Category Archives: Uncategorized

Federal Panel Considers Giving Colleges a ‘Gentle Shove’ Toward Accountability Testing

The Chronicle: Federal Panel Considers Giving Colleges a ‘Gentle Shove’ Toward Accountability Testing

The chairman of the federal Commission on the Future of Higher Education says it will not propose mandatory testing of college students but will urge colleges and accrediting agencies to voluntarily adopt assessments of student learning, and will recommend two tests.”There is no movement, no intent, no expectation of a mandated test at the federal level,” the chairman, Charles Miller, wrote in an e-mail sent to his fellow commission members this month.

In the e-mail message, titled “Standardized Anxiety,” Mr. Miller predicted that, with college costs on the rise, institutions would come under increasing pressure to prove their worth to taxpayers and students’ parents, and that many colleges would turn to testing. With time, he said, a test will emerge as the gold standard, “not by mandate, but by a normal process of early movers and best practices.”

“I believe the tipping point has already been reached. We need to give it a gentle shove,” he wrote.

The message refutes rumors, which began circulating soon after the commission’s creation in September by Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, that the federal advisory board was weighing a No Child Left Behind-style testing regime for colleges. The commission, which is made up of 19 business and higher-education leaders, is charged with devising a comprehensive plan for the future of higher education by August 1.

But the commission’s testing recommendations will still be controversial. Critics of college-level testing say that it is best left to professors, that tests should be tied to institutional curricula, and that no test can measure the effects colleges have on students’ social and emotional development.

“You can’t quantify life transformation,” says Mark F. Smith, director of government relations at the American Association of University Professors.

Unknown Investment Returns

The call for increased accountability in higher education is hardly new. For years state and federal policy makers have been pressing colleges and universities to demonstrate their worth. As tuitions have risen, outpacing inflation, many state legislatures and accreditation agencies have tried to create ways to gauge the improvements college educations make in students’ knowledge and skills. Some of these efforts at accountability already use testing to gauge students’ growth.

Yet there remains a nagging sense among many policy makers and some members of the commission that there is no “bottom line” way of knowing what colleges contribute to students’ intellectual development. As one commissioner, Richard K. Vedder, a professor of economics at Ohio University, puts it, “Harvard students are brilliant going in, and they’re brilliant coming out. The question is: How much value did Harvard add?”

The commissioners’ concern stems, in part, from recent studies suggesting that college graduates perform poorly on basic-skills tests such as the National Assessment of Adult Literacy. That survey, last administered by the Department of Education in 2003, found that less than a third of college graduates could read complex texts and make complicated inferences.

Adding to the alarm are reports from business leaders on the commission that college graduates are unprepared for 21st-century jobs. The executives note that American companies spend billions of dollars to give their workers remedial education each year.

Richard Stephens, a commission member who is senior vice president for human resources and administration for the Boeing Company, said testing would allow companies to evaluate job candidates based on how well their alma maters prepare students for the work force.

“We receive two million job applications each year,” he said. “I want to translate where they went to school into value in the marketplace.”

The push for increased accountability is also coming from the Education Department, which provides one-third of higher-education funds. In announcing the commission’s formation, Ms. Spellings said it was “time to examine how we can get the most out of our national investment” (The Chronicle, September 30, 2005).

Commissioners say the message from the department, policy makers, and the public is that higher education can no longer rest on its laurels.

“For years higher education has said that we do something very special that only we can understand,” said another commission member, Robert M. Zemsky, who is chief executive of the Learning Alliance for Higher Education at the University of Pennsylvania. “We can’t do that anymore. An increasing number of people are becoming concerned that it’s all smoke and mirrors.”

Advocating Accountability

The commission’s biggest advocate of accountability is Mr. Miller, a former chairman of the University of Texas System’s Board of Regents and the chief architect of that university’s accountability system, which includes testing to measure student learning. Mr. Miller, a nationally known investor who once managed millions in public funds, says he believes colleges owe it to the people who invest in them to be sure they are using the money effectively.

Mr. Miller worried many college officials when he told reporters at a December meeting in Nashville that the commission might propose tying an institution’s eligibility for federal student aid to standardized testing (The Chronicle, December 9, 2005). “We’re looking for leverage points,” he said. “Funding is one, accreditation is another.”

