No undergrad left behind

I have this uneasy feeling that higher education is about to go the way of K-12.

By that I mean, “Hello, I’m from the federal Department of Education and I’m here to make sure that YOU are accountable.”

And when I say “accountable,” I mean, “Let’s see how much money we can suck away from the classroom to create a huge bureaucracy to administer tests that we have engineered to tell us absolutely nothing.”

Hmm, not sure where that vitriolic rant came from. Years of repressing my true feelings in print, I suspect.

Anyway. “All Things Considered” had an interesting interview with Education Secretary Margaret Spellings this evening. In it, she spoke about a recently released report from the Commission on the Future of Higher Education. You can hear the full interview here but the message I got out of it was that higher education needed a few things, among them more money for scholarships, more information for parents and students about the education they are purchasing and more accountability for the money the federal government puts into higher education.

All of these things sound fine on their face, just as they did when officials said similar things during the genesis of NCLB. I mean, really, who can oppose things like students learning and public entities spending our money wisely?

But, a couple of things she said made me shudder. First, Michele Norris asked her whether she was advocating testing in higher education. Her answer was to say that she wouldn’t advocate a one-size-fits-all test. The inference here was that the universities or states should decide what type of evaluation system works best for them.

Then later in the interview she said that the federal government needed to offer higher education “incentives and assistance” to meet the challenges detailed in the report.

I’ll go out on a limb here and translate. Keep in mind this is my opinion and is filtered through my more-cynical-than-is-healthy brain, but try this one on for size:

Dear Higher Education (I capitalized that because people in higher ed REALLY like to capitalize things);

Since our recent report found that you are lacking in several areas, we are here to offer you some incentives and assistance to move to a new and exciting age in education.

First, we want you to develop a set of assessments. We’ll tell you what to include in them, what it takes to pass them and how often you have to give them, but we DO NOT want a one-size-fits-all test.

Please develop a large and expensive bureaucracy to administer this new testing system. We can’t afford to give you all the money to pay for this new department, but I’m sure you can find some money in your budget somewhere. Just so you won’t feel alone, we’ll do the same.

Once the testing system is in place, we’ll move on to how to bring every student up to 100 percent proficiency, but that’s a memo for another day.

Oh yes, I did mention incentives, didn’t I? Of course, we wouldn’t expect you to do this without some incentive. How’s this: Do it or we‘ll jerk your funding.

Love and kisses,
U.S. Department of Education

Whack me upside the head with a piece of celery if I’m wrong. I even have one you can borrow. I smell a changing tide in higher education, and if it’s anything like what NCLB is doing to K-12, it’s low tide in Ketchikan when the humpies are running. (Just ask someone who has lived there.)

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