I received great feedback from my last post, much of it articulating the difficulty of coming up with a fair way of assessing all institutions of higher learning—public, private, and proprietary—and I would like to incorporate much of it into this post. My first reaction when this topic came up (as I read responses to a post in which I singled out proprietary colleges as most in need of accountability) was that we certainly should not adopt a model such as the No Child Left Behind Act, signed into law by George W. Bush in 2002. Though the Act initially received overwhelming bipartisan support, it has been the object of much controversy ever since. The mandate was grossly underfunded and thus could not be adequately executed. More substantively, it seemed to create a culture of “teaching to the test.” Teachers, knowing that their school’s funding might ultimately rest on the annual test scores of its students, would focus on teaching the content of the tests, which would in turn limit the creativity and independence of their pedagogy. And that in turn created a decade’s worth of grade-school and high-school students more knowledgeable about test-taking strategies than the content that those tests ostensibly reflected.
No one seems eager to replicate that model on the collegiate level, although even before NCLB, there was apparently just such an undertaking. Commenter “emwhite” had this to say: “I think the last time this was broached was about 15 years ago in relation to the Goals 2000 initiative, sponsored by the US department of education, the first president Bush, and Bill Clinton. Several conferences were held and commissioned papers were published in the Journal of General
Education. Nothing resulted, though there was much talk of a national test of college graduates in the six areas of the proposal. Some reasons: those involved could not agree on just who would be defined as a college graduate, no money was to be provided for what would be a massive test development and administration enterprise, the great diversity of American post-secondary education militated against any single testing device, and—most obvious of all—nobody could come up with a way to induce college graduates to sit still for a test.”
He then wonders if others more centrally involved with that rather bizarre enterprise could provide more information: “Actually, it would provide good material for a CHE story.” Indeed, he or she is right: The story of how to hold America’s colleges accountable for the achievements of their students is a bizarre enterprise with a fairly long and complex history—perhaps better suited to an article than to my reflections here.
“emwhite’s” recollections of the Goals 2000 initiative raise questions that are completely unresolved today. How do we define a college graduate? Or do we devise different tests for community college graduates than for graduates of four-year baccalaureate programs? Even if we did so, that would not do justice to the vast variety of U.S. colleges and Universities.
“did18” elaborates: “there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to assessment. In fact, it would be . . . impossible to use the same single measure for Pennsylvania State University, Pennsylvania College of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, and Central Pennsylvania College. Each institution purports to promote student learning in different areas and in different ways.” The same claim could legitimately be made about every state university system in the country, and that doesn’t even approach the question of how to compare graduates of Bob Jones University to graduates of Harvard: private universities have widely disparate missions too.
And then, what would the tests (and I think it’s obvious in light of the above comments that there would have to be several), cover, since students begin to specialize from the moment they enter college, if not earlier? As a proto-English major in high school, the quadratic formula was lost to me at 15. Would I have had to relearn it? Would every animal husbandry major at Ohio State be forced to read Robinson Crusoe? (I actually taught such a student once. The thesis of her paper about Defoe’s masterpiece was: Robinson Crusoe mistreats his goat. It’s actually true, but hardly literary criticism. How would one score such a response?).
Finally, while many Americans would like to know whether our colleges are being responsible in educating their students, they would balk at the price tag of a nationwide accountability rubric. The first time that an assessment tool like that was implemented on a grand scale occurred when the U.S. entered World War I: 1.7 million inductees were given I.Q. tests (the War Department picked up the bill). The results were initially inconclusive, in the sense that the Army didn’t really make use of them, and the in the postwar era the tests were put to nefarious uses by eugenicists to prove that some races and ethnic groups were more intelligent than others (yet another problem with accountability testing).
In an article published in the Chronicle on February 23, 2011, Theodore C. Wagenaar, professor of sociology and a faculty associate in the Center for the Enhancement of Learning, Teaching, and University Assessment at Miami University of Ohio, strongly supported assessment, concluding: “Let’s not do assessment just because it is mandated. Let’s not do it to make accreditation agencies happy or because everyone else is doing it. Let’s do it to improve learning.” I’m all in favor of his sentiment. I just can’t figure out the how.
