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Chaffey College, a three campus college with approximately 20,000 students located California's Inland Empire, has become the destination of many community college practitioners from around the country. The reason why? Over the past ten years, the college has become nationally-known as an institution with a "risk tolerant change-oriented culture" and a signature set of student support programs that produce impressive performance outcomes for Chaffey students. Robert Gabriner, San Francisco State University and Norton Grubb, University of California, Berkeley, talked to the faculty and the administration about Chaffey's success story. And they were not disappointed: they learned a great deal which is summarized in this working paper. Their primary concern, in visiting 14 California colleges including Chaffey and numerous other colleges for specific innovations, has been to examine the quality of instruction in basic skills. But colleges have increasingly turned to student support services to enhance the success of their developmental programs. According to lore, Chaffey promised to have a broader variety of services than most colleges; and contrary to the pattern of separation and even hostility between instruction and student support, Chaffey had apparently developed a model of integrating student support and developmental education that the authors needed to understand. Even though their analysis focuses on various support services, the Chaffey story is really one of developing a broad structure necessary for success both specifically in developmental education and more generally for all students. (Contains 1 figure and 8 endnotes.)

Basic skills courses are designed to teach students certain basic academic competencies they have not mastered. However, very little research has examined the quality of instruction inside basic skills classes. This paper presents preliminary findings from observations in 13 California community colleges. The clearest finding is that "remedial pedagogy" predominates--this is a pedagogy involving drill and practice on small sub-skills, stressing correct answers rather than conceptual understanding, with very little contextualization. Innovation usually occurs when individual instructors develop idiosyncratic practices or in the few cases where departments have organized to develop non-remedial approaches, but the college is rarely the locus of innovation. In addition, basic skills students are enormously heterogeneous, complicating the challenges of instruction, and most student support seems relatively weak. These findings help to explain why basic skills instruction is so often ineffective. Appended are: (1) Figures; and (2) The UCB/RP Study of Basic Skills in California Community Colleges. (Contains 2 figures and 26 footnotes.)

This paper examines school finance as a potential solution for inequity, identifying problems with the conventional solution of simply providing additional funding when inequities and inadequacies appear. The paper notes that states have developed a large roster of policy instruments, or state mechanisms of achieving educational policy. California's finance system is complex, and while it establishes greater equity in funding in some provisions, it undermines them in others. School finance reforms have always been argued in terms of dollars spent on schooling. New school finance, instead, concentrates on how dollars are actually used within classrooms and schools to produce desirable educational outcomes. In California, the most recent in a long line of litigation promoting greater equity is Williams v. State of California. This case provides an example of a new school finance lawsuit, since the facts of the case (too many uncredentialed teachers, inadequate and outdated textbooks, and inadequate and deteriorating facilities) move beyond dollars to the instructional conditions students experience in schools and classrooms. The paper asserts that solutions for these inequalities may require a complex combination of top-down funding patterns with a bottom-up process based on inequities in either instructional conditions or outputs. (Contains 148 references.) (SM)