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September 2005, Volume 16, Issue 1 - Enrollment and the 60% Law |
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by Martin M. Goldstein
The "60% Law," the provision in the state Education Code which effectively prohibits PTers from teaching more than a 60% load in any one district, is coming under fire lately, and for good reason. It's a bad law, one that hurts the consituency it was ostensibly meant to help.
Separate stories on the SMCFA website and in the upcoming Hourly Advocate will detail the local and statewide Resolutions to change this law to a fuel-and-stress-saving 80%. This story, however, is about how it is now, and how it works here.
The exact provision of the Ed Code at issue states that you can't teach over 60% load more than two times in any three years (six consecutive fall/spring semesters) or else they would actually have to pay you properly for it -- i.e., put you on a full time tenure track. If they don't want to do it by accident, they have to count the over-60% semesters carefully, making sure they are given out only once in three semesters.
Counting to three accurately doesn't seem like it would be that much of a stretch, but virtually all Districts, in fear of making a tragic error and being forced to hire another full-timer by accident, simply don't give out any loads over 60% ever. As in never. So they can never make a mistake.
Our district is among those who hold to this policy. Some are actually worse; they won't give over 50% or even 40%. Others are better; presumably they can count to three predictably in Contra Costa and San Francisco, where the giving out of overloads every third semester is routine, and still nobody gets promoted by accident. Must be those Silicon Valley brains.
Ours holds to 60% with a death-grip rigidity that stopped me -- and one hundred potential SMC students -- cold this fall semester. I was at my 60% load with three 3-unit Comm 10 classes, which routinely fill to 40 fast, and in which the retention rate is over 95%. It's a good class, and this semester counting all three sections, I had over 100 students trying to crash it, plus, of course, the 120 happily enrolled.
Thinking this was one thing I could do to help raise enrollment, I had the extra 100 sign up if they wanted to take the class if an extra section were added, and I said I would take the list to my Chair and the administration to ask them to do so, though I wasn't real optimistic because of the 60% law, the logic of which, I admit, I was unable to really explain to them.
Well, not only wasn't a class added, I was told specifically I could not teach it if it had been, since that would have exceeded my allowed 60% load. I tried to explain the law, that I had to do this three times before it made any difference, to no avail. District policy, presumably made by the same people who created the student-shredding Five Day Drop last year, said no PT loads over 60% ever. We don't ever want to make a mistake, after all... And that was that.
So I am puzzled. In the last year or two things are deliberately done or not done which dampen any increase in enrollment -- while the administration is claiming that they seek to add to it -- and are asking us to help them do so.
Maybe Lantz is (and was) right. Maybe we are seeing the definitive results of our mini death-spiral, and the college has, effectively, permanently contracted. And just maybe they already know this, and have privately accepted it.
And thus what we're seeing and hearing from them is hypocrisy disguised as incompetence. They're not really trying to regrow the school, because they know they can't. The money isn't there anymore. But it looks good if they say they are trying to, so let's pretend we are, but make sure we don't.
Ultimately, one thing is clear. Students are getting hurt and our school is suffering, not healing and regrowing.
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