laceyajames-blog

[laceyajames-blog]

California’s AB-705

I work at a community college. I interact with students on a daily basis. Most days, for the over two years I’ve held this job, I’ve loved some aspect of it enough to want to keep doing it. The past few months, however, it’s gotten more difficult to focus on the good to the exclusion of the bad.

California’s AB-705, coupled with the restructuring of the community college I work at, is my biggest migraine. It is enough to literally make me nauseous. If you’re about to enter a community college in California... you should probably be sick too.

To begin with, AB-705 insists that it is to help students graduate more quickly. The idea that all community college students will be able to graduate in 2 years—no ifs, ands, or buts—is pretty great. However, that promise is a lot like the promise to teach you how to make tons of money online without having to leave your home just as long as you give me $29.99. Those promises, the get rich quick schemes, are devoid of anything really actionable.

Guess what AB-705 is full of.

What no one is saying about AB-705 is that there’s a very, very big IF attached to their 2 year promise. IF you are at a college level already, you will graduate in 2 years. IF you are not at a college level, for any number of reasons, you will not graduate. Period.

AB-705 ultimately changes the way that community colleges are being paid. Community colleges are paid to make sure that students graduate, and ultimately that students transfer. This is why it’s now so crucial that students graduates in 2 years. Students who won’t graduate just aren’t worth the money or resources to the community college system in California. Every student is, essentially, a dollar value rather than a person.

Most community colleges have had a level of remedial education available to their student population. This is comprised of lower levels of Math and English classes intended to get students up to speed. These students would then integrate into the general population—that being the students who will graduate in 2 years, regardless of AB-705. Adult students returning to college after a period of time out of school, GED students, students with disabilities, and students coming from impoverished backgrounds are often not part of the general population when they take their first semester of classes.

My own first semester of college was seven years after I graduated from high school. I took a placement test before enrolling. As I was reading and writing on my own even after seven years out of school, I was placed at an English 101 level. I was part of the general population in that regard. However, I placed below a college freshman level in math. Math was never my forte. At the time, I took two lower level math classes to get myself back up to speed in Algebra in order to tackle a statistics class.

AB-705 was already in the wind by the time I was finishing with math, and my college’s math department was embracing it. A number of these remedial classes were cut shortly after I finished these levels. The math department had limited the number of retakes of a class a student was allowed.

When I took statistics, I was struggling at the time with outside issues. I was already living with my fiancée, we were supporting ourselves on my part-time income alone while I went to school full time (a prerequisite of my job), and we had one little P.O.S car to make my 11 mile commute with five days a week. Our car often broke down, and I was calling on favors just to get to work. Classes were not something I could also juggle on favors. That particular semester I failed not only the statistics class, but the Spanish class I had been taking.

Because I failed it, I still have one opportunity to retake that statistics class while on that campus. If I fail that retake? I can no longer attend school there because I will be deemed a failure. The wording ultimately won’t be as harsh, but that is the outcome all the same. If I retake that class, and fail, and am no longer able to attend classes there, I will also lose my job.

It is not just my potential job loss that worries me, though it is a big deal to me in my personal bubble. The fact that the basic skills lab on that campus will be closing its doors also worries me. That lab often serves the older student population; middle-aged students who have never seen a computer; stroke victims who are returning to school as a part of their rehabilitation, but can hardly write their own name; and people who simply dropped out of school and couldn’t return until much, much later. Those students will no longer have a lab. They will no longer have a place on that campus.

Those students, students like me, and others like us all over the state, soon will not have a place on a California community college campus. It does not matter how eager we are to learn, because the resources will no longer be in place for us.