In the meantime, a snippet tucked into a report in the online newsletter Inside Higher Ed suggests a partial retreat from commission chair Charles Miller's insistence on a uniform national standarized testing regimen. It also suggests testing will be one of the footballs the politicans plan to kick around. The snippet reads as follows:
Speaking to reporters after the vote, Miller said his preference would be for “the academy [itself] to address” the changes called for in the report, and as evidence of his desire not to impose mandates on higher education, he noted that the report the commission approved Thursday had dropped language (which was in last week’s draft) that called for states to require public institutions to measure student learning using a set of tests and other measures. (The new language, which college leaders pushed hard for in the last few days, just says that “higher education institutions should measure student learning using....")I want to see the final draft before I try to read too much into this. But I think it may be a hopeful sign whatever new testing regimen emerges from all this won't be too intrusive.
If higher education is “not responsive to change” and “doesn’t have a strategic vision,” Miller predicted, then “things are going to be mandated.”
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