CNN/AP: Spellings launches review of colleges

[DeepModem Mom]

Spellings launches review of colleges
Tuesday, October 18, 2005


WASHINGTON (AP) -- Education Secretary Margaret Spellings launched a major review of the nation's colleges Monday, citing slipping U.S. performance and scattershot decision-making.

"We make small fixes with programs to emphasize key areas, but we don't think strategically about the bigger picture," Spellings told a new team of policy advisers. "We can't afford to leave the future of our nation's higher education community to chance."

Spellings' Commission on the Future of Higher Education has a task as sweeping as its name. By August 1, the group must recommend how to make colleges more accessible and affordable for families, accountable to policy-makers and competitive with peers worldwide....

***

Spellings chose leaders from academia, corporate America and research for the panel, along with officials from the departments of Defense, Energy, Commerce and Labor.

The college review is the most significant higher education initiative by the Bush administration, which is better known for its focus on reading and math in early grades....


http://www.cnn.com/2005/EDUCATION/10/18/spellings.colleges.ap/index.html

[Mz Pip]

1. Hmmm

Wanna take bets that this "review" will find Bob Jones to be super super top notch and UC Berkeley to be lacking...

Mz Pip
:dem:

[SoCalDem]

2. "chance"....thinking for themselves after having heard

many facets of any given topic

[MichiganVote]

3. Time for the faith-based college initiative

[phillysuse]

4. How did George Bush get through Yale?

Inquiring minds want to know.

I hope she will look very carefully at how George Bush
got through Yale - maybe someone else wrote the papers he turned in as his.

[bain_sidhe]

5. "make colleges... accountable to policy-makers"

::shudder::

My translation? A way to get rid of "liberal" college professors.

[acmejack]

7. That was my immediate impression.

They will privatize all the public schools, affordability is sure to be very low on their list of concerns.

[Zynx]

15. That can be their only objective. Our public universities are the best in

the world. The problem with our education system is not the public universities nor is it the private universities. The problem with our education system is that our public elementary, middle, and high schools have gone down the drain.

[JerseygirlCT]

9. Sure sounds like. nt

[MisterP]

20. Horowitz is getting his little Stalinist neocon dream

[aaronbees]

21. Also, a way to "train workers" ...

so they're little brainwashed robots in the great production machine. Forget critical thinking skills, forget the creative arts ... just make sure workers are there to give a product. Blecchhhh. :puke: I hear it all the time in my area, how the local workforce is supposedly lacking. Well, local industry leaders, maybe it's because you condescend to pay a crap wage and do everything you can to undermine the lives of that workforce.

Here's a novel idea: perhaps the policy makers should be accountable to the people rather than the other way aound.

[WinkyDink]

25. aaronbees, get out of my head!!

I have said those exact words innumerable times!
One of the reasons I had to retire early from teaching English!

[skooooo]

6. Try funding them better....

...all we've had for the last 15 years are cuts, cuts, cuts.

[JerseygirlCT]

8. Do I understand this correctly?

This is the party that was, a short while ago, all for eliminating the entire Education dept. And now, she's decided to get her nose into higher education?

It's not enough to cause problems in elementary and high schools, I guess.

[drthais]

10. I want to say something about this...

I teach at a university
and I am suspect of ANY program by this administration
to 'look into' colleges
of COURSE those who are in academia are 'elitist'
which is doublespeak for 'educated'
and capable of critical thinking
and, as a result, liberal, or at least progressive

the powers that be don't have a chance in hell
of changing that environment

[proud2BlibKansan]

14. I teach in a public school

and trust me, you don't want this administration anywhere near your university. LOL

[KamaAina]

11. No College Left Behind?

Four more years of "teaching to the test". Lovely. They must be stopped before they turn this into a nation of soulless automatons.

[Scooter24]

13. Exactly what I was thinking...

I can just see the government demanding competency tests in Math, Science, and English from it's college students. What a way to force students away from liberal arts classes to more scientific fields.

However, the law would probably only apply to public schools. This is where the majority of college students are. I highly doubt the federal government will get involved in dictating how Harvard and Yale must structure their curriculums.

What concerns me though is the mention of the research grants. They could easily force all schools, including private universities, to mandate these tests or face the repeal of their research grants. This is strikingly similar to using federal money to blackmail schools in allowing military recruiters on campus.

[megatherium]

17. too late, already beginning to happen

It's called "academic assessment" and they're making universities do this more and more. Here's the way it works: the accreditation people show up every 10 years. If your campus hasn't got an assessment plan (requiring every department to state learning goals, and collect data showing their learning goals are being met), they lower the boom -- they threaten to pull accreditation or put you on probation and make you prepare for a "focused visit" to see if you're doing anything about it. I teach at a university where this happened.

[Scooter24]

18. But wouldn't that

lead to possible grade inflation?

[megatherium]

26. grade inflation is why the whole assessment thing has started.

Grades no longer mean anything. So there's pressure to force universities to come up with concrete, objective measures of student learning, and data to prove students have learned. Some disciplines such as business have national exams for this purpose. Other academic programs are forced to gin up measures and collect data. Some of this is legitimate; some of it is busy-work.

[lutefisk]

24. Very much so:

From The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Still, if the chairman's past work is any indication, a major focus of the panel will be accountability. Mr. Miller has been promoting that concept since the late 1980s, when he chaired a Texas task force that developed a state accountability program that became a model for the No Child Left Behind Act.

As a member and later chairman of the University of Texas System Board of Regents from 1994 to 2004, he proposed new reporting requirements for the nine undergraduate colleges in the system and endorsed testing for all freshmen and seniors. The reporting system went statewide last year, and a test of students' analytical and verbal skills is now in the pilot stage.

And when he testified before Congress in 2003, Mr. Miller suggested that colleges test students in their first two years "to measure student learning at the undergraduate level across institutions."

http://chronicle.com/free/v52/i08/08a00101.htm

[newscott]

12. What the fuck does this mean?

We all get to go to Harvard now?

====

"We make small fixes with programs to emphasize key areas, but we don't think strategically about the bigger picture," Spellings told a new team of policy advisers. "We can't afford to leave the future of our nation's higher education community to chance."

====

Does this blurb just scare the shit out of your or what??????????

[GoddessOfGuinness]

23. This means they want to stop teaching kids how to think

and focus on teaching them WHAT to think.

[amandabeech]

16. If this bunch of keystone kops want more U.S. students to study science,

mathematics and engineering, then they are going to have to make sure that there are jobs for them at graduation and beyond, and that those jobs pay as much as going into investment banking or business in general. At the very least graduates should be able to support at least half a family and pay off the enormous student loan debt, too.

How you could get U.S. industry to go along with such a proposition is completely unclear, since they can get all the science and engineering grads they want overseas who don't have student loan debt and where a decent standard of life costs much, much less. Industry will not pay taxes to provide grants instead of loans to those who need them, nor will they agree to keep jobs here and compensate those who hold them a sufficient amount.

It's all a bunch of hookum to get control of the universities and throw out progressive academics. Perhaps those academics can organize themselves out of the reach of the U.S. govt. and more students could study abroad or get their degrees abroad.

[UrbScotty]

19. "...we don't think strategically about the bigger picture"

I didn't know you thought about anything!

[progressivebydesign]

22. Hey. This administration is out of control.

They are going for every single area right now, trying to change as much for the benefit of the neo cons, the religious right, and the corporations while they have control of everything.

I urge everyone to please work hard if there is a Congressional race in your district in 06. We HAVE to get back control of something in D.C. They are destroying our country. :cry: