The accreditor that oversees California’s community colleges goes on trial on Monday in a state court in San Francisco. But whatever the judge eventually rules, it will have almost nothing to do with accreditation or academic quality.
The San Francisco city attorney, Dennis Herrera, is suing the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges over its decision last year to revoke the accreditation of City College of San Francisco. That action would have closed the college this summer, but the court put it on hold pending the outcome of the lawsuit.
The trial is the culmination of more than two years of controversy over the college’s accreditation status—a controversy that has exposed the raw nerves of education policy in the state. Typical accreditation problems for California’s community colleges, such as funding and capacity, play into the dispute. But broader concerns have also entered the picture, including the role and direction of the institutions, the level of control that the faculty wields in governing them, and the mission of the accreditor itself.
The issue has become a political third rail: Elected officials in the city, the state, and even Congress have lashed out against the accreditor. Several people who were contacted by The Chronicle declined to speak on the record for fear either of retribution from the accreditor or of vilification by the powerful unions that represent faculty members at the college.
“In San Francisco this is in the same category as fighting climate change, the Koch brothers, or the Google bus,” said one person familiar with the accreditation battle. “In San Francisco this is good versus evil.”
Completion Conspiracy
Most accreditation lawsuits are barely covered in the news media. They’re typically handled by federal district courts, and they tend to focus on whether an accreditor followed its own procedures in revoking an institution’s accreditation. This is not that kind of trial.
What distinguishes this case, said Patrick W. McKee, a lawyer in Atlanta who represents several accreditors, is its scope: “It alleges under state law that the commission was engaged in unlawful business practices, rather than just trying to counter the findings that the institution did not meet the standards.”
Mr. Herrera’s suit is made even more unusual by its allegation of a political conspiracy, which it says began in 2011, when the California Community College system’s Board of Governors formed the Student Success Task Force to consider ways to define and improve the performance of the state’s two-year colleges.
The Lumina Foundation offered $200,000 to support the work of that task force, aligning the committee with what Mr. Herrera calls Lumina’s “narrow vision of student success.” Meanwhile, Lumina also awarded $350,000 to the Campaign for College Opportunity, another nonprofit group focused on improving college completion in California. That group’s advisory board included the accrediting commission’s president, Barbara A. Beno, and two other commission leaders.
The task force’s work resulted in legislation that, among other things, raised the bar for students to receive waivers of the $46-per-credit fee. The bill, which passed after several modifications, required students to meet certain academic-progress standards to become eligible. The final version of the bill had a solid base of support: The community-college accreditor approved, as did the chancellor of the community-college system, scores of civic and business groups, and some 20 other groups affiliated with the community colleges, according to an analysis by State Senate staff members.
But three groups opposed the bill: The California Teachers Association, the San Jose-Evergreen Community College District’s Board of Trustees, and City College of San Francisco.
At the same time as the bill was being debated, the accrediting commission hit City College with a “show cause” letter stating that the institution was “in substantial noncompliance” with accreditation standards. That action, in July 2012, gave the college just eight months to explain to the commission why its accreditation should not be revoked.
This timing forms the crux of the city attorney’s argument.
“By evaluating City College while embroiled in a public political fight over the proper mission, vision, and role of community colleges in California,” the accrediting commission violated its own conflict-of-interest policy and state laws that prohibit “unfair, unlawful, and fraudulent business acts and practices,” the city attorney argues in his complaint to the court.
Concerns About Money and Mission
As is often the case when a college gets into accreditation trouble, the problems plaguing City College were primarily financial. A state review had already concluded that the college was in “a perilous financial position,” and accreditors found the college was nearly $2-million in the red.
There were also concerns that a complex faculty-governance system had created distrust among key players and resistance to the authority of City College’s administrators and Board of Trustees.
But critics, wary of the Lumina connection, have raised concerns about accrediting overreach. The accreditor has tried to force a narrow mission on the state’s community colleges, valuing degree and credit completion over not-for-credit courses and education as enrichment, said Joshua Pechthalt, president of the California Federation of Teachers, on a conference call with reporters about the trial.
And some of the evidence presented against the commission puts the accreditor’s decision in a questionable light: Ms. Beno’s husband, for instance, was on the 15-member team that visited the college in the spring of 2012 to review its status.
Court documents also revealed that none of the reviewers recommended that the college be placed on “show cause” status and were instead inclined to put the college on probation, a less-severe sanction.
The accreditation fight has put City College in a precarious position, and none of its struggles will be solved by the court’s decision, said Rafael Mandelman, a member of the college’s Board of Trustees.
If the city attorney wins his suit, the judge could reverse the decision to revoke City College’s accreditation. But damage has already been done: The college has absorbed significant losses in faculty members, students, and tuition revenue as the controversy has played out, union officials said.
Regardless of who wins in court, the college will have to continue efforts to meet the accreditor’s standards—something faculty members and administrators have worked on since the show-cause action.
The college has applied to the accrediting body for “restoration” status, which would give it two more years to come into compliance with the accreditor’s guidelines. That special status was created after U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, and other members of the state’s Congressional delegation bashed the accreditor for not giving the college more time to meet its standards.
And under any outcome, the accrediting commission will remain the gatekeeper for federal student aid for California’s two-year public colleges. The community-college system’s Board of Governors is expected to approve language that would allow the community colleges to seek accreditation from another regional accreditor.
But even the faculty union that supports the measure recognizes it as a symbolic gesture: None of the other regional accreditors could accept the two-year colleges as members because the accrediting groups’ scope of oversight is generally limited to the states within their region. The Western Association of Schools and Colleges, based in California, is currently allowed to accredit only four-year colleges and has no intention of changing that, said its president, Mary Ellen Petrisko.
“The Board of Governors is looking for a way to voice their displeasure with the arrogant behavior” of the accrediting commission, said Fred Glass, a spokesman for the California Federation of Teachers.
Community-college leaders across the state fear that a trial will ultimately do more harm than good, both to the college and to the integrity of the peer-review system at the heart of the accreditation process. On Thursday the Community College League of California, which represents the presidents of the system’s colleges, sent a letter to both the city attorney and the accreditor urging a settlement or nonbinding mediation.
The case has become immersed in a “cauldron of politics and emotion,” the letter says, and the “stakes of the outcome would be significant.”
In a written response to the league, the city attorney said he had offered to engage in mediation but the accreditor had rejected that. The accrediting commission did not respond to a request for comment.
One community-college chancellor familiar with the issues said he “has faith in the people on the commission,” but there has been some “befuddlement about the resistance to settlement.”
“It’s so clearly in the interest of California to have City College open,” he said. “I hope that this would be some common ground among everyone involved.”
