Central Falls Implications for Community Colleges

In February 74 teachers and 19 staff members were fired by the superintendent at an underperforming Central Falls High School in Rhode Island. The decision has received a good deal of media attention and a significant amount of praise around the country. (Even President Obama has publically agreed with the measure as a move toward greater accountability in education.) While it is too true that the school has been a consistent underperformer, in the national media the story is mischaracterized. In reality it is, of course, not a story of callous teachers who do not bother to do their jobs or care about their students. The school was filled with professional teachers who worked very hard to help their students achieve. It was also not about a school that was making zero progress. The school’s test scores had improved over the last two years although to be fair the increases were slight. It was not that the teachers were unwilling to change the structure of the high school program. Structural changes such as moving from a comprehensive high school to one with upper and lower divisions had already been approved. In the end the unresolved issues that caused the superintendent to make the radical move seemed to be more about the requirement for teachers to work harder and longer for what their union regarded as inadequate extra pay.

This apparent national confusion about the reason the teachers were fired has implications for those of us in higher education. The problem is about the teachers accepting changes to their employment without what they believe to be fair pay. The perception is that they do not accept performance measures and are failing in their jobs

We, the community colleges, share a stronger bond with our high school educator colleagues than most traditional 4 year colleges. We must educate an increasingly greater percentage of the high school graduates and returning nontraditional students in order to keep the country globally competitive. Furthermore, we have been more willing to build programs that do more than provide a good liberal arts foundation but rather increasingly provide direct job skills which may even more lead to industry-style standards of measurement of performance. After all, a sizeable proportion of our students are looking not to transfer and certainly not just enlightenment, but rather for transferable and marketable skills. It seems manifest that at some point there will be a greater demand for us to be held accountable for our students’ performance.

I know that all my colleagues, faculty and administrators, in college are dedicated professionals who care about their students and their student’s futures. However, once the kinds of standards that have stabbed dagger-like into the status quo of compulsory public school have been imposed on community colleges, how will we fair? The answer is likely split. Some parts of our colleges, such as our nursing and technology components, are accustomed to performance measures. Both born out of public necessity and applauded by local government and industry for their ability to improve each region, the programs were initially structured in a way that performance measure is part of their infrastructure. While it has strong ties to our colleges’ liberal arts tradition, distance learning, due to its continued scrutiny and foundation in technology, seems more readily accepting of performance measures. Other more traditional parts of our colleges, those that are more focused on a traditional view of the liberal arts college (not necessarily traditional in the community college sense) will undoubtedly have more difficulty adjusting.

Performance measures and our acceptance of them cannot solve a Central Falls kind of problem. The performance measures are only a way to provide the institution with data. The way that the institution interprets the data and the proposed solutions form the locus of problems. Without knowing many more of the details of the Central Falls superintendent’s proposal than I have outlined here, it is difficult for me to say how fair the proposed changes were to the teachers or if the union should have accepted them. Knowing our mandate to provide college opportunities to all, if our colleges’ data showed we had a similar problem, I am not sure that dedicating more faculty time to the problem would help us. I also cannot imagine college deans and presidents taking such extreme measures to achieve what will likely be only marginal increases in overall college achievement. Until we arrive at that place in time it is not clear how we should respond. Unfortunately, the right time to contemplate the issue for community colleges is when the problem does not yet exist. The right time is now.