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How the Austerity Agenda Disappeared Over a Million California Community College Students: A Faculty Perspective
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Abstract and Figures
The largest system of higher education in the nation, the California Community Colleges (CCC) has disappeared over one million students in the past 15 years, a 35% decrease in its student body since 2008 despite California’s population increase. This dramatic shrinking of the CCC system was not an accident. It was manufactured by a vast neoliberal policy network and funded by edu-philanthropist foundations with the goal of disrupting, defunding, and dismantling public education (Ravitch, 2020). Tracking faculty and student advocacy against so-called “student success” policies, this paper concludes that edu-philanthropist foundations have created decades of policy designed to shrink and disinvest from California’s community colleges. Building on the literature documenting neoliberal educational reform within the public sector of the United States, this paper is based on original ethnographic research and leadership experience within local and statewide faculty organizations, including participation in the California Community Colleges governance and legislative processes, from 2007 to 2022. The paper calls for the nation’s community colleges to build a coalition that will educate the public about the fifty-year plus neoliberal project to defund public education; expose the philanthrocapitalist takeover of community colleges; and advocate for reinvestment in the millions of students who need the community colleges the most.
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In this virtual presentation, Debbie Klein discusses the impact philanthrocapitalist foundations have had on California Community Colleges over the past 20 years. Philanthrocapitalist-funded nonprofits have claimed to promote equity but have implemented policies that apply corporate efficiency models to public education, resulting in a disconnect between their goals and the outcomes of their policies. As a result, their policies have created more barriers to enrollment and success, leading to a loss of over one million students in the system over a decade. Philanthrocapitalists and the nonprofits they fund have intentionally shrunk and defunded the California Community Colleges over the past two decades.
This presentation argues for the need to build a campaign to reclaim and reinvent life-affirming education for the largest and most diverse student body in higher education in the United States.
Why have so many advocacy organizations whose decision makers have little, if any, direct experience within the California Community Colleges, successfully determined the policy and funding direction of the system over the past few decades? In 2020, I began researching a range of California-based advocacy organizations which have redefined the mission for the California Community Colleges to meet the goals of the so-called education “reform” agenda. As education historian and former US Assistant Secretary of Education, Diane Ravitch has revealed through her body of work, the unhidden intention of these policies has been to defund, disrupt, and dismantle public education. Compelled by Ravitch’s argument in Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools that “The Resistance” has successfully defeated the reform agenda in K-12, I believe it is time for a successful resistance movement within the California Community Colleges. The purpose of this article is to call out the educational “reform” movement’s agenda and plant the seed for an organized resistance to the policies that have been defunding, disrupting, and dismantling the California Community Colleges for the past two decades.
The California Community College system’s over-reliance upon part-time faculty is the most chronic and systemic inequity of teaching in the California community colleges. Although the Education Code deems part-time faculty temporary, part-time faculty are not only permanent but have comprised 70 percent of all California community college faculty for over two decades (figure 1). Furthermore, California law does not require part-time faculty be paid for anything beyond the classroom hour, and current law limits a part-time workload to 67 percent of an equivalent full-time load in a single district.
Over the last two decades, federal and state policy makers have launched a number of ambitious, large-scale education reform initiatives —No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, the Common Core State Standards, and others — only to see them sputter and fail. In 2017, the authors convened a number of leading scholars to explore why those initiatives failed and what can be learned from them. Participants agreed that to be more successful in the future, reformers will need to balance ambition and urgency with humility, political acumen, and the ability to recognize when it’s time to slow down or scale things back.
The discipline of political science in the United States evolved in tandem with the development of democratic education and the modern university system. Since the early years of the twentieth century, political science has been an academic discipline housed in universities and colleges, and most political scientists earn their living as university or college teachers. And yet as individual academics or as a discipline, we rarely stand back from our institutional environment and ask hard questions about what is happening with higher education and what this means for the practice of political science. Suzanne Mettler does precisely this in
Degrees of Inequality: How Higher Education Politics Sabotaged the American Dream
. And so we have invited a range of political science scholars, many with extensive experience as university leaders, to comment on her book and its implications for the future of political science.
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