No Gr_du_te Left Behind

[unhappycamper]

No Gr_du_te Left Behind
By JAMES TRAUB
Published: September 30, 2007

AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CHARLESTON, a not-exactly-selective institution on the banks of the Kanawha River in the capital city of West Virginia, incoming students take a standardized test designed to measure reasoning and writing skills and then take the test again after sophomore year and once again as seniors — to see if their education is doing them any good. Courses are constructed around a series of defined “liberal learning outcomes” like critical thinking and creativity, and if the students’ work shows that many of them aren’t hitting the outcomes, the teachers go back to the drawing board. Ditto with the standardized tests. “We take data seriously,” says Alan Belcher, a member of the Faculty Center that rides herd on the whole process, “and we act on it.” Apparently they act well: in its promotional materials, U.C. boasts that it posted “the largest learning gain from first to final year” of any of the 40 schools that participated in a trial of the Collegiate Learning Assessment, one test it uses.

This orientation toward measurable outcomes has already colonized many spheres of life — K-12 education, medicine, government services — but in the world of higher education, places like the University of Charleston are lonely outliers. They may soon become the vanguard. The Bush administration, having used the No Child Left Behind Act to impose accountability — and, critics would say, a sterile uniformity — on the reluctant world of public elementary and secondary schools, is now seeking to accomplish something similar in post-secondary education. A commission impaneled by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings concluded last year that colleges “should measure and report meaningful student learning outcomes,” that they should use tests to make comparison possible, that accrediting agencies should make these and other performance outcomes “the core of their assessment” and that colleges should make the results publicly available “as a condition of accreditation.”

The culture of assessment has provided a bracing discipline for the University of Charleston and for a small but growing number of other public and private institutions. But it’s fair to ask whether Stanford, say, or the University of Michigan needs any bracing. Do they need to prove that students are getting their money’s worth? And do we really want our dotty and beloved professor of medieval history to reverse-engineer his class according to desired student outcomes rather than sticking to the dictates of medieval history? In the upper reaches of academe there is an anxiety, sometimes bordering on panic, that the Bush administration is trying to turn everybody into the University of Charleston and has plans to implement something like No Coed Left Behind. It wouldn’t try to do that, would it?

SPELLINGS WAS George Bush’s education adviser in Texas as well as in the White House and was one of the driving forces behind No Child Left Behind, known as N.C.L.B. It was soon after she became secretary of education in 2005 that Spellings impaneled the Commission on the Future of Higher Education. She appointed as chairman Charles Miller, a Texas entrepreneur who played a central role in devising the model for his state’s system of public-school testing and accountability — the forerunner of the national legislation. In 1999, Governor Bush appointed Miller to the Board of the Regents of the University of Texas System, and Miller used his post to make Texas’s state university system the first to require the use of standardized testing and publication of the results. Miller saw a strong analogy between the problems of public schools and of higher education. “You take students who aren’t prepared and then you toss them overboard,” as Miller put it in a phone conversation this summer. “Time on task has shrunk a lot. You can’t schedule a class Thursday afternoon or Friday, or no one will come. What you get is a happy professoriat and good grades. That’s a system that’s dysfunctional, and it shows.”


Rest of article at: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/magazine/30grading-t.html?ref=washington

[Buzz Clik]

1. Spellings. How does an idiot get in charge of education?

Ever hear her interviewed? She's like Dubya's twin sister who was dropped on her head in the delivery room. She never uses the "g" in words ending in "ing", and it's all gonna, shudda, wudda all the time.

Our kids spend a significant fraction of their time studying for their mandated tests; yes, it covers some basic educational items such as reading comprehension and logic, but it really misses the boat in many ways.

"Please, God. Let the United States elect a president who is not a fool. Please??"