Any Port in a Storm?

Congress already addressed student learning outcomes in the 1992 and 1998 amendments to the Higher Education Act. The current problems with monitoring and reporting student achievement, then, cannot be attributed to a lack of legislative will. This raises the question about what went wrong with these initiatives.

The answers can be found by going back to the emergence of the regional accrediting guilds more than a century ago.

Historically, the voluntary system of peer review and institutional self-improvement that emerged then has almost nothing in common with the much more recent federal interests in American higher education, which have now been imposed upon the older organizational foundation. These regional accrediting guilds were originally formed for the benefit of their members, and in this regard they have performed admirably well by resisting political interference and change.

However, it is also obvious that now the shift is away from self-regulation, which tends toward the interests of the member institutions and not those of the public, and this shift may simply indicate that a whole new approach to quality assurance in higher education is needed. The December 2006 changes in which the Southern Association voted to side-line faculty qualification requirements for their members are a good example of this: http://sacscoc.org/pdf/Proposed%20Principles.pdf

These backward moves simply reflect SACS inability to get control of the out-of-field instructor problem in the South, which averages 34% (SACS-Eldridge E. Scales, 1969).

As this lack of accountability shows, accrediting guilds like SACS have a long history of resisting change and innovation, whether it was with the advent of junior colleges in the 1920s, or vo-tech schools, or even black colleges. And the record clearly shows they haven’t yet succeeded very well with the latter. Accrediting guilds are not noted for their flexibility in dealing with new challenges. This, of course, makes the Secretary’s job that much more difficult.

Glen S. McGhee, Dir., at Florida Higher Education Accountability Project, at 9:25 am EST on January 17, 2007

Dumbing-down

[Response to “Another Front on Accreditation” from “Inside Higher Ed” e-news, Jan 17, 2007]

Changes in the accreditation system have wide ramifications, as seen in the push of 2-year schools to gain permission to offer certain 4-year degrees. Their argument, “It offers a more affordable means of getting a bachelors for students who can’t afford many 4-year institutions. This encroachment of one educational area into the realm of another may continue, and even impact grad schools such as seminaries. Not only are there issues between Title-4 and non-Title-4 institutions, but the allowance for some schools to evade standards opens up the market to a very subjective level of education. I think it will actually create a further “dumbing-down” effect for education at every level, until a Bachelors degree is little more than an elevated High School diploma, a Masters is little more than an elevated Bachelors, etc.

Note the second article, where a once Educational-software-provider has actually moved into the area of educating. [Blackboard on Tuesday announced officially (as it had been suggesting less officially for several months) that it was offering products in a new line — assessment — from individual courses to entire institutions.] To misquote Dash Incredible, “When everybody’s an educator, nobody is.”

Fortunately/unfortunately there is no “Emissions test” for the effectiveness of education. And yet, that is exactly the outsourcing of professor-student interacting that Blackboard (and others) are attempting to accomplish. [The new tools will allow colleges to measure course effectiveness and to act on those findings, to figure out if there are gender or ethnic patterns in course performance,] In the early days of Blackboard (we beta tested it at the University of Alabama), the very first effects of requiring written assignments to be submitted electronically were:

1. Subjectivity – faculty completely stopped marking up and editing papers. They just wrote a two sentence summation of their “feelings” on the paper and gave a grade. Note the role of “ethnic and gender patterns” which can quickly turn in to demographic preference (e.g. “This class is too hard for me, so we’ll make their requirements easier by….”)

2. Greater importance of Peer-evaluation – sort of like a MySpace meets academia, students were allowed to read and comment (usually in class) on the quality/content of other student’s work.

3. Copyright infringement / plagiarism – students could read, and even print, other student’s work before submitting their own, resulting in several cases of plagiarized works.