While most higher-education associations remained silent, lobbyists for independent colleges and universities went on the defensive, warning that standardized testing would homogenize higher education.

“We need to play to the diversity of higher education and not come up with a Prussian, centralized model of how to go forward,” David L. Warren, president of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, said at a commission meeting held in San Diego in February. At least two commission members wrote to Mr. Miller to object to standardized testing, with one, Charlene R. Nunley, president of Montgomery College, saying she was worried about conflicts between the national commission’s recommendations and state efforts.

Recognizing the potential firestorm, Mr. Miller has taken care to clarify his position recently, stressing that he sees markets, not mandates, as the path to testing.

His theory, he explained in a recent interview, is that some colleges will resort to tests to justify their rising tuitions. Once some colleges start publishing test results, their competitors will be pressured to do so as well, driving the cost of testing down. Since policy makers, employers, and the public will want to be able to compare colleges, institutions will gravitate naturally toward a single test, which will then dominate the market.

To give colleges the “gentle shove” the chairman envisions, the commission may urge accreditation agencies to place more emphasis on measuring the effects colleges have on students, or ask the Education Department to require accreditors to do so. Accrediting agencies have been involved in student assessment since the 1980s, when the Education Department directed them to include measures of student learning. But the agencies now often let colleges set their own standards for student assessment.

That approach is much more palatable than mandatory testing to commission members with higher-education backgrounds. If a test proved valid, says David Ward, president of the American Council on Education, “some legitimacy would develop through the marketplace.”

“And that’s much better legitimacy than insisting everyone take it,” he adds.

Mr. Miller stresses, however, that it will be increasingly difficult for higher education to justify requests for increased state and federal aid without providing more data about student learning.

“To make the case for more money,” he said, “you have to show that you’ve done the best you can with what you have.”

Asked if he was still considering tying testing to federal support, Mr. Miller said that he would recommend it only if colleges didn’t develop testing voluntarily, “if there was no progress, or resistance.”

While the commission will not require the use of a single test, it is likely to endorse two: the Collegiate Learning Assessment, or CLA, and the Measure of Academic Proficiency and Progress (see “Sample Questions From 2 Tests”), both of which Mr. Miller highlighted in a memorandum on accountability sent to fellow commission members in January (The Chronicle, February 17).

Mr. Miller is particularly impressed with the CLA, which he described at the commission’s Nashville meeting as “a middle-of-the-fairway, perfect drive.” The test, which was developed by the Council for Aid to Education and the RAND Corporation, has been used in the Texas accountability system and has been administered to 30,000 students since 2002. This year it is being used by 121 institutions — including 35 members of the Council of Independent Colleges, which have signed up voluntarily — and is being adapted for use by community colleges.

The test’s creators say it provides a truer gauge of an institution’s quality than its SAT scores, endowment levels, student-satisfaction scores, or self-reports. However, they stress that the CLA should not be used as a diagnostic tool by itself, but as part of a portfolio of assessments.

The goal of the test, says Stephen P. Klein, a senior research scientist with the RAND Corporation, is to measure the skills “that colleges say are important to them in their mission statements”: critical thinking, analytic reasoning, and writing.

He adds that the test eliminates fears about “teaching to the test” because it does not measure content knowledge, but broad-based skills that all students should possess.

Richard H. Ekman, president of the Council of Independent Colleges, says the CLA allows colleges to show what they contributed to student learning because it evaluates students’ achievement based on where they began and where they ended up. He suggests that if the commission wants to encourage the use of the test, it should ask the Education Department to subsidize the $6,000 cost of the one-year measurement for smaller colleges.

“If you could eliminate the financing problem, that would increase use,” he said.

While the CLA was designed to measure institutional performance, not individual student performance, its creators say it could be modified for use as an exit exam. Students already receive their test results, but colleges receive aggregate results unless given permission by students to receive individual scores.

Will Students Care?

The second test, the MAPP, is the new version of the Educational Testing Service’s Academic Profile, which was retired in January. The test, which is multiple-choice, is also designed for institutional-improvement purposes, and allows colleges to compare themselves with peer institutions of their choosing.

Assessment experts say the emergence of those two tests makes it hard to argue that testing can’t work on the college level.

