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  • Community college faculty should all be allowed to work full time

    Community college faculty should all be allowed to work full time


    Students at Fresno City College

    Credit: Ashleigh Panoo/EdSource

    When most people think of part-time employment in the public sector, they assume that it (1) could be a steppingstone to a full-time job; (2) pays less than full-time, chiefly because it involves fewer hours of work; (3) is voluntary, and (4) is primarily meant to supplement a family’s income.

    When it comes to California’s 36,000 part-time community college professors, the facts defy all four assumptions.

    Unlike workers in other professions, part-time college instructors, regardless of length of service and/or quality of performance, will not be promoted to full-time unless they are lucky enough to secure an increasingly scarce full-time position teaching on the tenure track. Part-time instructors, many who work for decades off the tenure track, have been called “apprentices to nowhere.”

    Over the last five decades, colleges have gravitated toward part-time instructors for the flexibility of their semester-length agreements with no obligation to rehire, and their lower expense.  For example, while all full-time instructors receive state-paid health insurance, only about 10% (3,742) of the state’s part-timers do.

    Part-time instructor salaries are not pro-rated based on a typical full-time salary; instead, they are a separate scale which amounts to about 50-60% of the full-time instructor rate. To be clear, this doesn’t mean they receive 50-60% of the income of a full-time instructor: California law caps part-time faculty workload at no more than 67% of full-time. This workload cap, when combined with the discounted rate of pay, means that the average California part-time instructor teaching at 60% of full-time receives about $20,000 while the average annual income for full-time instructors is in excess of $100,000 a year. 

    Surveys conducted by the American Federation of Teachers in 2020 and 2022 found that roughly 25% of part-time community college faculty nationwide were below the federal poverty line.

    With no natural transition from part-time to full-time, this two-tier workplace takes on features of a caste system, especially as both full-time and part-time instructors satisfy the same credential requirements, award grades and credits that have the same value, and have the same tuition charged for their courses.

    While California college instructors are represented by faculty unions (primarily the California Federation of Teachers or the California Teachers Association), the priority of those unions would seem to be tenured faculty, as evidenced by the differences in the collectively bargained working conditions. 

    In the case of workload, for example, while part-time instructors are barred from teaching full-time, full-time instructors may elect to teach overtime, often called course overloads, for additional income. Full-time instructors displace part-time jobs whenever they do. In fact, full-timers generally get to choose their courses, including overloads, before part-timers are assigned courses.

    A bill being considered at present in the California Legislature is Assembly Bill 2277.  It would raise the current part-time workload restriction from 67% to 85% of full time, which, in theory, could enable some part-timers to teach more classes and earn more income. But if passed, AB 2277 would hardly solve the problem for part-time instructors.

    To make a more meaningful improvement, AB 2277 could be amended in two ways, neither of which make an impact on the state budget:

    • Remove the artificial workload cap outright, thereby enabling part-time instructors the opportunity to work up to 100% of full time when work is available. 
    • Impose a ban on full-time tenure-track instructors from teaching overtime (overloads).

    One possible source of opposition to these changes could be California’s faculty unions, which are dominated by full-timers. While supportive of earlier attempts at raising the cap to 85% (e.g., AB 897 in 2020, AB 375 in 2021, and AB 1856 in 2022) — neither union has shown a willingness to support elimination of the cap outright or curbing full-time overloads.

    In 2008, AB 591 adjusted the cap from 60% to the current 67%, but the first iteration of that bill proposed outright elimination of the cap (as does our suggested amendment), which was opposed by the CFT (see the April 16, 2007 legislative digest and commentary assembled in a California Part-Time Faculty Association (CPFA) report). 

    Another source of opposition could be those full-time instructors accustomed to teaching overtime/overloads; they could oppose losing that option, which underscores the conflict of interest in a two-tier workplace when more for one tier means less for the other.

