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Colleges to Get More Scrutiny: Panel Looking for Way to Measure Public Schools' Effectiveness

Posted on: Sunday, 9 April 2006, 15:00 CDT

By Robert Dodge, The Dallas Morning News

Apr. 9--WASHINGTON -- A blue-ribbon education commission with a decidedly Texas leadership is thinking of doing the unthinkable: Pushing colleges and universities to measure their effectiveness in somewhat the way public schools have done for years.

The Commission on the Future of Higher Education was formed last fall by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, who said the federal government provides one-third of annual spending on colleges, yet taxpayers do not know enough about how that money is spent or even how to choose schools for their children.

"You can find a lot more information to choose a restaurant than you can on how to choose a college," said Ms. Spellings, who helped her daughter pick a school -- Davidson College in North Carolina -- before she began classes last fall.

Ms. Spellings, who followed President Bush from the Texas governor's mansion to the White House, gave the 19-member panel until Aug. 1 to research and report on the issue. To lead the effort, she appointed Charles Miller, former chairman of the University of Texas System's Board of Regents.

The panel was charged with examining rising costs, barriers for going to college and how to sustain and enhance research. The group also is looking at how well institutions prepare students to compete in the global economy.

The commission's assignment might have been dismissed as the ivory-tower musings of academics. But the firepower brought by Ms. Spellings and Mr. Miller has stirred interest and anxiety on college campuses. Both helped develop academic standards and tests for Texas elementary and secondary schools, efforts that were the forerunners of the president's No Child Left Behind Act.

Colleges worry that the commission is the first step toward a rigid system of testing for the nation's vastly diverse colleges and universities.

"It would be virtually impossible to have any outcome measurement that is nationally or federally imposed on everybody," said Frank Balz, a vice president at the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities.

At a recent hearing in Boston, Susan Hockfield, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, asked the commission to keep one question in mind: "Will this foster educational innovation?" Then she added: "Standardized curricula or testing would limit our ability to educate, to develop new curricula and to train the innovators we need."

Consider the sprawling higher education landscape in Texas:

-- Six major university systems, including the University of Texas, the University of North Texas and Texas A&M.

-- Nationally known private schools, like Southern Methodist and Rice universities.

-- Traditional black colleges, including Prairie View A&M and Texas Southern universities.

-- Our Lady of the Lake, a Catholic university in San Antonio with strong ties to the Hispanic community.

-- Small liberal arts schools, like Austin College.

-- Fifty community college districts.

Measuring student learning would be tough. Institutions have different missions, serve students from diverse social and economic backgrounds, use different teaching methods, and offer a huge variety of majors across the liberal arts and sciences and technical fields.

'Flaws and problems'

Ms. Spellings has been careful not to dictate to the commission.

Asked if she wants a No Child Left Behind regimen for higher education, she said simply: "Of course not." But, she added, "It is right and righteous for us to ask questions about this system."

Mr. Miller also dismissed suggestions that the government plans to impose a standardized accountability system. But he argues that higher education is slipping while global competitors like India and China are investing heavily in their institutions.

"I would not use the word 'broken.' I would say the system has flaws and problems," he said.

Higher education has received some recent bad marks. A report this year by the American Institutes for Research found that 20 percent of recent graduates with four-year degrees and 30 percent with two-year degrees have only basic quantitative and literacy skills.

The report said, for example, that students were unable to estimate whether their car had enough gasoline to reach a destination or to calculate the cost of office supplies.

Graduation rates also are under scrutiny. According to the American Council on Education, 54 percent of all beginning students with a degree goal earned a degree or a certificate within six years.

"For the amount of money we are spending, we should be getting more," Mr. Miller said.

Measuring success

With higher education under increasing criticism, the American Council on Education unveiled a marketing and advertising campaign last month to highlight the economic and intellectual contributions of colleges and universities.

Two Texas businessmen who shared concerns about flagging public support for higher education approached the council about the campaign and helped develop it. The men, Bob Utley of Dallas and Roy Spence Jr. of Austin, both grew up in small towns and attribute their success to their education at the University of Texas. Mr. Utley is chairman of First Worthing, which develops apartments, including projects in university communities. Mr. Spence is president of GSD&M, an advertising company that worked on the campaign for free.

The American Council invested $1.5 million and received $25 million in TV air time from the NCAA. The commercials use humor to show how medical advances, information technology development and police training originated on college campuses. There also are newspaper ads and a Web site, solutionsforourfuture.org.

"We do not have strong negatives," David Ward, president of the American Council, said about public opinion, "but it could happen over the next 10 years if access to college becomes a real challenge for the middle class."

But educators said taxpayers and tuition-paying families are looking for more than a slick advertising campaign.

Mark Yudof, chancellor of the 15-institution University of Texas System, said he hopes the commission will push colleges to develop their own ways of measuring success. He pointed to early efforts by the University of Texas to develop reliable and accurate measures of results.

Each UT campus randomly selects groups of freshmen and seniors to take a test that measures knowledge. The test has essay questions that require students to think analytically and write clearly. The results are used by the universities to measure their success and report it to lawmakers and the public.

"We have to be working toward the goal of telling our taxpayers, students and legislators that we had a good year or we had a bad year," Mr. Yudof said. "And part of that is looking at the outcomes of the process."

E-mail rdodge@dallasnews.com

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Source: The Dallas Morning News

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