“It’s almost impossible to kill this thing by saying that what we teach in college is so unmeasurable that there is no way you can assess it,” says Patrick M. Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.

Mr. Callan’s group conducted a five-state pilot project that sought to measure the performance of colleges and universities within a state by comparing data on professional-licensing and graduate-admissions tests, the results of the National Assessment of Adult Literacy, and students’ scores on the Collegiate Learning Assessment and another test designed for two-year institutions. The commission is likely to recommend an expansion of the national center’s project in the commission’s final report.

Not everyone is taken with the new tests, however. In an e-mail message to Mr. Miller, Mr. Zemsky, of the University of Pennsylvania, said tests like the CLA are flawed because students do not have a stake in how well they do.

Mr. Zemsky says colleges do not need a new test — they simply need to make better use of the results from the many standardized exams already taken by their students. He proposes that benchmark scores, such as the median for all students who take the Graduate Record Examination, or GRE, be published, so consumers could compare competing institutions based on the relationship between their SAT scores and the scores on exams for graduate schools.

“We’re not short on data, we’re short on data that has been made public in a consistent way,” he said in an interview.

Mr. Miller acknowledges that concerns about motivation are valid, but he says the evidence from the CLA suggests that students are indeed motivated to do well.

“It’s not a fatal flaw,” he said.

‘A Wake-Up Call’

Critics of such tests, like Leon Botstein, president of Bard College, say that the answer to assessment lies not in standardization, but in “rigorous self-policing and peer review” by college faculty members. He calls the controversy over testing “a wake-up call for institutions, to make sure they’re doing their job.”

Indeed, some commission members are skeptical that colleges will ever embrace testing without outside pressure. “If you leave it up to the faculty, things will never get done,” said Arthur J. Rothkopf, a president emeritus of Lafayette College and senior vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “Faculty are great on the status quo.”

Meanwhile state-college lobbyists are trying to get out in front of the commission by offering their own ideas about how testing fits within a broader sense of accountability. They say the debate over accountability offers a prime opportunity for colleges to define their priorities and design measurements that reflect them.

“Public universities realize this is coming,” said Travis J. Reindl, director of state policy analysis at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, which is working with the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges to develop position papers on testing. “It is better to get out in front, manage it, and shape it than to be a victim of it.”

Sample Questions From 2 Tests

Following are sample questions from the Collegiate Learning Assessment, or the CLA, and the Measure of Academic Proficiency and Progress, known as the MAPP.

CLA Performance Task

Introductory material: You advise Pat Williams, the president of DynaTech, a company that makes precision electronic instruments and navigational equipment. Sally Evans, a member of DynaTech’s sales force, recommended that DynaTech buy a small private plane (a SwiftAir 235) that she and other members of the sales force could use to visit customers. Pat was about to approve the purchase when there was an accident involving a SwiftAir 235. Your document library contains the following materials:

Newspaper article about the accident
Federal accident report on in-flight breakups in single-engine planes
Internal correspondence (Pat’s e-mail to you & Sally’s e-mail to Pat)
Charts relating to SwiftAir’s performance characteristics
Excerpt from magazine article comparing SwiftAir 235 to similar planes
Pictures and descriptions of SwiftAir Models 180 and 235

Questions:

Do the available data tend to support or refute the claim that the type of wing on the SwiftAir 235 leads to more in-flight breakups? What is the basis for your conclusion?
What other factors might have contributed to the accident and should be taken into account?
What is your preliminary recommendation about whether or not DynaTech should buy the plane, and what is the basis for this recommendation?

CLA Make-an-Argument Prompt:

There is no such thing as “truth” in the media. The one true thing about the information media is that it exists only to entertain.

CLA Critique-an-Argument Prompt:

A well-respected professional journal with a readership that includes elementary-school principals recently published the results of a two-year study on childhood obesity. (Obese individuals are usually considered to be those who are 20 percent above their recommended weight for height and age.) This study sampled 50 schoolchildren, ages 5-11, from Smith Elementary School. A fast-food restaurant opened near the school just before the study began. After two years, students who remained in the sample group were more likely to be overweight — relative to the national average. Based on this study, the principal of Jones Elementary School decided to confront her school’s obesity problem by opposing any fast-food restaurant openings near her school.

