjacent ports on San Pedro Bay handle almost a third of all cargo entering and leaving the U.S. They moved $470 billion in goods last year, more than double that of the Port of New York and New Jersey.

The West Coast ports rely heavily on trade with China, where economic growth has been slowing and the government unexpectedly devalued the yuan in August, rattling global markets. China accounted for 49 percent of the value of cargo moving through Los Angeles last year, and 48 percent of the tonnage in Long Beach, according to data from both ports.

Imports from Asia to North America, aided by record car sales, increased more than 10 percent in June from a year earlier, according to Bloomberg data.

“These are some of the largest numbers in our history, far exceeding the pre-recession numbers,” Slangerup said.

Overall, the climate for global shipping is improving, according to an analysis by Bloomberg Intelligence. About 78 percent of the Bloomberg Intelligence global marine shipping peer group is expected to generate positive earnings per share this year and 83 percent next year, up from 65 percent in 2014, according to research by analysts Lee Klaskow and Talon Custer.

The dispute cost Los Angeles about 400,000 units of cargo, equivalent to more than two weeks of volume, Seroka said. “A lot of the numbers post-agreement look pretty good, but we lost a heck of a lot of business.”

To keep their lead and regain earlier losses, the Southern California ports are spending a combined $5.8 billion to expand capacity, replacing a bridge and dredging harbors to accommodate the biggest vessels, and automating unloading, warehousing and other activity. 

The projects could maintain the West Coast dominance in handling ever-larger container ships from Asia, as rivals in New York-New Jersey; Norfolk, Virginia, and Savannah also increase capacity and add automated features to speed cargo movement.

Early next year, some large ships that have docked in Southern California will have more options when new locks and a deeper channel in the Panama Canal allow them to reach the East Coast and Gulf Coast. Slangerup downplayed the threat, saying that drought caused by climate change may make it harder to fill the locks.

“They may not be able to operate at certain times of the year,” Slangerup said.

To accommodate the latest generation of larger ships, East Coast ports have to dredge their harbors after major storms year-round, Slangerup said.

"They can dredge all they want, but they’re fighting Mother Nature because every time a storm comes in, they have to dredge again," he said.

Los Angeles and Long Beach have other built-in advantages, including an inland rail infrastructure, that limit any migration of cargo, said Chas Deller, chief executive of 10XOCEANSOLUTIONS Inc., a maritime consulting company in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“Los Angeles and Long Beach will always be the No. 1 choice,” Deller said.