CREATING THE OPTIMAL CLIMATE FOR
STUDENT LEARNING AND SUCCESS
Chancellor Martha J. Kanter
Foothill-De Anza District/Senate Opening Day
Thursday, September 21, 2006
Thank you for that introduction, Board President Bechtel.
Good morning. It’s such a pleasure to have everyone together here at Flint Center this morning. There are almost 100 of you for whom this is your first time at Opening Day. If you are one of our 20 new full-time faculty, 48 new classified staff, 6 new administrators, 2 new supervisors or a new part-time faculty or staff member, please stand and be recognized!
All of us know what it’s like to come into a new institution, so please reach out to our new colleagues give them your insights, good advice and an invitation for coffee or just to talk. Thank you.
I’d also like to take a moment to honor our faculty and staff who have devoted 25 years or more of dedicated service to Foothill and De Anza. Would each of you stand, please?
Please join me in thanking all of our faculty and staff who have dedicated their skills and talents to our students for a quarter century or more. Thank you all.
On the back of your program, you will also see the names of our governance leaders at Foothill-De Anza— your elected representatives who play a pivotal role in ensuring that all of our employee groups have their voices heard. Governance leaders, please stand and be recognized. Thank you.
I’ve referred several times to the printed program, and I want to extend a special round of thanks to Jon O’Bergh and Marisa Spatafore, who were instrumental in coordinating today’s program and logistics. There are many others to thank as well, including Jose’s team at Printing Services, Patrick and his team from Dining Services, Donna Jones-Dulin and the College Services team, the Educational Technology Services team, the staff of Flint Center, our interpreters, and our workshop presenters, who will make this afternoon’s sessions a set of great learning opportunities for us all. Please all stand and be recognized. Thank you.
We begin the year in a good place. We chose as this year’s theme “Creating the Optimal Climate for Student Learning and Success.” I know that many of you probably read former Vice President Al Gore’s book or saw the movie “An Inconvenient Truth” that The New York Times critic A.O. Scott acclaimed as an “intellectually exhilarating, necessary film.” Al Gore addresses our global climate in the most common sense of the word. We too are addressing our climate—not just in terms of environmental issues, which are indeed crucial to us at Foothill-De Anza—but also in the sense of the prevailing conditions surrounding our students and the four goals of our Educational Master Plan: opportunity, quality, accountability and sustainability.
In considering the high stakes of global warming, Gore said: “What changed in the U.S. with Hurricane Katrina was a feeling that we have entered a period of consequences.”
Each of us here today knows that in education, we haven’t just now “entered a period of consequences.” Every contribution we make to student learning results in a direct consequence that has the power to change a life, a power that affects both community and society.
At every graduation, we see the consequences of our work. We know what grades our students earned, how many walked across our stages to receive their degrees, how many transferred, and how many earned certificates to advance in their careers. We also know firsthand about our students’ achievements. We read about them in the newspaper or hear about them from our colleagues—and, from time to time, these students come back—as parents, as graduate students or as community leaders—and tell us how much we meant to them.
This year, we have a new opportunity to create the optimal climate at our colleges that will enable more of our students to succeed. We too are in a very high-stakes situation; perhaps we can even call our challenge “educational warming.” With continuous, focused attention, we can improve our climate for learning and success; absent that, the consequences are increasingly severe. We must do our part to increase the number of students who will earn our degrees and certificates because, in doing this, we know they will be better able to sustain their own lives and contribute to the betterment of society in significant ways. A few might even become the next scientists who discover the solutions to global warming.
Each of us individually and together—collectively—plays a critical role in contributing to our climate. As a faculty member, your classrooms will each have their own unique climate as our students make their way through your courses. As a member of our classified staff, your climate might be realized in a particular set of buildings, the acres of land you oversee, or your frontline responsibilities in a division office, admissions and records, or a lab that you run for our students. Each has its own special climate for which each of us is responsible. As an administrator or supervisor, your climate might be the division you support, the programs you offer, meetings you hold or the schedule you are planning for winter quarter.
Whatever your role, together we all create the climate for learning and success. Our goal is to create the optimal climate for our students. To do this, each of us must go the extra mile, to stretch beyond our comfortable boundaries. We need to think about and plan both for what we can do as individuals—and for what we can do together. In doing this, we will be true to our mission and build a climate of excellence, opportunity, innovation and diversity in which we can all take pride.
I think a great example of the climate we create together can be seen in the new buildings on our campuses. Hundreds of faculty, staff, and administrators worked on and planned for each of these buildings that will house thousands of students for generations to come.
We did such a good job of this that 66 percent of our district’s residents from the cities of Palo Alto, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Cupertino, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, and portions of Saratoga, San Jose and Santa Clara, voted to give us $490.8 million dollars to be used over the next 15 years to complete our renovations and construction, and purchase critical classroom and office equipment and technology. Please join me in thanking the community, our board of trustees, our faculty and staff, and everyone who contributed to this great accomplishment of our district. Thank you all.
