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NCA team finds -
Now that the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools has formally renewed Springfield College in Illinois' accreditation for 10 years, we can share the NCA site visit team's Comprehensive Evaluation report. Based on its visit to SCI in November 2005, the panel "confirm[ed] the institution's capacity and responsibility to identify and address issues," including a good half dozen issues of long-standing concern to the accrediting body.
It is abundantly clear from the site visit report that SCI's partnership with Benedictine University was a crucial factor - perhaps the crucial factor - in granting continued accreditation. After noting "major improvements since the inception of the partnership," the panel reported in its summary of findings:
The faculty and staff are qualified, dedicated, and hopeful; in addition, recently hired staff are bringing new perspectives to the institution. It was clear from discussions with the Benedictine University President and the Chair of its Board of Trustees, that Benedictine is fully committed to the partnership. With the University's leadership and its advantageous presence in the state capital, Springfield College should be able to continue to fulfill its mission. While the team anticipates growing pains in relation to the partnership, it should be possible to overcome them. In short, it seems clear that Springfield College in Illinois, in partnership with Benedictine Univrsity, is now a viable institution with prospects for a positive future.
NCA's concerns, dating at least from SCI's last site visit and accreditation review in 1995, centered on assessment, retention, salaries, adult education, remedial or developmental instruction and what NCA found to be inadequate data collection across the board. Since Nuts & Bolts is an assessment newsletter, I will detail the 2005 site visit panel's findings as they relate to: (1) assessment; and (2) our performance on the accreditation criterion that called for SCI to "provide evidence of student learning and teaching that demonstrates that it is fulfilling its educational mission." The full report, with the panel's discussion on other criteria relating to "mission and integrity"; strategic planning; community engagement and service; and "acquisition, discovery, and application of knowledge," is available at the circulation desk in SCI's Becker Library.
'Culture of Assessment.' When we jump-started SCI's learning outcomes assessment program in 2001 after a two-year hiatus, we identified a large part of the problem in prior years as an organizational culture that neither understood nor valued assessment. While individual faculty members had worked hard on assessment throughout the 1990s, we felt that SCI's overall culture had impeded their efforts to such a degree that we no longer could claim to have an assessment program beyond the level of isolated individuals using classroom assessment techniques. So we set about to change the culture; that story has been told before, in this newsletter as well as evidence presented to NCA last year before the site visit, and I see no purpose in rehashing it in this space. Better to report on the NCA findings and look to the future.
Before getting into the site visit findings, however, I do need to say it's very clear our assessment effort passed muster only because everybody, faculty, students, staff and administrators alike, worked together to make it happen. While I'm relieved and gratified that our assessment effort passed muster, I don't take that as a victory for the Assessment Committee. It's everybody's victory. Suffice it to say that by the time the NCA site visit team arrived in Springfield, we all had our act together - and documented - so the panel was able to report, "It is clear from considerable documentation and a variety of personal conversations that SCI has made considerable progress in creating a culture of assessment on campus, with a specific focus on classroom-level assessment."
The following evidence was cited:
The site visit committee noted two other aspects of our assessment plan - an annual review of courses to "ensure that Illinois Articulation Initiatives are met," and our program review process. "Following a review," the panel noted, "the theater program was placed on indefinite inactive status. Review of the forensics program to determine the future of the program has included two external evaluators. These program reviews indicate the institution is reviewing the effectiveness of the programs."
Overall commitment to teaching. In addition, the site visit team noted a long-standing overall commitment to good teaching and student learning at SCI. It cited the way faculty members are "evaluated by department chairs, students, and the Dean of Academic Affairs," and the "classroom visits and evaluations are discussed with faculty and affect tenure decisions," as well as decisions on rehiring adjunct instructors. Also credited were the LaFata and Distinguished Teaching Awards and SCI's computer labs and utilization of "limited rsources to improve classrooms and maintain the cleanliness of the grounds, common spaces, and classrooms." Especially commended was the new Resource Center on the lower level of Becker Library:
The Resource Center provides an especially effective and spirited effort to support student learning. Evidence provided to the team, as well as on-site interviews, indicates active utilization of RC resources (over 30 students a day accessing the RC) and a variety of tutoring sessions available to students throughout the day and on weekends in areas encompassing the entire SCI curriculum. The Resource Center seeks continuous feedback from student users through a survey. Conversations with the Director of the Resource Center revealed that survey data has resulted in changes in organizaltional and facilities arrangements in the RC.
