The Chronicle's take on Miller commission

Since The Chronicle of Higher Education usually hides its articles behind a subscription firewall, I haven't kept up with its coverage of the U.S. Education Department's blue-ribbon Commission on the Future of Higher Education. But every so often The Chronicle comes out from behind the firewall, and this week they've got a good takeout on the commission's draft report from the July 7 issue. Like practically everything else in The Chronicle, it's thorough and very well balanced.

Written by Kelly Field, the article catches the tone of the Commission's debate in the headline: "Draft Report From Federal Panel Takes Aim at Academe." A subhead notes the split between chairman Charles Miller and educators on the commission. It also details some of the substantive recommendations that have surfaced thus far:

A draft report released last week by the Commission on the Future of Higher Education called for overhauling the federal student-aid and accreditation systems, easing the process of transferring credits between institutions, and using testing to measure the "value added" by a college education.

The report, which the panel discussed during a closed meeting two days after it was released, also endorsed the creation of a national "unit record" system to track the educational progress of every college student in the United States.

With that on the record, Field goes on to sketch in the controversy on the commission over the tone of its deliberations. Some of the complaints are procedural, reflecting concern that the commission will railroad through a predetermined set of recommendations. Field says:

... several commission members were unhappy with both the substance and the tone of the preliminary report, which was written by an outside writer with assistance from commission staff members. Some said it favored the views of the consultants who drafted the commission's issue papers over the opinions of the commissioners themselves.

"This really reflects what the consultants put in the papers and what they would like the commission to say," said James J. Duderstadt, president emeritus of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. "It doesn't have any relationship to the kind of deliberations we had at the May meeting," when members began sifting through potential recommendations in an effort to reach an initial consensus.

David Ward, president of the American Council on Education, said the report was "based on a highly selective reading of testimony" and "in no way reflects the candid and creative discussions we have had during our yearlong process."

"I believe it is seriously flawed and needs significant revision," he wrote in a letter to college presidents.

On the other side of the issue, Field quoted Richard K. Vedder, an economist who writes for the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, who said the report represented "a good starting point," and Sara Martinez Tucker, president and chief executive of the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, who said she was "very pleased with the completeness of it." Field explains:

Ms. Tucker said she created a matrix of all the ideas that came out of the commission's task forces, cross-referenced it against the report, and found that only three of her colleagues' suggestions were missing.

"Some of the ideas may be buried, or not as prominent as people would want, but they're in there. You just have to look," she said, noting that the unit-record proposal — her No. 2 priority — is not mentioned until Page 22 of the 27-page report.

Still, there's this question of tone. It's dogged the Commission since day one, and it won't go away. Field reports:

Other panel members were troubled by the tone of the report, which began by noting that American higher education "has become one of our greatest success stories," but quickly turned to "the less inspiring realities of college life in our nation": the enrollment gap between rich and poor, the high use of remedial courses, rising costs, and a failure to prepare American workers for a changing global economy.

The report went on to describe colleges as "risk-averse, frequently self-satisfied, and unduly expensive," and blamed rising tuitions on colleges' "failure to seek institutional efficiencies and by their disregard for improving productivity."

Robert W. Mendenhall, president of Western Governors University, an online, nonprofit institution, called the report "overly negative and overly focused on the academy as the culprit." And Ms. Tucker said she worried that the report's get-tough tone could backfire, alienating, rather than engaging and inspiring, academe.

Mr. Miller defended the draft, noting that Secretary Spellings had called on the commission not to be "shy or mealy-mouthed." In an interview, he said panel members' repeated calls for "moderate" language have left him feeling "almost like I'm being censored."

Mr. Miller also stood by his decision to have the panel's outside writer produce a complete draft, rather than an outline or set of recommendations, as was initially planned. Several panel members who received the full report a week before it was released to the public said they had been surprised by the abrupt change in plans.

He called the idea of offering recommendations before documenting the problem "an Alice in Wonderland idea: 'answers first, questions later.'"

"My way is the honest way, the direct way," he said.

Note Miller's language. His way is not an honest way, it's the honest way, implying all other ways are something other than honest. Perhaps it's just a chance turn of phrase. Or perhaps Miller's tone is hostile and combative.

Field's article ends with a valuable list of specific recommendations so far on issues of Access; Affordability; Quality and Innovation; and Accountability (with its recommendations on who carry them out listed in parentheses). I'll quote the recommendations on accountabilty below:

• Require institutions to measure student learning using measures such as the National Survey of Student Engagement and the Community College Survey of Student Engagement, as well as the Collegiate Learning Assessment and the Measure of Academic Proficiency and Progress (states). Provide incentives for states, higher-education associations, systems, and institutions to develop outcomes-focused accountability systems (federal government).
  
  
• Make results of such measures available to students and report them publicly in the aggregate. They should also be included on transcripts and in national databases of accountability data. Institutions should make aggregate results publicly available in a consumer-friendly form.
  
  
• Administer the National Assessment of Adult Literacy every five years, instead of 10 (Education Department).
  
  
• Require the National Center for Education Statistics to prepare timely annual public reports on college revenue and expenditures, including analysis of the major changes from year to year, at the sector and state levels (secretary of education).
  
  
• Develop a national student unit-record tracking system to follow the progress of each student in the country, with appropriate privacy safeguards.
  
  
• Create a consumer-friendly information database on higher education that includes a search engine that allows parents, policy makers, and others to weigh and rank institutions based on variables of their choosing (Department of Education).
  
  
• Establish a national accreditation framework that contains a set of comparable performance measures on learning outcomes appropriate to degree levels and institutional missions, and that is suitable for accreditation, public reporting, and consumer profiles; that does not prescribe specific input and process standards; and that requires institutions to report progress relative to their national and international peers.
  
  
• Make accreditation more transparent. Make the findings of reviews easily accessible to the public, and increase the proportion of public representatives in the governance of accrediting organizations and members of review teams from outside higher education.

Footnote. The Chronicle does have posted to the World Wide Web a directory of stories it has written on the Miller commission. And we take The Chronicle at SCI's Becker Library. So if you want to read them in hard copy, you can print out the directory and take it to the library.