City College of San Francisco - California Competes

THEME IV
IV. Conclusion & Future Directions
This essay shows how City College of San Francisco addresses and supports continuous improvement of its
programs and services through its integrated Planning, Budgeting, and Evaluation System. The four cases
selected for the in-depth case study accurately reflect many elements of typical institutional practice, and
provide evidence of how flexible and adaptable the College’s Planning, Budgeting, and Evaluation System
has become, allowing the College to “refine its key processes and improve student learning.” We have
demonstrated how our system provides the climate, the expectation, and the structure for continuous
improvement.
This essay portrays many of the strengths of the College, including the removal of barriers to student
learning. Examples of the focus on learning can be found in all of the cases. For example, by ensuring
that students who pass into the upper levels of ESL will have a minimum level of verbal and writing skills
in English, the ESL Department is putting in place an assessment device that will help to ensure that
students will be taught critically important skills in the level where they can learn the most.
The College also does a great job of augmenting the normal, systematic processes of improvement in
cases that are particularly challenging. The College has achieved excellent results by implementing constituency-led
or administrator-led initiatives that accelerate change, as in Financial Aid and A&R. Bringing
in outside advice or facilitation is something that the College has done to its advantage as well. That
strategy extends also to seeking alternative funding, as has been shown by the many grant-funded projects
mentioned above. Once a situation is headed in the right direction—A&R is a fine example of this, as it
is still meeting regularly to assess progress on goals—the College admirably sustains its attention to the
issue until major concerns are resolved, whether that is just a few weeks, or several semesters.
There is a productive and generally cooperative climate at CCSF, which encourages the engagement
of all sectors of the institution in finding remedies to obstacles facing students. A widespread degree of
agreement on major issues is very frequently achieved through broad review and inclusive, democratic
processes, including some that are part of the Planning and Budgeting System. That is not to say that
the College has eliminated diversity of opinion—far from it! However, the many venues for expression
of those opinions, and a strong system of Shared Governance, have led to a certain degree of dispersion,
or sharing, of power at the College. With the essential support of a significantly high level of leadership
by the Chancellor in the years since the last Self Study, this institutional dispersion of power—built into
our system and guarded by the constituencies—has made for a positive and relatively harmonious climate
at CCSF in comparison to many other colleges, or even our own historical record.
While the City College of San Francisco improvement system has shown itself to be both flexible and
inclusive, it also faces many challenges. It has sometimes been said that the CCSF system, in an effort to
consider all sides of each question until some consensus is achieved, is very deliberative. Each of the cases
in this essay contains some examples of problems that took some time to be fully addressed and resolved.
It is a very common occurrence at the College that an issue takes time to make its way to the top of the
action agenda. There are so many concerns at any one time that are equally pressing. It can take time for
key individuals and groups to identify a problem as needing immediate attention.
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