    Gov. Gavin Newsom acknowledged that California “community colleges could not operate without part-time faculty” who “do not receive the same salary or benefits as their full-time colleagues” in his Oct. 8, 2021 veto of AB 375 based on budgetary concerns — the fear that the state’s 36,000 part-time instructors would suddenly qualify for health care. (That fear has since been addressed by a 400% increase in the state’s contribution to the Part-time Faculty Health Insurance Program from an annual $490,000 to $200 million.) In the meantime, part-time faculty continue to be barred from working full time. 

    Faculty unions and lawmakers should take a step toward abolishing California’s faculty involuntary part-time work restriction by allowing them to work full time and protecting their jobs. An amended version of AB 2277 is a no-cost way of doing so.

    •••

    Alexis Moore taught visual art at colleges and universities for over three decades and served on the executive board of the Pasadena City College Faculty Association of the California Community College Independents (CCCI). 

    Jack Longmate has long served on the Steering Committee of the Washington Part-Time Faculty Association and taught for over 28 years at Olympic College in Bremerton, Washington, where his ending annual salary was about $20,000 for teaching at 55% of an annual full-time teaching load. 

    The opinions in this commentary are those of the authors. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.





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  • Academic gaps ‘allowed to linger’ among California’s Black students over past decade, report says

    Academic gaps ‘allowed to linger’ among California’s Black students over past decade, report says


    Aleka Jackson-Jarrell, coordinator of the Heritage Program at Adelanto High in California’s High Desert, regularly meets with Black students to make sure they stay on track to graduate and meet A-G requirements that enable them to apply to a public university.

    Emma Gallegos/EdSource

    In the areas of chronic absenteeism, suspension and reading proficiency, the rates for Black students in California remain largely the same as they were a decade ago. That is the focus of a new report, Black Minds Matter 2025, which provides new insight and recommendations on education for Black students in California a decade after the first iteration of the report was published by Education Trust-West.

    “This report really meets the moment that we’re in when we’re seeing so many cuts to education funding and programs that are inevitably going to impact Black students,” said Melissa Valenzuela-Stookey, director of research at the prominent nonprofit behind the report that advocates for equity in education.

    Ten years ago, Black students were nearly three times more likely than white students to be suspended, and while suspension rates among Black students have since declined from 14% to 9%, the rate is still three times higher than white students, according to data from the California Department of Education included in the report. The chronic absenteeism rates are similar: in 2016-17, Black students had the second-highest rate of chronic absenteeism of any student group, just under Native American students — a statistic that remained the same in 2023-24.

    “None of the opportunity gaps or outcome gaps explored in this report are new — all have been allowed to linger over the past decade,” concluded the report authors.

    Black students represent about 5% of California’s student population from transitional kindergarten to 12th grade. That totals about 287,400 students, with about a third of them living in Los Angeles County, per 2023-24 state data. About 150,000 Black students are enrolled at institutions of higher education, both public and private.

    “We constantly have in the front of our minds that there are students and families and communities behind every single data point,” said Valenzuela-Stookey. “For that reason, it felt really important to not mince words and just bring to bear the information that we have about what conditions students and families are facing and are up against; despite the fact that they enter those systems with really ambitious aspirations, something is pushing against them, and that something is systemic.”

    The “ambitious aspirations” Valenzuela-Stookey mentioned refers to a finding by The United Negro College Fund in which 9 in 10 Black students agreed that earning a college degree is important, plus additional studies that found Black parents “are highly engaged and invested in their children’s educations, particularly in the early years,” per the report.

