Chancellor Provides Update on PIT Project; Updated ACH Calculator Available for Faculty to Test

This blog post has been written and posted by Matt Hinckley, with the expressed verbal permission of DCCFA President Carlos Martinez, to:

Provide an update on the overall FLRG/PIT project broadly;

Share an updated Beta ACH Excel Calculator with faculty;

Provide an update on the ongoing work actively to seek, to solicit, and to incorporate faculty input directly, regarding the calculator specifically and the FLRG/PIT project broadly;

Answer a few frequently asked questions regarding the calculator specifically and the FLRG/PIT project broadly.

UPDATE ON THE FLRG/PIT PROJECT BROADLY

Chancellor May on Feb. 28 wrote to the PIT members to thank them for their ongoing work. In that email, he said that he and his DCCCD leadership team…

“have also worked with the finance office to estimate the budgetary impact of the recommendations. Initial estimates show the recommendations costing more than $50M annually above our existing faculty budget. This is equivalent to a 40% increase over our annual faculty salary spend. Any combination or bundle of policy changes will significantly increase (spending) on faculty load and compensation; however, given the many priorities and constraints faced by the district at this time of change, we need to align timing and investment across the many priorities. I am working closely with the finance office and the rest of the district leadership to figure out how to fund the recommended policy changes. Our process will likely include identifying ways to make the changes more affordable while maintaining the spirit of the task force's recommendations.”

Chancellor May also added that he encourages faculty to continue learning more about the PIT recommendations and the Beta ACH Excel Calculator, and that he is “looking forward to seeing (the overall initiative) through into action.”

As more information is made available to members of PIT, that information will be shared with faculty at large. The important takeaways are that this estimated cost confirms the previous claims that implementing the FLRG and PIT recommendations would require a significant allocation of additional resources into instruction, which is something all faculty should support, and that the chancellor intends to work toward implementation.

UPDATED BETA ACH CALCULATOR

Hereis a link to the most recent iteration of the Beta ACH Excel Calculator. Please click the link and download the Excel workbook to your local hard drive/desktop, save the file, and then begin inputting projected information.

Many thanks go to Kate Mosle and Simonas Matulionas with Boston Consulting Group, who as part of their support of the PIT task forces and project have been building the Beta ACH Excel calculator as a tool to help faculty understand how the PIT recommendations would work together. According to Mosle,

“I know faculty continue to have questions about the calculator. They’ve raised lots of good points of input, and I’d love to provide them with an updated version of the calculator that fixes some of the bugs.”

“I know there will be revisions to the Master Course Table before it is fully operationalized, specifically around splitting out lecture and lab portions of certain sections. Since those MCT revisions have not yet been made… I included a note on the title page specifically calling out the fact that the MCT does not yet split out lectures and lab, but it will in the future. So, this version of the calculator is still a draft, but I do think it addresses some of the other faculty concerns that have come up, and it may help ease some of the confusion around how it works.”

Note that many of the issues and concerns that have arisen from faculty regarding the Beta ACH Excel calculator have to do with course maximums and minimums, and contact hour (ACH) values associated with classes. In addition, many science faculty specifically have requested the ability to enter the lecture and lab segments/portions of course sections separately. For instance, several science District discipline committees have official positions that it should be permitted to have the lecture and lab segments/portions of their courses taught by different instructors (even as many faculty in those disciplines still have the academic freedom to teach both the lecture and the lab of a given section).

These particular issues actually are part of the underlying data set programmed into the Master Course Table (MCT), not the calculator itself. Specifically, the ability to enter lecture and lab separately, and have each segment/portion of the course section apply the correct ACH, needs to be programmed into the MCT. Given the sheer number of courses in the DCCCD catalog that have labs, those changes have not yet been accomplished, nor – because there are budgetary implications to class sizes – is the exact timeline clear, but it is the intent for courses with labs to have three separate entries on the MCT, as follows:

•       One entry for lecture and lab combined with the total correct course ACH;
•       One entry for only the lecture segment/portion with only the correct lecture ACH;
•       One entry for only the lab segment/portion with only the correct lab ACH.

While we wait for these updates to the MCT, and while we wait for District leadership to decide which recommendations to implement for Fall 2020 given budget realities, we can continue to learn about how the calculator would work generally in a model where load, extra service, and reassigned time, are denominated in the “single currency” of ACH.

Also, note that on the “Policy Levers” tab in the Excel workbook, the default adjunct/extra service rate is set to $62.50 per ACH. Note that this $62.50 rate is what is proposed in the PIT recommendations. The current DCCCD adjunct/extra service rate is $48.42. On the Policy Levers tab, you can set the adjunct/extra service teaching rate to any value. This is a draft, designed to show how ACH would work. It is not designed to represent what PIT recommendations will or will not be operationalized for Fall 2020 because again, that decision rests with the chancellor.