That's assessment, too, of course, and it didn't come from an Assessment Committee mandate.
Kudos. So thanks are due all around. To RC director Joanna Tweedy, who also got her tutors to draw a handlettered poster with our Common Student Learning Objectives, and who has left it up all year; to former Dean and acting President Jeff Mueller, without whose interest and concern we couldn't have gotten the assessment program off the ground in 2001; to the current Dean John Cicero and SCI/Benedictine President Bill Carroll, whose support has been vital; to Student Affairs Dean Kevin Broeckling, whose keen interest in institutional effectiveness planning has ensured that assessment is a holistic effort at SCI; to Ben U vice provost Eileen Kolich, our consultant who showed us how to breathe life into SCI's mission statement by developing student learning objectives from it and implementing them in the classroom; to Bob Blankenberger, Rick Rosetto, Barb Tanzyus, Amy Lakin, Matt Mogle and other assessment committee members who contributed beyond the line of duty; to Judi Anderson and former librarian Susan Full who put together a crucial faculty workshop at the beginning of our efforts to revive the assessment program; to Lynette Shaw-Smith, Gary Vitale, David Logan and Barb Tanzyus, who contributed papers to our assessment website; and especially to all the faculty who struggled with CSLOs and CBSLOs and brought their syllabi in line with the mission statement and the new assessment criteria derived from it.
Blue-ribbon higher ed panel meets in secret
According to a brief item in today's issue of Inside Higher Ed, the federal Commission on the Future of Higher Education will meet June 28 behind closed doors. A spokesman for the U.S. Education Department told the online magazine "that the meeting, in Washington, would lack a quorum, that the panel's members would meet in small groups, and that 'no final decisions would be made.'" As an old courthouse and county government reporter, I find myself less than reassured by this. But the commission has had so little attention from the commercial news media, it's already the functional equivalent of a secret panel anyway.
Recent coverage, at least that I find indexed on the Google news page, has been limited to a phillipic on proposed financial aid cuts and standardized testing in The Harvard Crimson, which is the only newspaper in the country that has dedicated more than one or two articles to the commission, and a couple of comments last month harking back to A Nation at Risk, a 1983 blue-ribbon commission report that created a political uproar over the public schools that has yet to subside. On May 19, The New York Times tossed off a commission meeting in 825 words, adding this:
In an interview during the meeting, [commission chair Charles] Miller said he hoped the commission's report would galvanize the Bush administration and Congress to legislate broad reforms in the nation's system for financing and regulating higher education. If it is punchy and well-written, he said, it could be as influential as "A Nation at Risk," the 1983 report commissioned by President Ronald Reagan that inspired a movement for higher standards and accountability in America's 90,000 public schools.
In a classic example of he-said, she-said journalism, The Times added:
"We've talked in private to him about that," said David Ward, a commission member and president of the American Council on Education, the largest association of colleges and universities. "If he means that 'A Nation at Risk' had a rhetorical flair that got people's attention, that's certainly true. But the pathology of the public schools in the 1980's is not comparable to higher education today. Our colleges and universities are successful — just not successful enough to confront the challenges of globalization without significant change."
Thus the only mention of the blue-ribbon commission in the national media. But there's more. Playing off of Ward's comment to The Times, Candace de Russy, an education writer for the conservative opinion magazine National Review, had this to add:
... since the 1960's, evidence of pathological trends in higher education -- relating to curricula, campus activities, educational outcomes, academic freedom, ethics, and finances -- continues to mount. So who's to say which educational sector is is most diseased or abnormally functioning?
Moreover, not only does the pathology in public schools endure, but a convincing case can be made that their “constitutional breakdown” -- failure to teach basic skills, disdain for knowledge, divisive multicultural studies, and collapsed discipline -- was incubated on our campuses. The ideas and practices born in the academy are seminal to all other institutions.
In particular, the greatest conduits of pathology to our elementary and secondary schools in recent decades have been our degenerate humanities, social-science, and teacher-education programs.
Yes, honorable Commission members, this nation remains at risk, and higher educators deserve much blame for the dangerous pathology afflicting it.
What's worrisome about this is that A Nation at Risk misinterpreted the statistical evidence and vastly overstated the problems of K-12 public education, but it was punchy and well-written, and it was accepted uncritically by the news media and lawmakers in spite of its shortcomings. Given the lack of public interest in the higher ed commission's activities and the partisan, combative tone of what little comment it has evoked so far, the potential exists for higher education to be similarly used as a political football when the commission reports in September.
-- 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>.
