Negotiating the community college institutional accountability environment: A Deweyan perspective

Abstract

Community college leaders face a wide range of ethical challenges in managing their institutions. One of these challenges is negotiating the various accountability expectations imposed on the institution. Traditionally, community colleges were formally accountable through their governing boards to state legislatures, local voters, and the community for the proper expenditure of funds, administration of relevant state or local policies, and implementation of the institutional mission. However, the 1980s marked the beginning of a new era when state legislatures began systematically to create new accountability expectations concerning institutional performance.State institutional accountability programs have been classified as first-generation or second-generation (see Harbour and Jaquette, 2007). Firstgeneration accountability programs include performance-reporting, performance-budgeting, and performance-funding initiatives (Burke, 2005). These programs typically require that institutions report their achievements on specific performance measures (such as student graduation rates, student transfer rates, and student pass rates on certain licensure examinations). Under performance-funding and performance-budgeting programs, some portion of state funding is linked directly (with respect to performance funding) or indirectly (with respect to performance budgeting) to institutional performance. Second-generation accountability mechanisms allocate some portion of state funding through market-based mechanisms such as 5 1

Giving voice: Advocating for the community college

“…Yet the success of the U.S. economy and the strength of the U.S. democracy are dependent on educating people and preparing them to sustain themselves and their families. Harbour and Day (2009) contend that community colleges need to be more NEW DIRECTIONS FOR COMMUNITY COLLEGES • DOI: 10.1002/cc explicit in affi rming their role "in educating an adult population capable of supporting a democratic society" (p. 7).…”

Resistance and engagement in the critical classroom

“…Within the everparadoxical ways of discursively constituting community college as culture of remediation or community college as site of cultural transformation, totalizing charges against its antiacademic climate hinge on nebulous assumptions of what it would mean for it to possess a truly "academic" atmosphere. National studies of remediation typically focus on overviews of program characteristics and quantifiable outcomes, such as exit scores and attrition rates (Harbour & Day, 2009;NCES, 2004;Porchea, et. al., 2010;Schuetz & Barr, 2008).…”