High Stakes and Low Data: A Critical Review of the Accountability Reporting for the California Community Colleges

The Accountability Reporting for the California Community Colleges system is now in its fourth year of operation. Though recoding of ESL and Basic Skills courses for the purpose of tracking student improvement is currently in process, ARCCC should by this point be a generally mature system. Thus it would seem appropriate to now subject it to a critical review. In that review, four areas of concern appear: 1) The completeness and validity of data used for the calculation of the indicators—primarily a problem of data leakage due to the complexity of the MIS reporting process. 2) The question of appropriate time frames in which to see change in an indicator and to relate it to institutional practice. 3) The extent to which indicators actually reflect the practices they were intended to measure. 4) The appropriateness of the peer groupings. Analysis of data in the 2009 report reveals substantial problems in each of these areas. Though there are currently no specific consequences at the institutional level for "poor performance", the potential is obvious.