I am strongly opposed to the "objective" pretense of such assessments: we get tricked into becoming a new from of school, and the truly important content of my discipline is only assessable quantitatively if we sacrifice the learning expereince: the essence of a university, its freedom to teach, is in danger if we streamline.  What we will get is more accounting, not accountability.  I hope to be able to teach what counts, without counting: liberty is not to be quantified, as J St. Mill correctly assessed.
Achim Koeddermann

 
 
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Subject: Education Department Hears Appeals to Make Colleges More Accountable for Student
3/10/03


  <http://chronicle.com/icons/space.gif> Education Department Hears Appeals to Make Colleges More Accountable for Student Performance

By STEPHEN BURD <mailto:[log in to unmask]> 

Kansas City, Mo.




Two panels of student-aid experts, state officials, business leaders, parents, and students selected by the U.S. Education Department urged the Bush administration on Friday to hold colleges more accountable for the academic performance of their students. 

The Education Department put together the panels to speak here at a special session of the agency's annual student-aid conference devoted to the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, the law that governs most federal student-aid programs, which Congress is scheduled to begin considering later this year. Education Department leaders, including Sally Stroup, the department's assistant secretary for postsecondary education, moderated the panels. Ms. Stroup said that the administration would consider the advice of the panels when drafting its proposals for reauthorizing the act, which expires at the end of the year. 

Bush administration officials have repeatedly said that they will use the same principles that guided their efforts to improve elementary and secondary education, such as demanding greater accountability and performance from public schools, to guide their approach to renewing the Higher Education Act. While such talk has alarmed many college lobbyists and leaders, who fear that the administration intends to ratchet up the government's oversight of colleges, most of the panelists agreed that it is appropriate for the government to make sure that colleges do a good job educating their students, retaining them, and graduating them in a timely manner (The Chronicle, <http://chronicle.com/weekly/v49/i04/04a02301.htm>  September 20). 

"If we are going to maintain taxpayer support for federal higher-education programs, I believe we must provide taxpayers with the confidence that their tax dollars are being well spent," said Richard T. Jerue, vice president for government relations and corporate development for the Education Management Corporation, which primarily operates for-profit art institutes and culinary colleges. "Quality and accountability are the ways to assure that." 

In his presentation, Mr. Jerue promoted a proposal by the Career College Association, which lobbies on behalf of for-profit institutions, that would require colleges to create an "Institutional Report Card." Such reports, he said, "would give students, parents, policy makers, and any other interested party tangible information about a particular school, its mission, goals and objectives, what it purports to do, and its success in doing that." 

As part of that proposal, institutions would be required to report the rate at which they graduate their students, as well as other factors that "attempt to assess what happens to the student while he or she is in school," he said. Colleges could report on their retention rates or transfer rates, depending on the missions of the institutions 

In addition, Mr. Jerue said, colleges would be required to provide "outcome measures" that would try to answer the question "What value-added did the student receive from the education they just paid for?" Factors such as job-placement rates, average starting salaries, licensure information, graduate- and professional-school admission rates, passage rates for competency tests or certification exams, student/alumni satisfaction surveys, or employer satisfaction surveys could be considered. "The outcome measures will necessarily be different depending on the mission of the particular institution involved," he said. 

Another panelist, Jeanne Adkins, talked of how, as director of policy and planning for the Colorado Department of Higher Education, she helped develop measures for judging the performance of the state's public colleges. 

Ms. Adkins, who is now the director of the Colorado Student Loan Program, the state's student-loan guarantee agency, said she believes that the performance measures, which are taken into account when the state legislature divvies up new spending for the public colleges each year, have been "a success for consumers and for institutions." Colleges that originally opposed the reporting requirements, she said, have recently sent out news releases pointing to the improvements they have made in raising their graduation and retention rates. 

Ms. Adkins, however, told the department officials that if they decide to move forward with accountability measures, they should not just try to duplicate the Colorado model. Any policy that the Bush administration and Congress develop, she said, should give states the authority to design their own accountability systems. "Flexibility, rather than rigid guidelines," she said, "brings far more good information -- and potential change -- in our view," 

Department officials indicated on Friday that they will move ahead with accountability proposals, but did not specify exactly what those proposals would be. Ms. Stroup told Ms. Adkins, "As we talk about accountability in the coming months, my guess is that we will hear the same sorts of 'why this can't work' or 'why we can't do this' as you heard in Colorado four years ago." 

After the panels concluded, department officials allowed members of the public to speak on reauthorization. College lobbyists, who had been left off of the panels, reiterated their opposition to proposals that would increase the federal role in holding colleges accountable for the performance of their students. They said, however, that they would support efforts by the government to make data that colleges already provide to the federal government, states, and college guidebooks more widely available to students and their families. 

"The Department of Education already collects a boxcar full of data from institutions of higher education," said Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president for government and public affairs at the American Council on Education. "It might be that what we ought to be thinking about is making the public more widely aware of what's available" on the department's Web site. 




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