NO ADMINISTRATOR LEFT BEHIND
D. D. Wills
The news for faculty from Washington, D.C., is not heartening. This reporter recently attended the WASC (Western Association of Schools and Colleges) Annual Meetings in Irvine, where we heard several disturbing reports concerning the escalation of pressure and dictation by the Department of Education and Congress directed at higher education. WASC is our accrediting organization, one of six in the nation. All are run essentially by the member institutions, except for the directors and staff of the headquarters offices, who are hired in effect by us to administer our own accreditation policies. That self-monitoring approach is a little too democratic for the current regime, though they have no objection to it when applied to financial institutions or industry. The Fed is considering establishing its own accreditation structure and praxis, i.e., reviewing us directly.
Many faculty regard the institutional accreditors as a kind of external enforcement agency for unwelcome education management practices such as assessment and strategic planning. It is true that accreditation organizations of all sorts, including the professional ones, have been a conduit for many of these corporate and educational administration fads, along with our own universities' and university systems' administrations. However, so long as the accrediting and other education organizations remained relatively free from political intimidation, they have been willing to allow constituent campuses to determine their own forms of assessment, quality control, mission, and so on. Penetration of institutional accreditation into actual curriculum and course content has been shallow (not true of professional accreditation, of course). This is why such a great diversity of sorts of institutions of higher education are accredited in the United States. A DeVry and a Cal Poly Pomona can both be accredited because they actually do what they say they do.
Washington is now questioning whether our accrediting agencies really guarantee quality, i.e., whether they are accountable (yes, that magic word). For them, quality refers to such matters as time to graduation, retention rate, student performance on standardized tests, etc. There is talk of a national standard for higher education. The notion that the number of students in a class is related to learning is scoffed at. The strong correlation between socioeconomic status and graduation rate is considered irrelevant. The particular characteristics of each campus are ignored. No one raises the illogic of substituting testing for teaching. It is not discussed that the surest way to improve graduation rates is to be more selective in admissions. If our youth are ignorant, it must be the fault of our schools and colleges, which must therefore be more managed from the top. The management people naturally know much more than we do about teaching and learning. If students can't read, write, or do math, it is because the teachers neglect these subjects.
More administration
At the WASC meetings, we also heard a report about Teaching Learning
Quality Review Process (TLQRP), the latest version of TQM to be
applied to universities, this one in Hong Kong. There, the government-administered
university system is using this approach to upgrade its product,
producing at the same time a highly regimented and controlled
experience for the faculty. Although the approach is intended
to permit self-reflection and experimentation, it would require
so much heavy oversight that contingency, debate, and inspiration
would probably be precluded. It will surely demand more administration,
just as the abolition of regional institutional accrediting agencies
suggests a need for a more extensive bureaucratic structure between
the classroom and the Department of Education, layers and layers
of administrators.
Have you ever heard an education bureaucrat, legislator, or even administrator suggest that commercial television, the omnipresence of material values, the poverty of inner-city, rural and reservation schools, and the definition of education primarily as preparation for work have anything to do with students' disengagement and lack of knowledge and skills? The recently-passed education legislation ironically titled "No Child Left Behind" indicts public education for the poor performance of our youth, while exalting the potential of private and faith-based alternative institutions. There is no mention of the sociocultural, political, and economic context of education in the U.S. There is no analysis of the highly bureaucratic, over-managed environment in which teachers must do their work, the many forms of accountability already demanded of us, the many initiatives devised by administrators that teachers then must implement on top of their classroom roles.
The Secretary of Education, Rod Paige, an African-American
appointed by Bush, who has extensive background both in K-12 education
and the Christian Church, has devoted a great deal of time promoting
the "No Child Left Behind" document. He also does another
kind of promotion. He stated in an article in the Baptist Press:
"The reason that Christian schools and Christian universities
are growing is a result of a strong value system. In a religious
environment the value system is set. That's not the case in a
public school where there are so many different kids with different
kinds of values. … I would offer [those who disagree with
the position that religion has a place in the nation's public
schools] my prayers."
Sound like a man on a mission - literally? And whose value system does he have in mind?
Of credits and credentials
Why is this of interest to us? For one thing, we are teachers
of teachers. One of the ideas Paige is advocating is the elimination
of the current credentialing system of teachers. He proposes
formation of an American Council of Teacher Standards, which would
award credentials based on a national standard exam and other
unspecified criteria. He says no specific number of credits or
hours can prepare a teacher or demonstrate one's preparedness.
Until the establishment of the new system, he states we should
encourage talented professionals to step into the classroom via
a kind of fast track.
Voucher schools are of course nothing new. Already, such schools
require no credentials of their teachers. The official advocacy
of non-public schools coupled with the threatened elimination
of credentials poses a threat to the education of teachers as
we know it. If the government is getting out of the business
of education but is going to take over the business of accrediting
educational institutions and credentialing teachers, we may find
our new managers hostile to our teachers' and faculty unions,
even more so than the current administrations. And there will
be plenty for campus administrators to manage.