Blog
The SMCCCD Dumpster Fire Continues . . .
The dumpster fire at the SMCCCD District Office continues, and less than a year after Dr. Jennifer Taylor-Mendoza left the CSM presidency due to instances of what Ibram X. Kendi has labelled as “racist abuse,” yet another high-level Black administrator is experiencing racism in the workplace and has filed a formal complaint against members of District leadership for harassment. This complaint has subsequently led to an investigation. In a letter that was sent by someone to dozens of district leaders and the Board, it is indicated that Dr. O’KenZoe Selassie-Okpe’s – the District’s Chief Diversity Officer and E.D. of the Skyline Equity Institute – has filed a complaint of harassment against three administrators – two senior administrators on the district chancellor’s cabinet and one mid-level administrator at Cañada College.
The Online Education Hydra (Part II)
In August, I argued in my blogpost that online education has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, that our dependence on distance education during the COVID-19 pandemic forced us to over-emphasize online courses even as we emerged from the worst parts of the pandemic. I argued that we were funneling students who did not want to enroll in online courses into them because we offer so few in-person courses. This month, I’d like to briefly look at other negative consequence that our over-emphasis of distance education has on students, particularly those consequences associated with screen time and electronics use.
The SMCCCD Dumpster Fire
For this next blogpost, I was originally planning on writing about the adverse effects of online education on students, but in light of some troubling events at my college and district over the last few weeks, I decided to pivot. Just a few weeks ago, the College of San Mateo community found out that our college president, Dr. Jennifer Taylor-Mendoza, would be leaving our college for a college presidency elsewhere in the Bay Area. She left the CSM presidency after just two years and after a total of twelve years in the district, in which she served and excelled as director of the CSM learning center, as a CSM dean, and as a Skyline vice president. The topic of this blogpost, then, really comes down to one question: why would a talented, high-performing new college president leave her position for a lateral move as a president at another college in a very similar district (e.g. community-funded or “basic aid”)? Answering this question honestly is an important practice for equity and justice-minded educators and professionals, especially considering Dr. Taylor-Mendoza is a Black woman.
The Online Education Hydra (Part I)
I recently stumbled upon a Washington Post article entitled “Online Learning Still in High Demand at Community Colleges” where through various interviews and a few studies, the author Sara Weissman details how community colleges across the country are still offering an astounding number of online courses, some institutions with over 50% of their sections offered in fully online or hybrid modalities. Unsurprisingly, the administrators Weissman interviewed justify such outsized online offerings because, according to one vice president, “students have made their preferences clear via their enrollment trends - online course sections at the college have filled much more quickly lately than in-person courses.” Unfortunately, I am not sure these trends, which are usually undergirded by college “data,” reflect what is really happening on the ground, as it is usually difficult to decipher what kind of data these administrators are actually analyzing. Are they looking at fill rates in the same departments, for instance, or over the entire college, comparing departments that are primarily online against those that are primarily in-person. Nevertheless, these “trends” certainly haven’t reflected my experiences with students.
Transfer Equity, Pt. 2: Community Colleges
In last month’s blog, I discussed the decision by my daughter’s school district foundation to allocate the majority of their resources to the three poorest schools in the district, which inadvertently created an “enrichment gap” between these schools and wealthier schools like my daughter’s. These funds were used for reading and math support and mental health, which promotes educational equity in one sense, but ultimately created inequities in art, music, STEM, and other enrichment activities since the wealthier schools used the vast majority of their fundraising dollars for these types of activities instead. In other words, the students would all enter high school on an equal footing in math, reading, and emotional wellness; however, even with such equality, the students from the wealthier schools would enter with more “educational wealth.” In this blog, I argue for what I term “transfer equity,” a form of educational wealth building that provides students not only with basic skills and needs but also with the educational opportunities needed for future academic success, in community colleges.
Transfer Equity, Pt. 1
A few months ago, I got an email from my daughter’s school about an Equity Summit being sponsored by the district’s education foundation, the non-profit fundraising arm of the school district. As someone interested in educational equity and as a former member of the district’s equity committee, I decided to attend. As I learned at the summit, the foundation had made the decision a few years ago to shift its financial resources from all the schools in the district to the three schools with the highest proportion of low-income students. This decision was made in part because these three schools do not have PTAs, and therefore, do not have local fundraising capacities.
Welcome to Blog 2.0!
I am excited to announce the re-launch of my blog! I write “re-launch” because several years ago, I used to have one. However, a couple of factors led to its pause: first, I migrated my website from one hosting company to another and decided that it was going to be overwhelming transferring all those blogposts to the new website; second, and more importantly, I started writing my second book – The White Educators’ Guide to Equity: Teaching for Justice in Community Colleges – which derived much of its content from these blogposts; finally, writing this new book took over much of my dedicated writing time, so I didn’t restart the blog after migrating the site and instead focused on this new project.
Now, The White Educators’ Guide is out (buy it here), so I thought it’d be a great time to start writing blogposts again, and who knows, maybe they will inspire my next book! So what should you expect?