Interestingly, “One of the first two institutions to sign on was the University of Texas at Brownsville.” UT@B, as an institution, does not seem to be accredited (Nobody at the school was able to tell me with whom UT@B as an institution, across most programs, was accredited). Information from their website indicates that institutional growth must factor that,

“Program quality is the quickest and best way to make UTB/TSC a university of first choice. Programs that have a regional, state or national accrediting body should be encouraged to seek and receive accreditation in a reasonable time frame, unless there are supportable reasons for not doing so. Such reasons include but are not limited to a significant mismatch between the program and the accrediting agency’s philosophy or the results of a careful cost-benefit analysis indicating that accreditation is not worth the investment. To the extent possible, the institution is encouraged to identify short term funding to achieve national norms in programs for which they are determined to be the desired goal. For those programs in which accreditation is determined to be the desired goal, seeking and achieving it should be one standard by which the sustainability of those programs are assessed.”

Their Business program is accredited through AACSB and the School of Nursing is accredited through NLNAC.

Specifically for our Seminary as we recruit, we need to emphasize (up-sell) the importance of the longer degree. Instead of going the way of the “2-year” (60 hour MDiv), I think we continue to show the value of the 103-hour degree (inclusive of languages and PT)

J. Hathaway (edited by J. Pakala)

Jim Pakala, Library Director at Covenant Theological Seminary, at 1:25 pm EST on January 18, 2007

Rule Making Panel Convened by U.S. Department of Education

It has come to my attention that you have been appointed to a rule-making body by the U.S. Department of Education. That body will meet to develop proposed student financial assistance regulations. In light of recent actions by a similar appointive committee, the National Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, it is apparent that the U.S. Secretary of Education is preparing for a massive intrusion of federal power into the traditionally independent system of higher education in the United States. It may not be perfect, but the current mix of state supported and independent private colleges and universities overseen by a self-governing system of academic accreditation allows new institutions to flourish and to contribute to higher education in the United States. If that system were replaced by a national accrediting body domiciled in the U.S. Department of Education or chartered by it to replace the existing accrediting associations, a dark night of despotism would set upon higher education in the United States. In that context, I want to call to your attention that the “Protocols” of the rule-making body to which you have been appointed provide for the stifling of all dissent: Protocol “III. Decision Making” reads as follows: The committee will operate by consensus, meaning that there must be no dissent by any member in order for the committee to be considered to have reached agreement. Thus, no member can be outvoted. Members should not block or withhold consensus unless they have serious reservations about the approach or solution that is proposed for consensus. Absence will be equivalent to not dissenting. All consensus agreements reached during the negotiations will be assumed to be tentative agreements until members of the committee reach final agreement on regulatory language. Once final consensus is achieved, committee members may not thereafter withdraw their consensus. There is a general rule in American politics that political appointees in the three hundred or more Cabinet and sub-cabinet positions in the U.S. Federal government are expected not to criticize, nor dissent from, the policies of the Administration that appointed them while they hold appointive office, and thereafter. And that political loyalty is usually followed though there have been some exceptions. In my experience in service as a political appointee in the Administrations of two Presidents of the United States never have I witnessed an attempt to muzzle non-political appointees who voluntarily participate in an appointive administrative body, agency, commission or committee. Dissent is accepted as the price of freedom. The highly unusual terms of Protocol III of the rule making body to which you have been appointed sets a new standard of control that I urge you to reject. In recent matters affecting higher education, I struggle to recall when in my experience an appointed official acted in such an arbitrary fashion without consultation with Members of Congress and the general public. In the absence of public hearings on rule changes, Townhall meetings, and without consultation with the higher education community, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings moves policy behind a screen of appointive Committees. And now we learn that those participating in this charade are not permitted to dissent! I urge you to reject Protocol “III. Decision Making” and inform your associates of the threat to higher education presented by the policies of this Administration and that if you do not register your dissent that you inform the members of the organizations you serve that by serving on this rule making committee you accept the muzzle of Protocol III. The bureaucratic administrative state that can close down innovation in higher education is on the move and looking for freedoms that it may devour. All that it asks of you is that you remain silent. In my humble opinion, you are required by your duty as a citizen of this country not to accept the muzzling of dissent represented by Protocol III.Sincerely yours,

Richard J. Bishirjian, Ph.D. President Yorktown University P. O. Box 460808 Denver, CO 80246720 212 0843

Richard J. Bishirjian, President at Yorktown University, at 6:50 pm EST on January 27, 2007