Congress is Speaking out of both sides of its mouth

“Bills that both the House and Senate have passed to renew the Higher Education Act would bar the Education Department from promulgating federal rules to guide accrediting agencies on what and how they should assess colleges’ efforts to measure student learning. The measures would also make clear that colleges, rather than accreditors, have primary responsibility for setting standards for student learning.”

Only Congress could get away with speaking out of both sides of its mouth this way.

First, it passes laws that mandate measures of student learning — Sec 496(a) of the 1992 amendments to the HEA required the establishment of standards for completion rates, job placement rates, and pass rates on state licensing examinations (see 20 USC 1099b (a) 5 (A) ).

But now it acts like it never passed these laws!

By abdicating its responsibility (to say nothing of its integrity) Congress is hurting taxpayers and students that want the laxity of quality control at the institutional level addressed. By delegating the QA/QC responsibility back to the individual institutions, Congress not only passes on the need to reform our 100 year old system of self-regulation in HE, but by-passes the very same gatekeeping system that it set up in the wake of the massive waves of student loan defaults in the late 1980s.

Clearly, in the years since then, the regional accrediting guilds have tightened their grip on *both* houses of Congress.

Instead of worrying about federal involvement in higher ed, we now see what happens when the accreditors hold the government and taxpayers hostage.

Glen S. McGhee, Dir., at Florida Higher Education Accountabilty Project, at 7:55 am EST on February 28, 2008

Let’s work on things that can actually help

Although this administration leans toward redefining higher education as workforce preparation, that is far from the purpose of this sector of society. Furthermore, institutions are not standardized but function under very different missions, largely because students have differeing interests and needs. Accreditation institutions are resisting pressures to make them require institutions to fit a singular mold.

To characterize higher education and accreditation as dying industries is the kind of hyperbole and misrepresentation that has unfortunately characterized this process from the beginning. The US higher education system is the best in the world and simply has refused to be browbeaten into submitting to regulations that will truly undermine it to make it no more than the training division of for profit corporations. Who benefits from that? Just the corporations’ bottom line.

Let’s get real and move on that things that might actually help.

roliva, at 10:35 am EST on February 28, 2008

A little help from who?

Now I have to agree that I would prefer not to have the federal government more invovled; look what a disaster No Child Left Behind has been. But at the same time, our higher education system is based on and very similar to the same system that was used to educate monks in the Middle Ages. The system is hundreds of years old and may not be the best mechanism to educate our future leaders-particularly as the world is growing every smaller.

At the same time, out society also needs to readdress its perception on college. Not everyone needs to gain a college degree to be successful, nor should everyone go to college. As Jerry W. Miller said, employers discriminate based on a college degree and even the college obtained from. There is an assumption that someone more educated is better equipped to do that particular job verses someone with the skills and background. A bachelor’s degree should not have the same weight as a high school diploma, but we’ve moved into that direction.

That being said, before we can even look at mandates focus on graduation and retention rates and standardized systems of learning, we need a system that enables us to track a students transfer process- and I believe there has been discussions at the college level of this. The Higher Education and politicians seem to be blissfully unaware that people leave college in general for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of education. I realize that this group is also concerned about cost; but they fail to speak about how public funding of college education has decreased significantly. With a decrease of support from the federal or state level, colleges are of course going to see an increase in tuition costs.

It would be nice if Spellings could just step in and fix the problem by creating its own standards, but the reality is its just not that simple and that is not going to increase the quality of education or the graduation and retention rates.

LP, at 11:10 am EST on February 28, 2008

Resisting the “Mission” of Business Leaders

Resisting implies defending the status quo.

But see Participatory Economics as one well-worked out model of an alternative economic and educational system based on de-centered networks of cooperatives. It’s not about people or their talent being punished so wealth can be redistributed to the derelict.It’s about everybody participating, willingly, and being productive, developing their talent, and experiencing empowerment through such innovations as balanced job complexes.

Actually, business leaders could be very helpful in this if they themselves were willing to alter their “mission.” It’s about a highly productive economy that does not overproduce, does not ruin the earth by overconsumption. It’s about full employment and more time for civic participation and leisure. But in order to pull that off, the entire citizenry would also be educating itself for these radical new skills. For it’s about supply and demand, but no market, planning but not in a centralized, authoritarian way. And it’s about getting rid of a professional managerial class as in capitalism or a coordinator class as in the former Soviet Union, present day China and Cuba.

There ARE some pretty counterintuitive things in the model, like paying ourselves more when we ALL do our share of menial work, and paying ourselves less when we do our favorite, creative, empowering work, both forms of which would be balanced. And we can’t really get to that model from here without a long transition and a gradual internalizing of those new skills. The model HAS been shown, however, to DRIVE the values of solidarity, equity, self-management, diversity and efficiency.

The innovation might well develop everyone’s talents to the maximum. Our own education system has built into it all kinds of, mostly unconscious, exclusions, and that serves what IS, as though WHATEVER IS, IS RIGHT. What IS, of course, is a hybrid between the old feudal class structure and a capitalist “mission,” or so-called “meritocracy.” Except that once there’s been an outcome there can no longer be equality of opportunity. That’s what we’re teaching, by and large: adapt to this mixture of two poisons: one inherently exploitive mode of production morphing to another.

The model I suggest would preclude an underground economy. There would be no need of it, nor could one hide one’s ill-gotten gains among those whose ill-gotten gains are considered legitimate by a capitalist culture.

It’s a very detailed, complex model, one that has been worked out mathematically and represented in a book, Participatory Economics, Princeton UP, 1991. I haven’t the space to explain past the avalanche of automatic, erroneous assumptions this idea invariably riles up. Google “Participatory Economics.” We may not adopt it on the spot, but at least we’ll be shown the need to think past knee-jerk assumptions in order to argue with it, and that’s a good thing. Personally, I’ve found it very educational to argue with it. What the model does best, perhaps, is awaken our desire for something better and more genuinely democratic. That Desire is itself educational, and THAT ought to be considered part of assessment and accreditation. Do students graduate with a desire to achieve a better political economy?

Absent Referent, at 4:45 pm EST on February 28, 2008

“U.S. Education Department has invested significant time and energy on pressuring accrediting agencies to prod colleges to more effectively measure and more transparently report the academic outcomes of their students.”

Oh, is that what it was? It seemed to me to be a full-court press for institutions to adopt the CLA as a way to compare them to each other, and not incidentally make some folks at the RAND Corp. very wealthy.

First, you CAN’T measure education. (What would the units of measurement be?) You CAN estimate parameters for probabilistic events like “Jack can probably multiply two three-digit numbers", but once these events become complex, agreement about their meanings drops.

Second, everyone knows that a degree is different from a credential. A degree from school A is different from one from school B. Is this supposed to be bad? Is the market for educated people so easily fooled that they don’t know the difference between a well-educated person and one who is not? If so, the education doesn’t make a difference. If not, then the market should sort out the value of respective degrees. A system for job placement tracking would solve that problem, if it exists. The government could do all kinds of useful things if there were the intelligence and will to do so. Dictating meaningless “standards” is just a waste of everyone’s time.

Stanislav, Measurement Schmeasurement, at 6:35 pm EST on February 29, 2008