    The report, published Thursday, highlights multiple key findings, including:

    • The percentage of Black students in California at grade level in math increased from 16% to 18% in the decade since 2015-16 but has remained the lowest of all student groups
    • The gap between California’s Black and white students who have met or exceeded the state’s reading proficiency exams, known as California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress, has not changed significantly since 1998
    • Three in 4 Black students are socioeconomically disadvantaged, which is 13 percentage points higher than the statewide average
    • The rate of Black students completing A-G course sequences in high school, which are required to attend the University of California and California State University systems, has increased by just 4 percentage points in the last decade
    • While the number of Black children enrolled in transitional kindergarten more than doubled from 2021 to 2023-24, the rate still makes up less than half of the number of Black 4-year-olds who are eligible to enroll
    • Black elementary school students report feeling sadness more frequently than any other student group
    • The number of Black teachers remained disproportionately lower than the share of Black students statewide; just over a quarter of school districts employ Black teachers at a rate proportionate to their Black student population
    • The rate at which Black students participate in dual enrollment increased by only 6 percentage points in the last seven school years, from about 11% to nearly 17%, while other student groups increased between 8 and 14 percentage points
    • Black college students in California face the highest rates of food and housing insecurity

    “This status quo is not an accident — it is the consequence of systems designed to produce unequal outcomes operating largely unchecked for centuries,” the report’s authors wrote. “It is also the consequence of incremental changes made in place of what’s called for: much more fundamental transformation.”

    A deeper look into some of the data cited in the report reveals alarming trends. For example, dual enrollment rates increased among all student racial groups between 2015-16 and 2021-22, per an analysis of state data by Policy Analysis for California Education, but Black students recorded the lowest rate of growth — at nearly 17% in 2021-22, just under the rate of dual enrollment participation for Asian students in 2015-16.

    Also, according to data from the California Community Colleges, within their first year in community college, Black students were completing and passing transfer-level coursework at a rate lower than their peers, with a difference of 30 percentage points between Asian students at 77% and Black students at 47%.

    While the report’s authors acknowledged the pandemic exacerbated some of the academic gaps, many existed long before Covid lockdowns began, and the data included in the report reflected that longevity. “It was really important for us to make sure that people had a long view of how entrenched these systemic inequities are because the solutions to them should follow from how long they’ve been baked into our systems,” said Valenzuela-Stookey.

    In addition to sharing the stark disparities, the report’s authors highlighted a handful of programs and initiatives they believe are working to close the gaps.

    These include a teacher residency program called The Village Initiative and created in collaboration with the Watts of Power Foundation; Los Angeles Unified School District; and California State University, Dominguez Hills. Fifteen Black male teachers were part of the program in 2023, and the partnership estimates they will place 113 fully credentialed, Black teachers in school over the next decade.

    Farther north, at Berkeley High School, the campus’ African American Studies Department is credited for the high rate of graduating within four years among the Black student population, at nearly 95% in the latest school year, compared to the statewide average of just over 86%.

    One of the overarching recommendations proposed by the authors was the creation of a Commission on Black Education Transformation, made up in part by Black students, parents and educators. This would be a standing state commission with the authority to make actionable decisions, including the allocation of resources to ensure follow-through from state and local agencies on policies related to academic progress for Black students.

    Other recommendations include:

    • Mandating that all high schools incorporate the 15-course A-G curriculum required for eligibility to the UC and CSU systems
    • Increasing award amounts for the existing Cal Grant program to aid students with non-tuition costs
    • Prioritizing the hiring and retention of Black educators in both TK-12 and higher education
    • Expanding pandemic-era supports, such as before- and after-school programming and academic tutoring
    • Requiring that all school staff receive training to end the disproportionate impact on Black students of punitive disciplinary practices
    • Modifying the state’s Local Control Funding Formula to target funds based on an index of metrics such as levels of adult educational attainment and homeownership rates
    • Instructing school districts to report “evidence-based strategies” aimed at supporting Black students in their Local Control and Accountability Plans

    Valenzuela-Stookey noted that her team sees both the progress and persistent gaps over the last decade “as a reminder that policy change is just the first step in closing a lot of these opportunity gaps that are highlighted in the report, and implementation and on-the-ground practice work is really the necessary next step if any of that is to come to fruition.”





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