MAPP Social-Sciences Question:

Economic growth and territorial expansion in medieval and early-modern times depended on urbanization, trade, colonization, conquest, and the clearing of land. But the increase in human contact established by these endeavors carried enormous risks of infection by disease. By adopting the concept of the unification of the globe by disease, we can discern the relationships between, and therefore better understand, phenomena seemingly very diverse. For example, we can see a connection between the outbreaks of plague in Western Europe, which recurred from the 14th through the 16th centuries, and beginning in the 16th century, the drastic depopulation of the New World by the spread of disease among its population.

This “community of disease” came about as the large populations of the world — the Chinese, the European, the Native American — expanded, and travel and trade among them greatly increased. The trade routes (traveled by armies of rats and fleas as well as humans) stretched across many disease-ridden areas. The danger became acute the moment traders from Genoa crossed the Black Sea and arrived in Central Asia, newly unified by the Mongols; and then once again, when Christopher Columbus, also Genoese, set sail westwards. Ultimately a large part of the world’s population perished from disease.

So great is the role of demography as something that shapes the development of human civilization that these devastating losses of life and the painfully slow recoveries from them influenced much of the world history.

Reading question: In using the phrase “community of disease,” the author of the passage most likely intends to indicate that:

Members of a particular society generally develop resistance to diseases that occur frequently in their society.
Only members of the same society are likely to be susceptible to certain diseases.
The exposure of diverse peoples of the world to the same diseases constitutes a link between these peoples.
The devastating effect of disease is a unifying factor among the people who suffer from it.

Critical-thinking question: The author’s discussion in the passage above presupposes that, before expanded trade routes linked Europe, China, and the Americas, which of the following was the case?

The large populations of the world did not suffer from disease.
Infectious diseases were found only in Western Europe.
Infectious diseases were unlikely to spread between the large populations of the world.
The traders from Genoa contributed to the spread of infectious diseases more than any other group.

Writing question: Which of the following is the best revision of “So great is the role of demography as something that shapes the development of human civilization that”?

So great is the role of demography in shaping the development of human civilization that
Of such greatness is the role of demography to shape the development of human civilization
The role of demography is of such greatness in shaping the development of human civilization
The role of demography is great enough to shape the development of human civilization such that

SOURCE: Council for Aid to Education; Educational Testing Service

Maryland: Search at U of Maryland upheld

From Inside Higher Ed:

A police officer at the University of Maryland at College Park did not violate the Fourth Amendment rights of a then-student when he and other officers entered the student’s dormitory room by mistake during a multi-room drug raid in 2002 and briefly detained the student, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled Wednesday. The student had sued the officer and the state of Maryland, but the appeals panel, overturning a lower court ruling, concluded that the officer behaved in a reasonable manner and was protected by qualified immunity.

Montana: UM prez ousts provost

Missoulian.com: Muir out as UM provost, vice president

A carefully worded University of Montana press release announced Tuesday that UM administrator Lois Muir will leave her post as provost and vice president for academic affairs “on June 30 or earlier, depending on her plans.”

The press release does not explain why Muir is stepping down as provost, but in a phone interview with the Missoulian, Muir said the decision was not hers. Muir said she did not resign and has no plans to leave UM.

A tenured professor in UM’s psychology department, Muir would not elaborate on her plans or comment on whether teaching at UM is in her future.

AAUP calls off boycott conference

Inside Higher Ed: AAUP calls of conference boycott

In the end, no one will be going to Bellagio.

The American Association of University Professors in February postponed an international conference on academic boycotts that was scheduled to take place that month in Italy. Both the participant list for the invitation-only session and the materials distributed for the session had come under fire. AAUP officials defended the invite list (which was criticized as anti-Israel by some) and apologized for including in conference packets an anti-Semitic article published in a magazine affiliated with Holocaust deniers.

Australia: ACT teachers’ pay dispute intensifies

Australian Broadcasting Corporation News: ACT teachers’ pay dispute intensifies

The ACT Education Union has accused the Territory Government of trying to inflame a pay dispute by threatening a possible crackdown on striking teachers.

