Saturday, March 15, 2008

Some background on the Spellings Commission and its criticism of the college accrediting system

RECOMMENDED READING:

.....The documents below shed light on, among other things, trustee Williams' familiar talking point concerning the accrediting agency and its alleged failures of transparency.
.....Essentially, right-wingers want to dump the DOE in favor of local control, but (say right-wingers) if we've gotta have a DOE, it ought to make colleges focus on "outcomes," especially as this concerns a useful workforce. For these people: Academic Freedom, Schmacademic Freedom.

Spellings Commission Report, 2006 (Warning: this is a pdf file.)
...Accreditation agencies should make performance outcomes, including completion rates and student learning, the core of their assessment as a priority over inputs or processes. A framework that aligns and expands existing accreditation standards should be established to ... allow comparisons among institutions regarding learning outcomes and other performance measures… In addition, this framework should require that the accreditation process be more open and accessible by making the findings of final reviews easily accessible to the public…. (25)
An AAUP review of the Spellings Commission Report. It's brief and it's unimpressed.
...[In the report, A]cademic freedom and democracy do not even warrant discussion. Infringements that have taken place on campuses because of laws such as the Patriot Act are not discussed. The postsecondary institution is seen as having a single function—to transmit skills that equip people for the workforce....
Conservatives v. the very existence of a DoE (Wikipedia)
...President Ronald Reagan promised during the 1980 presidential election to eliminate the Department of Education as a cabinet post…. Throughout the 1980s, the abolition of the Department of Education was a part of the Republican Party platform…. In 1996, the Republican Party made abolition of the Department a cornerstone of their campaign promises, calling it an inappropriate federal intrusion into local, state, and family affairs…. During his 1996 presidential run, Senator Bob Dole promised, "We're going to cut out the Department of Education." …In 2000, the Republican Liberty Caucus passed a resolution to abolish the Department of Education…. 2008 presidential candidate Ron Paul has campaigned in part on an opposition to the Department....
The Need for Accreditation Reform (DoE). (Warning: this is a pdf file.) An "issue" paper at the DoE website. It recommends a replacement agency.

Margaret Spellings (Wikipedia)
...Before her appointment to George W. Bush's presidential administration, Spellings was the political director for Bush's first gubernatorial campaign in 1994, and later became a senior advisor to Bush during his term as Governor of Texas from 1995 to 2000....
• From Inside Higher Ed: Can You Say NACIQI? (12/5/06)
…Judging from Monday’s meeting of NACIQI (nuh-SEE-kee), the first since Education Secretary Margaret Spellings and the report of her Commission on the Future of Higher Education put major changes in accreditation near the top of their reform agenda, that visibility is likely to turn up the pressure on accreditors and colleges to provide tangible proof that they are educating their students…[S]ome of the reports the panel’s staff prepared for this week’s meeting were perceived as pushing accreditors harder and further on measuring learning outcomes than they have been pushed before. And the one accreditor that had a chance to respond Monday — WASC — was firm in pushing back…The staff report for the Western accreditor found four areas in which the agency needed to improve, including a need to “clarify how it will evaluate the quality of an institution’s effectiveness based on the student outcomes data it collects and to outline in its procedures its expectations for institutional improvement (student learning) throughout the accreditation cycle.” Although the staff recommended that the Western association be re-recognized for the standard five years, it urged that the accrediting agency be required to report back in a year on its progress in fixing the perceived deficiencies….

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

What? We're supposed to study?
Will there be a quiz later?
Chunk, don't you realize? THIS IS AMERICA. We don't do no stinkin' studying!

Anonymous said...

Bush and education--now there's an oxymoron.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for such comprehensive coverage Chunk - do you get FLEX credit for this?

Roy Bauer said...

FLEX credit?
All I seem to get is kicked in the teeth.
It's a good thing I like doing this.
Not the teeth part though.

Anonymous said...

Well, people DO appreciate your commitment - I hope you plan to take a break for Spring break though --- really. relax. enjoy yourself.

Roy Bauer said...

Trust me. At this point, I don't think I'd be doing this if I didn't like it.

Anonymous said...

What happened to the WG brouhaha?

Roy's obituary in LA Times and Register: "we were lucky to have you while we did"

  This ran in the Sunday December 24, 2023 edition of the Los Angeles Times and the Orange County Register : July 14, 1955 - November 20, 2...