Inside Higher Ed today offers an opinion piece about "assessment" which is the current buzzword in academia. It correctly identifies a split in academic attitudes toward internal ("for us"-- assessment of classes and programs within the academy) and external assessments ("for them"-- assessments to be used in comparing institutions, as called for by the Spellings commission), and speculates a bit about the reasons, including:
We know the "us" -- faculty members, students, department chairs, deans -- and we know how to talk about what goes on at our institution with each other. Even amid the great diversity of institutions we often find a common core of experience and discover that we speak each other's language.
But the "them" is largely a mystery. We may have some guesses about the groups that make up "them" -- parents, boards of regents, taxpayers, legislatures -- but we cannot be sure because accountability is usually described generically, not specifying any particular group, and because our interaction with any of these groups is limited or nonexistent.
While I agree with some of the other points, I think this one is exactly backwards. People in academia are uncomfortable with the Spellings commission and its call for "Assessment" not because we're not sure who we're dealing with, but because we're all too familiar with the people behind this.
This is, after all, a product of the same administration that brought us "No Child Left Behind," which looks to most academics like a disastrously bad idea. These are people who either are or are beholden to right-wing ideologues who are fairly open about wanting to dismantle the existing system of public education. These are people who are either members of or beholden to religious groups that are distressingly prone to just throwing out huge swatches of modern science that they don't agree with (evolutionary biology, modern cosmology, climate science).
I think it's perfectly reasonable for academics to be a little uneasy with any recommendations coming out of this Department of Education. There are good reasons to doubt whether anything put forward by the Bush administration is being put forward in good faith, out of a genuine concern for the good of the nation, or in service to some ideological agenda or another.
Now, I'm not saying that academics would be ecstatically happy with similar recommendations from a Clinton administration (either one), or even a Nader administration. College and university faculty are a cranky lot, and will find something to complain about in even the best imaginable proposal. But you don't have to look long at the Bush record of cronyism, bad-faith dealing, and politicization of pretty much everything before you start questioning the Spellings recommendations.
In this context, the final paragraph of the Inside Higher Ed piece seems hopelessly naive:
[...] Members of Secretary Spellings' Commission on the Future of Higher Education are correct in expecting "results." If discussions for demonstrating these "results" continue to emphasize narrow and prescriptive assessment for "them" institutions will face large amounts of work, risk and agony for little benefit. However, if assessment for "them" can be about demonstrating a commitment to student learning and being accountable for a process, then institutions will be able to place their time an energy where it belongs: with the students.
And if wishes were horses, we'd all be eating steak.
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But you don't have to look long at the Higher Education record of slick empty marketing, misleading statistics about retention and student-faculty ratios, and politicization of pretty much everything before you start questioning the Tenured Faculty's wisdom that their institution is worth $30,000+ per year per student.
Really -- students are going to want to know what concrete value they can expect for the big bills they will take on. Its best to be ahead of the curve on this.
Upstate's comments are true but irrelevant.
The point is that there is every reason to fear that anything proposed by this administration will be worse than the status quo. It's not just the cronyism and blind dogmatism that (as Chad mentions) you have to worry about, it's this administrations anti-talent for coming up with the worst possible ideas (at least for achieving the stated goals) and then implementing them in the worst possible way. Under Clinton, Gore, or even Reagan, you could have some confidence that the recommendations would bear some rational resemblance to the stated goals and that there would be a good-faith effort to implement them properly.
The assessment issue is MUCH older than this administration. I first ran into it about 15 years ago when it was already well developed. At my institution we spent a large amount of money and faculty time trying to come up with end of BA assessments in the major. About 50 faculty members from all areas of UG education were involved, except for our School of the Arts, which declared itself unassessable. We met and met over a 2 year period trying to develop our own tests and being guinea pigs for an ETS foray into senior assessment.
Our main conclusion was that we, at least, could not get the thing to work. The main problem was that the tests were meaningless add-ons from the students' perspective, so students just blew them off, despite bribes (free food) and cash payments. The closest thing to success was in chemistry. They buried an ACS test in the freshman class final exams so students did not know they were being assessed. Also, note that the test was not given to seniors, everyone's target group. Other universities tried giving the SAT again or GREs, which have national norms. A conceptual and political problem was how to deal with the results, even if reliable and valid tests could be developed. If school A does better than B, do you reward A for its success (thus giving it resources to maintain or expand its standing), or to B so it can catch up, thus suggesting that failure, not success, pays? The NCLB approach won't work for colleges and universities.
Finally, I'd like to observe that the US vs THEM division was well established. As part of our work, I and a few other faculty were sent to a national conference on assessment in the major. There I heard many comments from non-faculty types (test-developers, adminstrators, and political aids) the faculty were their prime enemy in trying to entrench assessment in higher ed.
I think the assessment push just comes to a head every 5 years or so, but never succeeds on anyone's terms but never goes away, either.
First, consider yourself tagged with the "eight facts" meme, Chad:
http://doctorpion.blogspot.com/2007/06/doubly-tagged.html
Second, Secretary Spellings can be correct about students wanting "results" (quotation in the 2nd paragraph) and completely wrong about what results they want. I'd wager that the majority want "a degree" and a "good job", with the sort of retained knowledge of math and composition that an exit test would measure being way down the list. That is why Dr? Leahy reported the results he did.
A former colleague once proposed (among friends) that the university could find a huge market if it set high admissions standards and then gave a degree to every student it accepted (in exchange for 120 credits worth of fees, of course). They would have the credential they needed for a good job, and also the right to take 120 credits of classes any time they felt they needed to learn something. The only sticky wicket would be the accrediting agencies, but you could probably produce data showing that your "graduates" knew as much or more as the grads of regular colleges.