Statewide Accreditation Report: Get Rid of ACCJC | SF Faculty Worker’s Rights Forum

Statewide Accreditation Task Force Report: Get rid of ACCJC!

Friends of CCSF, breaking news! Released today, a statewide community college task force publicly confirmed what’s long been acknowledged in private: The Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC) “no longer meets the current and anticipated needs of the California Community Colleges.” The organization has “consistently failed to meet” expectations, ignored a decade of suggestions to improve—and the “system and its member institutions,” as a whole, “have lost confidence in the ACCJC.”

The report recommends moving to a new accreditor, but also suggests that a shift could be an overly long process. There is no reason to leave our state’s community college students and the colleges that serve them exposed to further damage by this accreditor for as many as 10 years! A serious and considered effort among community college constituents could ensure a fairly quick change to more responsible accreditors.

“The ACCJC has lost its way,” said Joshua Pechthalt, president of the CFT – California Federation of Teachers… “We need a commission with the best interests of students, faculty and public higher education at the center of its work. The‪ACCJC has other priorities. It forces colleges to waste faculty and staff time and taxpayer money on bureaucratic minutia irrelevant to the classroom. It makes reckless and ill-informed decisions behind closed doors that harm the lives of thousands of Californians.”

• Report urges new accreditor for California community colleges
  –San Francisco Examiner
• College accreditation group should be replaced, task force says
  –San Francisco Chronicle
• 2015 Task Force on Accreditation Report –CCC report
• Chancellor’s task force calls for new accreditor to oversee state’s community colleges –CFT statement

Save the date! Please join us for a hearing and investigation on faculty working conditions and student learning conditions at City College of San Francisco, San Francisco State University and the San Francisco Art Institute. We will be joined by city and state leaders as we focus on faculty contract fights across our City to increase public awareness of and support for efforts to maintain and improve the quality of higher education in San Francisco.

San Francisco Faculty Workers’ Rights Hearing
Wednesday, September 9th (6 – 8 pm)
St. John the Evangelist Episcopal Church,
1661 15th St. (btwn Mission and Valencia)
RSVP and invite on Facebook or share the flyer

Workers Rights’ Board is a community project of Jobs with Justice San Francisco. For more info, email solidarity@jwjsf.org or call (415) 994-2496.