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December 19, 2007, 07:49 AM ET
Now What?
Margaret Spellings is a class act — smart, tough, and resilient. Yesterday she did what she had to do. She pulled the plug on her department’s attempt to federalize accreditation in order to force that process to focus on testable learning outcomes. The lesson she learned, I suspect, is that higher education really is different.
Paradoxically it is both more fractured and better organized than the nation’s K-12 systems. More important, at its core is a professoriate that owns the teaching/learning process lock, stock, and barrel. You cannot change higher education with out enlisting both the energies and enthusiasm of a significant portion of us. The question that Spellings’ reform efforts has left unanswered — unaddressed really — is how does one make that happen? More on Friday.
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