Accountability for Higher Ed?

The Commission on the Future of Higher Education was chartered by Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings in September, 2005.  Its charge sounds bland enough, until you weigh the meaning of: “How well are institutions of higher education preparing our students . . . ?” in the context of the Bush administration’s obsession with outcomes testing.  The true mission of the Commission was clarified in a New York Times article on February 9, 2006: to create standardized testing to evaluate how well college students are learning.  The problem, according to Charles Miller (president of the Commission and former head of the Texas Board of Regents) is one of accountability.

As Secretary Spellings put it, “unlike K-12 education, we don’t ask a lot of questions about what we’re getting for our investment in higher education.”  Hmm.  Since college education and its effect on the future success of American children is something of a national obsession, it’s hard to believe that people aren’t more or less constantly looking at what we’re getting.  But of course that’s not the Secretary’s point, nor the point of the Commission: they are designed to make higher education accountable to the federal government.  No Young Adult Left Behind.

This news, almost more than any of the other dismal reports coming in from

Washington

,

Iraq

, and

Guantanamo

, convinces me that we truly have a New Right in power in this country.   The Reagan right was always too anarchist to be truly fascist: its dream of dismantling the federal government, while often contradicted by its actions, kept it from wanting to intrude so ostentatiously on the minds of Americans (though to be sure the Reagan Justice Department was preparing much of what we now see coming into being, thanks to the enabling shock of 9/11).  Keeping education out of the hands of the Feds was in any case an article of faith on the Right.

Federally-mandated outcomes testing for American higher education?  It’s enough to make anyone who teaches the subversive stuff I do (literature and theory, sometimes French naturellement) take early retirement.

Peter Brooks

Comments

[Now a Hoo]

If anyone else were in charge of such a movement, it wouldn't necessarily be that bad.

I went to a large, underfunded state U., and they used standardized tests to show the state legislature that we were learning critical and analytical reasoning while we were at the university. We got a day off our freshman- and senior- years to take the tests. They would compare our scores at the beginning and end of college and then presumably take them to the legislature and show that they were good stweards of taxpayer money. The tests were /not/ about what specific things we had covered in any class, and no student got in trouble for doing poorly. It wasn't bad at all.

That said, there's no chance the current government would use a testing program in anything but a reprehensible manner.

[Coach Outlet]

Chief Justice Robert's decision for the unanimous Court in in the law school/military recruiting