No Child Left Behind Goes to College

On October 18, 2005, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings convened her Commission on the Future of Higher Education. Inside Higher Ed reported her opening remarks as follows:

"I’ve convened this commission to ensure that America remains the world’s leader in higher education and innovation,” because “the world is catching up,” the secretary said, noting that the U.S. now ranks seventh internationally in college graduation rates. “And we’re not keeping pace with the demand for skilled labor in the new high-tech economy,” she added, quoting Tom Friedman in arguing that “our students are facing and education and ambition gap, and they’re on the wrong side."

Secretary Spellings asked the panel's Chair, Charles Miller of Texas, to focus on four areas: "accessibility, affordability, accountability and quality."

Faced with a deadline of August 2006 to come up with recommendations on ways "to ensure that America remains the world’s leader in higher education and innovation," the panel is currently mulling over one option: standardized testing for colleges.

On Feb. 9th, the work of the panel was covered in an article in the New York Times. In a memo, Miller wrote "What is clearly lacking is a nationwide system for comparative performance purposes, using standard formats." The Times goes on to report,

Mr. Miller said he was not envisioning a higher education version of the No Child Left Behind Act, which requires standardizing testing in public schools and penalizes schools whose students do not improve. "There is no way you can mandate a single set of tests, to have a federalist higher education system," he said. But he said public reporting of collegiate learning as measured through testing "would be greatly beneficial to the students, parents, taxpayers and employers" and that he would like to create a national database that includes measures of learning.

We at nHumanities admit we find no comfort in Miller's remark that he's not "envisioning a higher education version of the No Child Left Behind Act," for we remember the old adage, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and looks like a duck, it must be a duck. We've seen how these things work before, and the odds are excellent that very shortly after that "national database" has been created, efforts will be underway to tie the performance of individual colleges to the receipt of federal funds. From our perspective in the trenches of community college education, NCLB has made matters worse, not better. A similar approach for colleges is wrong-headed at best and destructive at worst.

Links:
Higher Ed Commission Gets to Work
Panel Explores Standard Tests for Colleges

Photos of Bluto from The National Lampoon's Animal House.