Spellings Ed Dept. says, "No" to more Pell grants. [View All]

[donco6]

But "Yes" to requiring a phenomenally expensive system for tracking student progress from preK to postgrad.

Yeah! That makes sense.


Education Secretary Margaret Spellings called yesterday for greater fiscal and academic accountability in higher education and endorsed a controversial plan to keep long-term records on students that would track performance from the time they enter the system in grade school to show how their educations progress.

The panel proposed that college students undergo testing to ensure that the schools are meeting their academic promises and goals, the results of which would be part of a public database that would help students and parents assess and choose schools. Spellings made the point that few objective measures for judging the quality of a school are available to parents.

The commission recommended increasing the value of Pell Grants to cover 70 percent of the average in-state tuition at public colleges; the grants now cover only 48 percent of tuition. Spellings did call for a complete overhaul and streamlining of the unwieldy college aid system and acknowledged that more money is needed, but she stopped short of endorsing increases in Pell Grants. David L. Warren, president of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, said: "I found that quite remarkable, because it was the key recommendation from the commission. Yet she endorsed a unit record database, which would be enormously expensive to implement."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/26/AR2006092601460.html