The Territory Government says it could be forced to use the Federal Government’s new industrial relations laws if a dispute over pay is not resolved before the legislation is enacted

Teachers held a stop-work meeting earlier this week, with members voting to support further strike action in the campaign for higher wages.

ACT Education Union secretary Clive Haggar says the executive will meet with the Minister on Tuesday.

“If we’re going to be seeing some sensible compromise on behalf of the Government, we could be moving to a resolution of the dispute,” he said.

“But if this is just an exercise in escalation of threatening behaviour, that’s not going to resolve the exercise.”

ETS to Pay $11-Million to Settle Lawsuit Over Scoring Errors in Teacher-Certification Test

The Chronicle: Another blow for high-stakes testing

The Educational Testing Service has agreed to pay $11.1-million to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by test takers who received incorrect scores on an exam that is widely used by states in teacher-licensing decisions, the company announced this week.

The Nation launches StudentNation web site

The Nation has announced the launch of StudentNation—a new student-based web-page.

You’ll find details on The Nation‘s student programs and projects, activist resources, info on upcoming Nation events, links to student articles and blog posts, a question of the week, a collection of featured student websites, select Nation articles and, eventually, a progressive calendar and a student-produced photo blog. Be sure to check out the articles from the special issue on “The New Face of the Campus Left.”

Ontario: Colleges aim to save students’ year

Peterborough This Week: Colleges aim to save students’ year

An ongoing strike by college workers will not stop students at Sir Sandford Fleming College from finishing their semester or graduating.

Today (Tuesday) Ontario’s 24 colleges announced a Semester Completion Strategy that will ensure students can meet their program requirements despite the cancellation of classes due to the strike.

Minnesota: Those with thick accents need not apply?

Star Tribune: A Minnesota legislator says “clear English pronunciation” should be a requirement for instructors at state colleges and universities

It’s a scenario familiar to university students: One or more of your instructors is foreign-born and speaks English with a thick accent. Usually, you can understand, but sometimes it takes an effort. Occasionally, you don’t have a clue what’s being said.

New Blog Offers Higher-Ed Views From the Right (Phi Beta Cons)

National Review today started a new blog, Phi Beta Cons, which it bills as “the right take on higher ed”—that’s right as in conservative and libertarian. The blog, which its editor describes as “dedicated to keeping an eye on the politics of campus life,” has so far drawn postings from Stephen Balch, of the National Association of Scholars, on the Lawrence Summers resignation; David Gelernter on Yale’s admission of an ex-Taliban spokesman as a student; Candace de Russy on the “Jihad on campus”; and Anne D. Neal, of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, on what she describes as “the vast divide” between “academic elites & mainstream America.”

California: Some U. of California academic senators are poised to remove chairman, but their ability to do so is unclear

Inside Higher Ed: Some U. of California academic senators are poised to remove chairman, but their ability to do so is unclear

Outwardly, Clifford Brunk, elected chair of the University of California Academic Senate and a biology professor at the university’s Los Angeles campus, seems to do his job of representing faculty members’ concerns to the university’s regents, the California system’s Office of the President, and the public. Internally, though, some senators take issue with his leadership and appear ready to impeach him on Monday — though no existing bylaw permits them to do so.

West Virginia: Session called a ‘terrible failure’

Charleston Daily Mail: <a href=”http://www.dailymail.com/news/News/2006030728/”

Members of one of the state’s largest teachers unions want to give lawmakers a wakeup call about what they say is a dire need for additional across-the-board teacher pay raises.

Judy Hale, president of the West Virginia chapter of the American Federation of Teachers, called this year’s legislative session as a “terrible failure” when it comes to educators’ pay and employee benefits.

She and other union members were slated to meet today in Charleston to talk about several bills that seem unlikely to advance before the session ends Saturday.

Subscribe to the Workplace blog

You can now subscribe and receive daily email updates when the Workplace blog has new content.

To sign up enter your email address on the right sidebar and click on “Subscribe me!” or vist this link.

Powered by FeedBlitz

Princeton as a foothold for the right

The Chronicle: A glance at the March 13 issue of The Nation: Princeton as a foothold for the right

Robert P. George, a professor of jurisprudence at Princeton University, is turning that university’s campus into “a testing ground for the latest phase in the right’s effort to politicize the academy,” says Max Blumenthal, a writing fellow with the Nation Institute.