HOW FACULTY INPUT CONTINUES TO REFINE THE BETA ACH EXCEL CALCULATOR
Other than the issues with the Master Course Table listed above, ongoing feedback from faculty via email, phone calls, and in person, has been processed and in many cases incorporated into updates to the Beta ACH Excel Calculator.

As with earlier drafts, the updated Excel workbook linked above allows us to see how changes stemming from the Policy Initiative Taskforce (PIT) work might look in operation. Faculty can input various scenarios of load, enrollment, and reassigned time to see how load and compensation would be impacted under potential policy changes. Please note this calculator remains in beta form. We are posting it in the hopes of helping faculty begin to become familiar with Adjusted Contact Hours (ACH) as well as gather feedback on the functionality of the calculator. This updated version has incorporated faculty input for a variety of improvements. However, the PIT recommendations are still under review, so this document only calculates what potential changes may be. This is still a draft. Some changes of note between the previous iteration and this version include:

• Flexibility for a “teaching minimum” requirement to be met across Fall and Spring semesters rather than limits in both semesters;
• Technical difficulties in entering course numbers that begin with zero are now fixed (can now be selected using a drop-down menu) and enter the correct ACH;
• Fixes issues with the replication of release time between fall and spring.

DOES THE CALCULATOR INCLUDE PREMIUM PAY?

At present, the Beta ACH Excel Calculator does not include Premium Pay. This is not an oversight, nor is it a thinly-veiled attempt to remove Premium Pay. Indeed, at the Dec. 12 PIT Leadership Council meeting, Chancellor May reiterated that Premium Pay exists in order to incentivize faculty to teach during non-traditional terms. Subsequent recommendations from BCG and PIT have removed any/all suggestions to trade Premium Pay for a higher extra service rate, and the issue has not been discussed after that Dec. 12 meeting. The only proposed change to Premium Pay that emerged in the PIT recommendations on Jan. 29, mentioned on pages 25 and 34, suggests that under certain circumstances, “…deans should be empowered to offer Premium Pay to faculty to teach extra courses in fall or spring, when both student demand warrants and where enrollment makes summer (or winter) Premium Pay earnings impossible or unlikely.” Again, this is a recommendation and there has been no decision yet as to whether or not it will be implemented.

That said, Mosle and Matulionis of BCG continue to try to develop a means by which Premium Pay can be automatically included in a future edition of the Beta ACH Excel Calculator. The fact that the Premium Pay ACH rate of $81.25/ACH (for up to 96 ACH) is different from the adjunct/extra service rate, and does not apply during fall or spring, makes the programming particularly challenging for Excel.

HOW CAN I CONTINUE TO HAVE MY FEEDBACK HEARD AND CONSIDERED?

Please continue to work with the ACH calculator, review the PIT recommendations, and send concerns of the following types to the following individuals:

• Class size maximums and minimums, and ACH values for individual courses: Master Course Table Task Force co-chairs, Angela Nino and Shawnda Floyd;
• How ACH is calculated in the various types of reassigned time: Reassigned Time Task Force co-chairs: Becky Heiskell and Audra Barrett;
• ACH Calculator functionality issues, compensation issues in the ACH Calculator, and other compensation issues brought up in the PIT report: Compensation Practices Task Force co-chairs, Matt Hinckley and Lori Doddy;
• Faculty Contracts (not reflected the ACH Calculator): Faculty Contracts Task Force Co-chairs, Matt Henry and Greg Morris. (Note that the draft contact in the PIT report was just a draft and several subsequent iterations have been produced by the task force.)

Also, share your thoughts with your local faculty association president.

WHY ISN’T THE FACULTY COUNCIL TAKING THE LEAD ON COMMUNICATING THIS, AND/OR WHY ARE NON-COUNCIL MEMBERS USING THE DCCFA ADVANCE BLOG TO SHARE THIS INFORMATION?

FLRG (2016-2017) and PIT (2019-2020) were both requested by, and in part staffed by members of, the Faculty Council. The FLRG and PIT projects have been informed and influenced by Faculty Council input, which in turn was influenced by years of input from faculty broadly on issues of inequities with compensation and load calculation. And at many times throughout both processes, FLRG and PIT have worked closely with the Faculty Council. At the same time, as official DCCCD projects, the FLRG and PIT projects were/are also separate from the Faculty Council (just as the DCCFA itself is a separate entity from the DCCCD).

In 2016-2017, FLRG updates were shared via the DCCFA Advance Blog. Here in 2020, ongoing PIT updates are being shared via the DCCFA Advance Blog. The DCCCD SharePoint is also being used, but in the interests of getting as much information as possible through as many means as possible to as many members as possible as quickly as possible, DCCFA President Carlos Martinez authorized Matt Henry and Matt Hinckley, as PIT task force co-chairs, to continue to use the DCCFA Advance Blog to communicate PIT information. Moreover, continuing to use the Advance Blog for this purpose allows members instantly, through the use of the FLRG and PIT labels, to peruse the historical context for this work since 2016.