In the past two decades, tutoring services have become an integral part of nearly every program at California's community colleges. The purposes of tutoring services are to provide individual attention to students in academic difficulty, training and assistance in developing effective study skills, assistance and support to special groups of…

In 1998 the American Historical Association began an ambitious project, "Teaching and Learning in the Digital Age," designed to allow groups of historians in different parts of the country to experiment with the use of computer-based technologies to enhance the teaching of undergraduate survey courses. It aimed to enable these historians…

Prepared for the Board of Governors of the California Community Colleges, this report provides an overview of the 50% Law (Education Code Section 84362), which requires the state's community college districts to spend 50% of the current expense of education each fiscal year (FY) on the payment of salaries for classroom instructors. The first of…

In response to legislative mandate, the California Postsecondary Education Commission developed options for improving students' learning and development in college, including funding approaches designed to support these options. The commission's report summarizes a previous, related report and traces the origins of the current report from it,…

With 90 million Americans now reading and writing at the two lowest of five levels of proficiency ("functional" illiteracy by many estimates) according to the 1994 National Education Goals Report, and 30% to 40% of enrolled students in remedial classes, it is past time to determine a "fix" for the greatest national…

Part-time college instructors with children are not perceived as professionals, and therefore they often do not advance to full-time status. Their inability to move out of the area limits their possibilities for full-time work and colleges often exploit this. Of the part-time women interviewed by members of a panel at the Conference on College…

Although children who live in environments of violence and poverty are frequently the subjects of psychoanalysis, much less attention is given to the fears and anxieties of children from more fortunate families. In the case of one San Francisco Bay Area school, the two head teachers in the kindergarten class were going to be absent for two…

Telecourses differ in fundamental ways from regular college courses; i.e., faculty are not the only ones involved in telecourse design and production; colleges are not the sole funding agencies for their production; and telecourses are designed to be marketed, rather than to be offered by a single institution. These differences mean that…

This issue of "Forum," a journal designed to provide a marketplace of ideas for California community college faculty, contains six articles on current educational concerns. First, "Seeking a Working Vision: Community Colleges and the Mission Statement," by Richard A. Garcia, argues that community colleges must put joint…

This report describes the effects of the recession in the early 1990s on institutions of higher education in California including large budget cuts, student tuition increases, enrollment reduction of 200,000, growth in student loans, and lack of state policy. This report recommends that a new compact between the state, the colleges and…

This monograph is based on a conference on bilingual education held by the Center for Equal Opportunity (CEO) in September, 1995 in Washington, D.C. CEO made repeated attempts to secure speakers representing the pro-bilingual education viewpoint; the paper by Portes and Schauffler represents this view. Papers presented include: "Introduction:…

Grounded in a communication theory that assumes that the form of communication affects the content of the knowledge that a teacher conveys to his or her students, a study attempted to determine how violence is treated in the classroom. The site for the study was Darbin Elementary School, in a suburb of San Francisco. The method was observation,…

The multicultural and bilingual population of California will continue to increase over the next decades, and as a result, the role of multicultural and bilingual education will increase in importance. Since the 1970s improvements have occurred in instructional materials, in program evaluation, and in teacher certification to meet the needs of…

This book examines the reactions of schools in Massachusetts and California to policies that sought to persuade schools to abandon or reduce tracking--the practice of grouping students into classes by ability and organizing curriculum by level of difficulty. The text is divided into 8 chapters: (1) "Implementing Tracking Reform," which…

After 2 years of study, California's Commission on Innovation produced a series of recommendations to guide California's community colleges in educating a growing number of students with only modest increases in state support. Subsequently, the California Higher Education Policy Center sponsored a day-long symposium to discuss the report's main…