At Princeton, Mr. George is well liked, says Mr. Blumenthal. He is considered an “accomplished legal and moral philosopher who has earned the admiration of conservative intellectuals and mainstream academia.” Yet there is also another side to the man, he writes, one that is “less tolerant, ferociously partisan, and intimately connected to wealthy organizations that wish explicitly to inject their politics into the universities.”

As a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, Mr. George has supported the Bush administration’s policies on limiting federal support for stem-cell studies and opposing same-sex marriage, Mr. Blumenthal writes. At Princeton, the author adds, the professor exercises his conservatism through his directorship of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

The semiautonomous program, part of the department of politics, describes itself on its Web site as an initiative that fosters scholarship and debate on questions of constitutional law and “the application of legal and ethical principles to contemporary problems.” Mr. Blumenthal, however, says the program is not dedicated to neutral scholarship but actually functions “as a vehicle for conservative interests.”

The Madison Program has had a number of conservative supporters, he says, such as the now-defunct John M. Olin Foundation, which donated $525,000 in 2000, and the Bradley Foundation, which gave $400,000 in 2002 and 2003. In those years, more than $330,000 came from what Mr. Blumenthal describes as conduit groups for “the secretive, cultish Catholic group” Opus Dei. All such money, he adds, has been used “to support gatherings of movement activists, fellowships for ideologically correct visiting professors, and a cadre of conservative students.”

Mr. George denied to Mr. Blumenthal that the Madison Program had accepted money from Opus Dei, but was unsure whether it had received support from groups affiliated with the organization. He also said it was “misleading to call the program a conservative program,” Mr. Blumenthal writes, but said the program took “a certain coloration” from his own conservatism.

Mr. Blumenthal apparently is not convinced. The Madison program, he insists, “has become the blueprint for the right’s strategy to extend and consolidate power within the university system.”

The article, “Princeton Tilts Right,” is available at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060313/blumenthal

Wisconsin: Felons on campus

Thee Chronicle: FELONS ON CAMPUS:

A state audit of the University of Wisconsin has found 40 convicted felons on the system’s payrolls, mostly at its Madison campus. The state’s Legislative Audit Bureau conducted the review after news-media reports last year drew attention to the university’s handling of three faculty members who had committed felonies while employed by the university. Although state laws prohibit employment discrimination based on arrest records, criminal background can be considered if the conviction is related to the worker’s job. The university system says it was unaware that many of the employees had criminal records. The audit bureau’s report recommends that the system conduct internal investigations to determine whether to take action concerning the employees in question

A Win for Women at Newman

Inside Higher Ed: A Win for Women at Newman

University settles with woman and EEOC amid reports ex-president preferred male candidates for some positions.

U Charleston ends illegal job requirement

Inside Higher Ed: U Charleston ends illegal job requirement

In an attempt to avoid violating civil rights laws, the University of Charleston has made changes to a controversial job requirement the stated that applicants for the Herchiel and Elizabeth Sims “In God We Trust” Chair in Ethics must believe in God.

Revolt at Case Western

Inside Higher Ed: Revolt at Case Western

If the Harvard University faculty can rise up, why not other faculties?

That was the idea that inspired a professor at Case Western Reserve University to send out an e-mail to his colleagues the day after Lawrence H. Summers announced that he would quit the presidency at Harvard. “Yesterday we learned from Harvard … that faculty can ultimately take appropriate responsibility for responding to severe problems in university governance,” wrote Lawrence Krauss, in calling for a vote of no confidence in Case’s president, Edward M. Hundert.

Mass Layoffs Are Expected at U. of New Orleans as Faculty Members Camp Out in Offices

The Chronicle: Mass layoffs expected for UNO

Faculty members at the University of New Orleans, hundreds of whom have been sleeping in spare bedrooms or on office floors since they returned to their hurricane-damaged campus in January, are bracing for layoffs that could be announced as early as next week.

U Delaware: Professor skinhead

Inside Higher Ed: Professor Skinhead

t’s not the kind of honor universities want for their instructors. Robert Huber, a Ph.D. student in physics at the University of Delaware, who taught physics last semester, is a member of the Skinhead Hall of Fame.