FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Wednesday, Thursday 22, 2013

Today California Federation of Teachers president Joshua Pechthalt issued the following statement regarding the news that San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera has taken legal action against the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges, charging, among other things, that “the private agency unlawfully allowed its advocacy and political bias to prejudice its evaluation of college accreditation standards,” and that the ACCJC is “a wholly unaccountable private entity.”

“We are heartened that San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera has sued the ACCJC. The reckless actions of the agency and its president, Barbara Beno, have not only imperiled an education for 85,000 San Francisco students, but also diverted enormous amounts of time and money in all our community colleges away from instruction and toward “compliance” with the ACCJC’s unreasonable demands.

“The focus of Mr. Herrera’s legal action is in broad agreement with the complaint filed by CFT with the ACCJC and the U.S. Department of Education. Last week a letter from the Department of Education to the ACCJC found that three key points of our complaint were valid and needed to be addressed by the ACCJC or it would lose its oversight authority.

“More and more people are now noticing the damage done by the ACCJC to California’s Community Colleges. While City College of San Francisco faces significant challenges, those challenges have been worsened, not helped, by ACCJC sanctions. We are hopeful recent events will convince the Commission to rescind its wrongful dis-accreditation decision, and help put this rogue agency back on a more constructive track.”