If it becomes law, a reform bill now in the state legislature will mark a milestone in the two-year effort to rein in the secretive but powerful private organization responsible for accrediting California’s 112 public community colleges. The target of Assembly Bill 1397 is the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC), which was recently thwarted from terminating the accreditation of the City College of San Francisco (CCSF), mostly for issues stemming from the academically high-rated school’s Great Recession-battered finances.
The political firestorm sparked by the unelected commission’s effort to effectively close CCSF turned a spotlight of publicity on the darker policy corners of the commission, revealing an almost comically rogue culture of nepotism, free-market radicalism and mandarin indifference to the lives of students and teachers. But now the commission finds itself caught in that light once more,
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