Secretary Spellings and the attack on higher education

Following the rousing success that has been the No Child Left Behind era in American Education, the Bush Administration, through its lackey, err, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, has decided to take on higher education. Early signs are that this will be undertaken with the same forethought and success that every Bush initiative has had.

An advisory commission report sent this month to Education Secretary Margaret Spellings recommends a wide range of proposals related to the accessibility, affordability and accountability of higher education.

I agree that higher education has become prohibitively expensive in many places. When costs rise 5-10% per year, that far outpaces inflation and earnings, and many schools have priced themselves out of the running for many students. However, the cause of these increases is not often identified. It's not new buildings, or faculty salaries, or Porsches for the dean. It's health care, same as with other businesses. Health care costs rose nearly 8% again last year (and 80% since 2000), and that's directly connected with the rise of tuition and fees at colleges.

To say, on the other hand, that higher education is not accessible or accountable, is patently absurd. There are hundreds and hundreds of four-year colleges and universities in this country, and thousands of two-year community colleges. In nearly any town of any reasonable size is some sort of institution of higher learning. Distance learning is becoming more and more common (see, for example, the University of Illinois' Global Campus Initiative).

Dealing specifically with accountability, Spellings wants to:

• Provide matching grants to colleges, universities and states that collect and publicly report student learning outcomes.

• Convene a meeting with higher-education accrediting groups this year "to move toward measures that place more emphasis on learning." She says accreditation, the primary source of quality control in higher education, is focused "more on how many books are in a college library than whether students can actually understand them."

These are even more clueless than the comment about accessibility. Where I work, we are hip-deep in our every ten year reaccreditation process. We're part of the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools. You can read their handbook on accreditation here, but I can say unequivocally that accreditation is entirely about student learning. We are dedicating thousands of hours of work compiling hundreds of documents detailing what we expect students to learn in each course, what artifacts and data we collect to measure student learning, and what processes we have and are developing to use that data to improve our teaching and increase student learning. I could provide you with some of the number that I've written, if you're really interested. Spelling's comments are entirely non-sensical, and will do far more harm than good. I expect no less out of a Bush appointee.

A number of years ago, back when the Liar in Chief took office, I said something about how we would look back fondly on the time before Bush took office, "back when we had schools."

Sigh.