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Federal high-stakes testing for colleges?
Sometimes I think I must be living in Cloud Cuckoo Land --
We're putting the finishing touches now on plans for our third Assessment Day on March 29. We'll be administering two modules of the CAAP (Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency) test this year, in reading and math, from 10 a.m. to noon and again in the evening. Sophomores are required to take both modules, and we will have more details for you closer to the time of the test.
After fine-tuning our administration of the standardized test over the last two years, we're ready to add both modules. And our first linkages from ACT Inc., the vendor, suggest our students are making "expected progress" or "better than expected progress" compared to their peers who take ACT tests in Illinois and a national reference group of students in private two-year colleges. In this month's Assessment Committee meeting, we voted to purchase linkage reports not only to the ACT state tests but also the COMPASS placement test we give incoming students who haven't taken the ACT. Thus we now will have data on all our students. In short, I believe after years of experimentation we are now getting good results from our program of standardized testing, the Illinois Articulation Initiative and classroom assessment.
So it came as a slap in the face to read The New York Times the other day and learn the chairman of a blue-ribbon Commission on the Future of Higher Education appointed by President Bush's secretary of education thinks "What is clearly lacking [in higher ed] is a nationwide system for comparative performance purposes, using standard formats."
Oh. I thought that's what we were doing with the ACT tests.
Like I said, either somehow I'm playing a bit part in an ancient Greek comedy or the world of blue-ribbon commissions, think tanks, educational policy analysis and federal mandates is very different from my own. Here's what Charles Miller, chairman of the blue-ribbon task force, told The Times:
In an interview, 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. "It would be a shame for the academy to say, 'We can't tell you what it is; you have to trust us,' " Mr. Miller said.
He said he would like the commission to agree on the skills college students ought to be learning -- like writing, critical thinking and problem solving -- and to express that view forcefully. "What happens with reform," he said, "is that it rarely happens overnight, and it rarely happens with a mandate."
"It does happen with levers," Mr. Miller added, "and maybe the accreditation process will be one. Or state legislators. Or members of Congress."
Now let me see if I'm understanding this right. Miller says he wants to mandate federal standards and federal standardized testing, and federal funding will be used to leverage compliance. But he says that isn't like No Child Left Behind. Which leaves me with a critical-thinking, problem-solving question that isn't on the test: If it walks like NCLB and quacks like NCLB, is it a duck? Or is it perhaps a higher ed version of NCLB?
Other than the New York Times story, a Newsweek column by Anna Quinlan, a complaint in The Hartford (Conn.) Courant about "the measurement-happy world of federal accountabilty" and a Baltimore Sun editorial worrying about "the superficially appealing but highly questionable proposition" of federally mandated "one-size-fits-all" testing, there's been little attention paid to the Miller commission. But the electronic newsletter Inside Higher Ed this month reported in addition to standardized testing, its agenda seems to include studying access to higher ed, "innovation" like that at on-line universities like Kaplan, Cappella and Western Governors, and what staff writer Doug Lederman characterized as "a debate about the pros and cons of the for-profit higher education sector and how its behavior might inform the commission's work."
It's hard to tell what any this means for us outside the Washington Beltway. Miller sounds like he's got his mind made up. He's even got specific test vendors in mind. (ACT, by the way, is not one of them.) But diverse interests are reflected on the commission, and it's not clear what, if anything, they will reach a consensus on.
It may be significant, however, that U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, who has advised Bush on education issues since he was governor of Texas, empaneled the Miller commission. At its first meeting she said its work is needed because so many more high school graduates can go on to college "due largely to the high standards and accountability measures called for by the No Child Left Behind Act," which she helped draft.
I will leave it to others to assess the success of NCLB. In fact, that's for the courts to decide. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, school boards and teachers in states including Connecticut, Michigan, Vermont, Texas, Indiana, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Utah have sued the U.S. Education Department, saying NCLB in fact hinders their ability to teach to high standards. Closer to home, the Illinois Association of School Boards reports a lawyer for the National School Boards Association belives a lawsuit filed by the Ottawa Township High School, Ottawa Elementary, Streator and Wheeling school districts against NCLB "may have a chance" of succeeding in U.S. District Court at Chicago.
Spellings' advocacy of NCLB may be significant. It may also be significant that Texas radio commentator Jim Hightower suspects Bush and his administration have sandbagged NCLB so they "can advance their ideological agenda of school privatization … [a]s more and more schools lack the resources to achieve the passing rates required on the mandated tests." Hightower is partisan. He's a Democrat and a former elected official (state agriculture commissioner, an elected office in Texas), but he's been watching how George Bush and his cronies do school reform for 10 years now
It's hard to tell what all this will add up to. Perhaps nothing. Blue-ribbon commissions come, blue-ribbon commissions go and the world takes little note of their passing. It bears watching, though.
In the meantime, while the blue-ribbon experts talk about leveraging "public reporting of collegiate learning as measured through testing" inside the Beltway, we've got students to teach, an assessment program to run and standardized tests to administer out here in the real world. If nothing else, it demonstrates the wisdom of relying on multiple measures for assessment purposes. If our standardized testing program gets swallowed up in a massive federal boondoggle, we can still try to hang onto IAI and classroom assessment to tell us what we need to know about what our students are learning.
A note on references. Since Nuts & Bolts is now appearing in an electronic format, I am providing references blog-style with hypertext links to my online sources. Since many newspaper websites do not archive stories indefinitely, I am also keeping hard copy printouts in my office. So if you find a dead link to a reference you want to track down, please contact me and I'll put a copy in your mailbox in Dawson Hall.
Briefly ...
We have just put math instructor Barb Tanzyus' spring 2005 assessment report up on SCI's assessment website in our Occasional Papers section at http://www.sci.edu/assessment/reports01toc.html. While Barb's report is concerned mostly with an evaluation of student learning her statistics classes, she touches on broader assessment issues as well. It's well worth reading even from those of us who don't know a chi square from a square root or a square dance. ... Assessment Day Reminder: Please remember to announce to your students: Our annual assessment day is Wednesday, March 29. In order to begin standardized testing in math as part of our mandated assessment program, we'll begin at 10 a.m. Watch this space and your SCI e-mail account for details as they become available.
-- Pete Ellertsen, chair, Assessment Committee
Nuts & Bolts is an electronic newsletter published by SCI's Assessment Committee. Members are: Bob Blankenberger, humanities and social science; Amy Lakin, languages and literature; Steve Stowers, math; Barb Tanzyus, math; Ray Bruzan, chemistry; Brian Carrigan, science; Sr. Anna Izydorczyk, student; and Pete Ellertsen (chair), communications and humanities. Kevin Broeckling, dean of students; and John Cicero, academic affairs dean, serve ex officio.
If you have information, comments or feedback, please contact any committee member or Nuts & Bolts editor Pete Ellertsen, in Becker L-16A on the SCI campus, 525-1420 ext. 519 or by e-mail at <pellertsen@sci.edu>.
