Who's Who at the Spellings Summit

For weeks, mystery has swirled around who will have a seat at the table(s) this week when Margaret Spellings convenes her higher education "summit," which is designed to help set the course for how the Education Department moves forward in carrying out the recommendations of the education secretary's Commission on the Future of Higher Education.

Would business leaders dominate? Will Washington's higher education associations -- which have been frozen out of several other recent policy discussions in Washington -- get a golden ticket? Will you need a Texas birth certificate to join in?

The various conspiracy theories were fed in part by the fact that requests to see the list, from participants and interested reporters alike, were turned away in recent weeks. But department officials insisted that the delays had occurred because they were striving to balance and satisfy the hundreds of nominations and suggestions that college groups and others had submitted for the maximum 300 slots, and to make the final group representative not only of higher education itself but of the many other constituents with an interest and stake in it.

The list that department officials provided late Monday is probably unlikely to satisfy everyone (could any such list?), but it's hard at first glance to find any group that would have a serious gripe about being shut out. Sure, there aren't a lot of individual professors (three by this reporter's count, excluding policy experts who focus on higher education), but major faculty unions are represented. It's hard to find a significant sector of higher education not represented (heck, there are even two officials from rabbinical colleges).

And all of higher education's major Washington lobbying groups will have a voice in the discussion -- remarkably enough, even the invitation to David L. Warren of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, who was the Spellings Commission's most vocal and persistent critic throughout the course of its deliberations, did not get lost in the mail.

"We feel that the process we used to create the invitation list was eminently defensible," said Jason Dean, who as a senior counselor to Under Secretary Sara Martinez Tucker played a key role in planning this week's summit. "We tried to reach out to as many communities as we could, and hopefully our registration list is a reflection of that. I can’t tell you how many times we tried to get the invite list right. But I'd be naive to think that everybody's going to be happy."

So who's coming?

Ten of the Spellings Commission’s 19 members will be there (all were invited), including, of course, now Under Secretary Tucker, as well as Charles Miller, the panel's outspoken chairman, and David Ward, who as president of the American Council on Education was the sole member of the commission not to sign its final report.

The federal government is well represented, with 16 Congressional aides joined by 18 officials from various offices in the Education Department, not including those organizing and leading the conference. But befitting the reality that there is much more to be done at the state level than at the federal level, there are many more state officials of various stripes, including one governor, Donald Carcieri of Rhode Island, several state legislators, and numerous heads of state higher education coordinating boards and university systems.

Twelve accreditors will be there, as will 49 college presidents, from a wide range of institutions: public four-years like the University of Massachusetts system and the University of Maryland Baltimore County, community colleges (including Dyersburg State Community College and Portland Community College), historically black institutions such as Grambling State University, and four-year private institutions like Alverno College and Pacific Lutheran University. All 12 presidents who accompanied Spellings on her trip to Asia last fall were invited.

Most of the major players in standardized testing will be there, as will a wide array of higher education researchers and policy wonks. The corporate sector is represented by companies as diverse as Bison Gear and Engineering Corp. and Sungard Higher Education. (A full list of the attendees and their affiliations appears below.)

What will they be doing?

The summit, which will be held Thursday at the Willard Hotel in Washington, (an agenda can be found here ) will be framed around a set of 25 initial recommendations drawn from reports by five "working groups" that department officials formed on specific subjects: aligning K-12 and college curriculums and requirements; increasing need-based student aid; using accreditation to measure student-learning outcomes; serving adults and other nontraditional students; and making information about college costs more transparent and available to the public. (Department officials do not plan to release those reports or the 25 recommendations until Thursday morning, but here is the document produced by the working group on accreditation, to provide a sense of how broadly framed the recommendations are.)

Thursday’s meeting will begin with reports from the five working groups, and then the participants will break into one of five larger groups to refine, add to or subtract from the original lists of recommendations, which Dean called “conversation beginners.” After a luncheon speech by Spellings, the participants will divide up again into five groups with the goal of identifying specific tasks that need to be done to achieve the recommendations, and which players – federal or state government, college officials, foundations, etc. -- should be responsible for them.  

By late afternoon, facilitators from the five groups will present to the entire assemblage on their conclusions, and the day is designed with end with a session aimed at identifying “the nation’s action plan and next steps," as the agenda describes it.

In June, the department plans to hold a series of five regional mini-summits (in Atlanta, Boston, Kansas City, Phoenix and Seattle) that are designed to (1) sustain whatever momentum emerges from Thursday’s meeting, (2) solicit more advice and involvement from people who were unable to attend the Washington meeting, notably students and others for whom travel was impossible, and (3) explore whether and how the issues and problems are playing out differently at a local or regional rather than national level.

Exactly how much say the nearly 300 attendees at Thursday's meeting will have in shaping the department's ideas going forward, and how easy or difficult it will be to reach any sort of consensus in a group that big are two of the questions that will make the day potentially interesting, if messy.

The full list of those planning to attend Thursday's meeting follows: