September
Margaret Spellings’ Plan is Fraught with Contradictions
The Washington Post has some expanded coverage this morning on the speech that US Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings delivered yesterday. (Read the original Education Department advisory committee’s report.) I highly suggest you read the article, and I hope no one has any confusion about how much a federal college report card would change and impact the job of electronic college marketers. My interest here is far from off-topic. Given how much campaigning and spin Warren Wilson has done to combat our one bad mark in the Princeton Review, I can’t begin to imagine what kind of effort it would take to augment, combat, or take advantage of federally-created rankings and reports. To paraphrase a popular bumper sticker here on campus: “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.”
Some mysteries cleared up:
The panel proposed that college students undergo testing to ensure that the schools are meeting their academic promises and goals, the results of which would be part of a public database that would help students and parents assess and choose schools. Spellings made the point that few objective measures for judging the quality of a school are available to parents.
[…]
Educators have also balked at the commission’s call for colleges to conduct student assessments and make them public, saying it would be virtually impossible to develop a uniform national academic measure because of the many diverse subject disciplines and concentrations.
So it is to be some form of standardized testing. Want to find out what standardized testing has done to the quality of education in American public schools? Ask your nearest teacher. Think they’ll have better luck in universities? [Update: The New York Times article mentions two tests that she specified by name: the Collegiate Learning Assessment and the Measure of Academic Proficiency and Progress.]
At the commission’s recommendation, Spellings is offering financial incentives to schools that voluntarily report student assessments.
Elaine was right on. Government pressure on private institutions will come from denying them access to federal financial aid programs. The CNN article yesterday also hinted that the government would be pressuring accrediting agencies to support this agenda as an accreditation requirement. [Update: looks like the government will be offering matching funds to colleges already spending money experiamenting with standardized tests. She did not specifically say anything about federal financial aid.]
The article also does an excellent job of pointing out how backward her actual endorsements are when compared with her provocative statements about improving higher ed and making it more accessible for lower incomes. For instance:
She wants our higher education system, which she admits is “the best in the world,” to improve and be held accountable for student performance, BUT she wants to also hold colleges solely responsible for cutting costs by suggesting things like “increase use of adjunct professors over tenured teachers.” Yeah. Great idea lady, since grad students do such a better job than experienced PhDs. Maybe we could also make college cheaper by no longer using any books? Since, you know, they cost a lot and stuff.
She wants college to be affordable for low-income families, and she made a bunch of nice, quotable statements to that effect. Despite this, she disregarded the main recommendation made to her, which was a plan to increase need-based Pell Grants. Instead, she recommends a pipe dream Big Brother database that would cost probably several times the amount of money that increasing the grants would. Colleges, when being forced to comply with this new database system, are likely going to have to spend much more money on coming into compliance, self-assessments, re-organizations, and a hell of a lot of marketing spin to cover their junk. It seems to me as if Spellings’ priorities have nothing to do with actually making college more accessible so much as driving some sort of strange Bush pet project. (It was so un-surprising when WaPo quoted the chancellor for the Texas university system as being a vocal proponent of the database plan.)
“Our universities are known as the best in the world, and a lot of people will tell you things are going just fine,” [Spellings] said in a speech at the National Press Club. “But when 90 percent of the fastest-growing jobs require postsecondary education, and fewer and fewer Americans are getting one, are we satisfied with just fine?”
Let’s see, the United States has, at best, a middling public education system when compared to our peers in the developed world (and at worst we’re coming in close to last). Spellings admits we have one of the best higher education systems? What on earth—what deranged misfiring part of her brain—makes her think that government intervention is going to improve higher education when they’ve made such a stinking cesspit out of public education? Her comment about job requirements versus higher ed enrollment is debatable as well, but, even if you take it at face value, that is a problem to be solved between the private sector and the higher education system. I’ll be Republican about it: trust the free market to fix the system. If there is money to be made, then colleges will take advantage of prospective student’s desire to make that money by working with the business world to produce the kind of employees that business will hire. The free market will drive education improvement in ways that will help American jobs. Heavy-handed big-government intervention will not. (Guess what folks, I’m a Democrat, and I still think that old-school Republican logic works so much better than creating the Big Brother College Guide.)
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Some other news sources covering the subject (GET EDUMICATED!!1!):
The Wall Street Journal’s Washington Wire blog
Members of the higher education community aren’t happy, either. “We’re perplexed when she says there’s not much information on accountability,” says David Warren, president of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. “Our Web sites are overflowing with information.”
(And boy don’t we know that!)
And for a political angle, have some Kos
careful… I have a feeling that while we were getting hosed by our colleges and universities for every dime we have that the government just screwed us with our pants on
Schools Matter blog reporting on the Houston Chronicle article by Ben Feller
What Feller’s press release, er, news story, doesn’t say, is that the Spellings Commission Report is an underhanded device to direct the curriculums and research agendas of America’s colleges and universities into the hands of corporate interests.
Kansas University news via Kansan.com
Both McCluskey-Fawcett and Chancellor Robert Hemenway said they would not support a national exam if it judged all institutions by the same criteria.
“I think it would go against the strengths of American universities,” Hemenway said. “I think one of the great strengths of the higher education in the United States and in Kansas is the diversity of it.”
The Capitol Times in Madison WI
The commission finalized its report in August. The only member of the panel not to sign the report was David Ward, president of the American Council on Education and a former UW-Madison chancellor.
Ward said at the time it evoked a “false sense of crisis,” blaming higher education for problems that actually come from various sources.
The plan, Ward has argued, wrongly suggested a “one size fits all” approach to improving higher education.
Perhaps we are seeing the college version of No Child Left Behind, where the federal government takes more control of what is practically a state issue, with more policies and regulations - not less. It should come as no surprise, by the way, that Spellings was one of the authors of No Child Left Behind as a domestic policy advisor for President Bush prior to being named Secretary of Education.
Spelling and her commission envision using the database to assess the quality of education offered by institutions. Students and their families, she said, would be able to better choose colleges. They would know more about what they were getting for their ever-more-expensive college education.
Fair enough. But at what price — for taxpayers and for the universities that must set up elaborate systems to track the progress of every student enrolled.
This is Big Brother squared.
September 27th, 2006 at 10:49 pm
The speech was so ridiculous. It was one of those times–which have been coming perhaps more frequently in these last 6 years than in the previous 8?–where I just throw up my hands and curse the world. Not that I could really compare; my clearest memories of the Clinton years were of things like the time in 4th gradel I made many, many terrible jokes about Monica Lewinsky while reading ‘Election’ …with my mom.
Everything you’ve hit upon here is spot on. When I look at what the woman said I can only hope and pray it’s a matter of her being ‘out of touch’ rather than… serious. Whether I’d rather have an out of touch secretary of education over a psychotic one is a question worthy of some debate, I suppose.
September 27th, 2006 at 10:56 pm
Oh, and to keep it old school one more time: someone should go reread what The Carnegie Commission / Council on higher education did back from ‘70 onwards… It had some good points and suggestions for reform that I think could have been adopted more fully than they were. Still stuff to learn from ‘68-9, as my Columbia riots paper taught me.
What’s more, Students for a Democratic Society was reborn last January. We have a chapter here on campus now. They say they’re nonviolent now, but, hey… another throwback.