Community colleges just part of state's broken ed system
Modesto Bee 3/28/07
Because it's big, diverse and complex, there are almost as many truths about California's community college system as there are commentators. But it's also easy to forget that community colleges don't exist in isolation — they're only part of an educational system that continues in its failure to address social and economic realities that left it behind decades ago.
In many ways, community colleges are much like many of California's emergency rooms. They're overwhelmed with problems that developed because of unaddressed socioeconomic realities, including poverty, immigration and the abandonment of programs that once served as preventive medicine for a host of social ills. As a rule, schools and teachers get the blame for poor student performances. But those who've studied the problems realize that we shouldn't have expected anything other than poor results when we decided to reduce educational resources while confronting the biggest educational challenges in the state's history.
In 2004, Sacramento Bee columnist Peter Schrag noted in an interview with PBS' John Merrow that Proposition 13 reduced spending on public schools simultaneous to changes in the state population demographics that began providing greater burdens on education: "The burdens being kids coming from weaker home support, less command of English, more poverty, more single-parent families … collectively it has made an impact." (A transcript of that interview is available at www.pbs.org/merrow/tv/ftw/schrag.html.)
Schrag also mentioned crowded classrooms, reductions in art and music programs, fewer nurses and counselors, and other effects of reduced funding. In the community colleges, the culmination of these effects is students who have little command of the fundamentals once routinely associated with a high school diploma. The result is overcrowded remedial classes that repeat the errors of the K-12 system by placing second-language and underprepared students in crowded programs that, despite the remedial level, are beyond their capabilities.
And because such a high percentage of community college students are poor, too many must work while trying to make up for their educational deficiencies. The majority soon find themselves exhausted from the double burden of work and school, and burn out before transferring.
We never should forget the context within which community colleges operate. And, if other parts of the system are suffering from insufficient funds, we also should note, as another Sacramento Bee columnist, Dan Walters, recently pointed out, that community colleges are last in the category of funding as well: "Taxpayers shell out just $6 billion a year to support community colleges and their 2.5 million students (equivalent to over a million full-timers), which is just about the same amount that the state allocates to the University of California and the state university system, which absorb scarcely a third of the community colleges' undergraduate load" ("Nitpicking community colleges," posted March 11 at www.modbee.com/opinion/state/dan_walters).
Why should it be a surprise that in education, as is the case everywhere else, we get what we pay for? And in the case of the community colleges, it might well be argued that we're getting even a little more than we pay for, all things considered.
Caine, a Modesto resident, teaches in the humanities department at Merced College.