Drills, skulls, the DOE

●.....As you know, our new Accreditation difficulties stem, in part, from the DOE’s cracking down on our accrediting agency, WASC/ACCJC. With that in mind: From this morning’s Inside Higher Education: A Little Help From Its Friends?:

.....In the year and a half since the report of the Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education, the U.S. Education Department has invested significant time and energy on pressuring accrediting agencies to prod colleges to more effectively measure and more transparently report the academic outcomes of their students. In many ways, the accreditation war has been at the center of the department’s effort to carry out the commission’s work.
.....Which has made it all the more frustrating to Secretary Margaret Spellings and her aides that Congress is poised to shut them down. Bills that both the House and Senate have passed to renew the Higher Education Act would bar the Education Department from promulgating federal rules to guide accrediting agencies on what and how they should assess colleges’ efforts to measure student learning. The measures would also make clear that colleges, rather than accreditors, have primary responsibility for setting standards for student learning.
.....College leaders, who last spring fought tooth and nail against the department’s efforts to impose a set of new regulations governing accreditation, lobbied Congress hard to limit the department’s work on accreditation. But department officials strenuously oppose the approach lawmakers have taken in the Higher Education Act legislation and have expressed their objections in many venues: interviews with reporters, White House letters outlining their problems with the legislation, and, most recently, a harshly worded op-ed in a Washington political newspaper in which Spellings lambasted for having been “persuaded to block the U.S. Department of Education from overseeing the quality of institutions of higher education by special interest forces determined to keep the accreditation process insular, clubby and accountable to no one but themselves.”
.....“While business leaders embrace the future, Congress is vigorously defending old structures and outdated practices in higher education at the behest of entrenched stakeholders who advocate the status quo,” Spellings wrote in the Politico.
.....Department officials have tried, so far unsuccessfully, to persuade leading members of Congress to drop or soften their prohibition. As House and Senate lawmakers and staff begin work on a compromise version of the Higher Education Act legislation, they may get a little help from a friends — former members of the secretary’s higher education commission.
.....This month, Sara Martinez Tucker and Diane Auer Jones, respectively the department’s under secretary and assistant secretary for postsecondary education, held a conference call for former members of the Spellings Commission to, as a spokeswoman characterized it, update them on the department’s efforts to carry out the panel’s recommendations. The spokeswoman said that the department has done so occasionally, although she could not say when or how often.
.....By all accounts, department officials — who like all federal officials are barred contacting or encouraging others to lobby Congress — did not in any way encourage the participating members of the Spellings panel to urge lawmakers to reconsider their approach to the accreditation issue. According to several participants on the call, Tucker and Jones updated the members on a wide range of recent administration and Congressional initiatives, including the renewal of the Higher Education Act, and they did make clear that they were unhappy about the outcome of the accreditation issue.
.....“Sara said something like, ‘We’ve been beaten up on this accreditation issue,’ and she may have said that the department had been ‘emasculated’ or something to that effect,” said Richard K. Vedder, a commission member who is an economics professor at Ohio University.
.....Vedder and Charles Miller, who chaired the Spellings panel, insisted that department officials “did not in any form or fashion ask us” to advocate on the agency’s behalf, as Miller put it. But someone — Miller, Vedder and Arthur J. Rothkopf, another former commission member, all said it “may have been” them — asked Tucker whether there was anything the panel’s members might do.
.....“I may have initiated it,” said Rothkopf, a former Lafayette College president and now senior vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “Some of us wondered, If we don’t like what the Congress is doing, maybe those of us who are commissioners could say, ‘We think this is going in the wrong direction.’ “
.....Vedder, who like Rothkopf describes himself as generally sympathetic to the department’s position on accreditation, said that Tucker responded along the lines of: “We are constrained by the law, we cannot lobby Congress. but you people can do whatever you want.”
.....And they just may, says Rothkopf, who notes that he is speaking as an individual capacity and not for the Chamber of Commerce. “I think that most commission members felt that the accreditation process was a way to get more outcomes out there, to give students and parents and the public more information. Congress’s approach would seem to cut the accreditors loose and cut the department loose. What Congress has done here runs counter to our recommendations and will make it harder to achieve the results we would like to achieve. It’s a possibility that some members of the commission will express their views.”….

● Also in IHE: Drill Terrifies Students:

.....Elizabeth City State University, in North Carolina, is offering counseling to students and faculty members after a mock safety drill in which someone pretended to be a killer and entered a classroom with a fake gun, The News & Observer reported. An e-mail and text message had alerted the campus to the drill, but there were not full details and many at Elizabeth City State apparently didn’t read the message. The unknowing professor whose class was the target of the fake drill said he was “prepared to die” as the events took place.

● From yesterday’s OC Reg: Saddleback College's Rapid Tech program makes industry partners:

.....Two days before last Thanksgiving, a young woman in the Sacramento area was in a horrific car accident that crushed the right side of her face. The next day, engineers at Saddleback College were building a large-scale model of her skull to send to surgeons at UC Davis Medical Center.
.....The skull was built by the college's National Center for Rapid Technologies, part of its Advanced Technology Center. The center has existed since 2005, but only last October did it receive a $4 million grant from the National Science Foundation. It then assumed the name "RapidTech" and became the only center in the country that specializes in rapid prototyping and additive manufacturing, said Ed Tackett, the program's director.
.....Instead of starting with a large block of material and shaping it down, machines at the center build parts or prototypes from scratch − a much more efficient process, Tackett said.
.....The technology has existed since the late 1980s, but newer processes and materials have made the technology more economically viable. That means companies need engineers who know how to use it.
....."From an educational aspect, what (RapidTech) lets see is where the technology's going in the future, and it lets us develop coursework that will train the new generation of technicians and engineers," Tackett said.
.....Saddleback offers a certificate program in using the technology. It keeps the class size to about 10 – mostly because of the building's lack of physical space, which Tackett and his colleagues are hoping to change by finding a generous donor.
.....In addition to education, the center has also partnered with several companies, including Pixar, Ford, Honda and Boeing, by developing prototypes and specialty parts for new projects.
.....Tackett said as the technology progresses, Saddleback will lead the industry in the creation of new ways to utilize it. New jobs come from new technology, he said, and the manufacturing industry should focus on America's strengths – creativity and the ability to specialize – instead of trying to bring back mass-manufacturing jobs lost to outsourcing.
....."Let's be realistic about U.S. manufacturing: a lot of it has been moved offshore," he said. "We need to be progressive, not regressive about our manufacturing and our capabilities."

● From this morning’s New York Times: School Board to Pay in Jesus Prayer Suit

.....A Delaware school district has agreed to revise its policies on religion as part of a settlement with two Jewish families who had sued over the pervasiveness of Christian prayer and other religious activities in the schools.
.....One family said it was forced to leave its home in Georgetown because of an anti-Semitic backlash.
.....The settlement, which was approved Tuesday, includes payments to the families that both sides would not disclose. Although the settlement resolves many complaints in the suit, against the Indian River School District, the parties are proceeding with litigation over the school board practice of beginning its sessions with prayer....