Beyond this, we begin the year with strong enrollments. That is great news for us, as we know that our enrollment drives 97 percent of the revenues we use for positions and compensation.
This summer we also received some very positive news from Sacramento, certainly the best news I’ve had as I begin my fourth year as your chancellor. We’ve been given a good budget this year, so we’ll be able to add some new faculty and staff positions, build up our B-budgets and fund some of our highest priorities with the one-time funds we’ll receive.
Last week, I learned that our state board of governors approved a major effort led by our Foothill and De Anza academic senates, initiatives begun here in 1999 to increase the degree requirements in mathematics and English to college level statewide. We’ve already put this in place, but statewide, this adoption will go into effect in fall 2009 in order to give community colleges adequate time to increase our success in closing the achievement gap among the various student groups we serve.
What is not new is that our faculty and staff have been working on ways to close the achievement gap for many years. In fact, last year we posited three guiding questions to work on through our research studies.
1. How do students learn best?
2. How do faculty and staff best enable students to learn?
3. What are the optimal conditions to maximize student learning?
To answer these questions, institutional research has begun to identify some best practices that we can learn from and build upon. For example, we know that Foothill and De Anza students who completed Math through Foothill’s Pass the Torch program or De Anza’s Math Performance Success program completed college level math requirements at much higher rates than students who did not participate in these programs. We know that students who participate in learning-communities-linked classes are more successful than those who don’t. Similar success rates occur for students in the Puente course sections.
We know that students who took Counseling 100 classes persisted the next year at a 69 percent rate compared to those who didn’t, who persisted at a 29 percent rate.
Institutional Research recently published these studies on our Web site and, at the conclusion of their report, presented 14 best practices or principles identified or supported by the Foothill-De Anza research, listed on page one of your program. I’ll emphasize just three of the findings here:
1. Early success matters a lot.
2. Students succeed who learn the fundamentals well. AND
3. Cohorts of learners create supportive peer groups and long-term relationships.
This year, we will continue to study and identify the best practices that make a difference for our students and see if we can learn from these programs and apply their designs and pedagogical approaches more widely. If we follow the 14 principles, we’ll make more progress and more of our students will succeed.
It’s very hard work, as we all know. Thanks to everyone whose hard work matters so much!
Every summer before I start the new year, I conduct a review of everything I’ve personally done as your chancellor, all that I haven’t done as your chancellor, everything we’ve done and haven’t done as a district, and all that our colleges have accomplished and haven’t yet been able to do, in order to set the stage and prepare a work plan for the new year. We all do this planning or something like it as we embark upon the new year.
As I conducted my review this summer, I was so proud of what we achieved last year—the quality of the courses and programs we offered our students, the faculty and staff we hired, the awards our faculty and staff received, the tenure review processes completed by our faculty, the new labs we put in place, the buildings we renovated, the bond we passed, and the list goes on and on.
Looking ahead, this year, we have a new and magnificent opportunity to enhance our climate for learning and success.
In August, Marc Baldassare of the Public Policy Institute of California released a new study, “Californians and the Future,” which reported that “Californians are overwhelmed by the future, but underwhelmed by the plan to deal with it.” That is not the case at Foothill-De Anza. We are tackling the challenges of higher education—perhaps most notably, the lack of preparation of our incoming students. And through our work, we are making a difference in the climate and, most importantly, in the performance and success of our students!
As we open this new year, we know it will be a period of consequences. Just as the scientific community, government, and industry will work on solving the problem of global warming, propelled by that sense of urgency we all feel, so will we—with a concomitant sense of urgency—work together to optimize student learning and success. Thank you for your commitment to our students, thank you for your dedication to realizing opportunity and excellence for each of our students, and thank you for helping us identify ways to sustain our good works throughout our district as we move forward to create that optimal climate for student learning and success. Thank you all.
I now have the pleasure of introducing our keynote speaker. Abdi Soltani serves as the executive director for the Campaign for College Opportunity. Before joining the campaign, Abdi served for nine years with Californians for Justice in a variety of capacities, including as a community organizer and as executive director. He also worked to expand CFJ’s organizational capacity to Fresno, San Jose and Oakland.
Before joining Californians for Justice, Abdi worked on a number of student-led projects as an undergraduate at Stanford University. He was one of a group of young people that founded the James Irvine Foundation Fellowships for Sustainable Communities, as well as Youth United for Community Action.
Abdi was a recipient of the John Gardner Public Service Fellowship when graduating from Stanford and the Gerbode Foundation Fellowship. He received a bachelor’s degree in biology from Stanford.
Please join me in welcoming, from the Campaign for College Opportunity, Abdi Soltani.
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