Obama's higher ed ratings, student outcomes assessment and a dandy new standardized testing product -- here we go round (and round and round and round) the mulberry bush

So I'm on the Inside Higher Ed website reading up on President Obama's plan to rate colleges and universities -- which turns out to look like one more circuit around an old, old mulberry bush -- and I surf into an an editorial on higher ed assessment by someone named Geoff Irvine, who turns out to be CEO of Chalk & Wire, a Canadian assessment software company. At least it's labeled as an editorial. To me it looks more like an unadulterated sales pitch.

"Today," says Irvine, "leaders of colleges and universities across the board, regardless of size or focus, are struggling to meaningfully demonstrate the true value of their institution for students, educators and the greater community because they can't really prove that students are learning."

OK. Been there. Done that. I've been around this mulberry bush before, and it's not too hard to figure out what's coming next.

This is precisely the same language we were bombarded with when I chaired a faculty assessment committee 10 years ago, and we were mandated to really prove [our] students were learning, in meaningful, evidence-based, "value-added" ways that somehow turned out to involve the purchase of standardized testing products. Irvine adds:

Most [colleges] are utilizing some type of evaluation or assessment mechanism to keep “the powers that be” happy through earnest narratives about goals and findings, interspersed with high-level data tables and colorful bar charts. However, this is not scientific, campuswide assessment of student learning outcomes aimed at the valid measure of competency.

Campuswide assessment efforts rarely involve the rigorous, scientific inquiry about actual student learning that is aligned from program to program and across general education. Instead, year after year, the accreditation march has trudged grimly on, its participants working hard to produce a plausible picture of high “satisfaction” for the whole, very expensive endeavor.

But, Irvine helpfully adds, there is a way out of grimly trudging around the mulberry bush.

In part he recommends "change management" and "disruption," two of this year's most popular corporate school reform buzzwords, and in part he recommends buying a product he just happens to sell:

Most accreditation software systems rely on processes that are narrative, not a systematic inquiry via data. Universities are full of people who research for a living. Give them tools (yes, like Chalk & Wire, which my company provides) to investigate learning and thereby rebuild a systematic approach to improve competency.

Which led a commenter to paraphrase:

#Disruption #Consultants #NewTechnology (which I can sell you!) Yes, of course that is the answer. Because the "public" is dissatisfied. For one, I look forward to more pronouncements from our assessment overlords. That will surely (SURELY!) make higher education better.

And another to exclaim:

What poorly reasoned nonsense. This is a perfect example of "disruptive" pressure from outside, allegedly on behalf of "the public." It masquerades as an editorial but what it amounts to is free advertising for an "assessment" company. (Will _Inside Higher Ed_ run puff pieces by the CEOs of Nike or Coca-Cola next?) Those who listen to parasitic nonsense like this are just going to pile on the costs of higher education, and students will be no better off for it. Courses and curriculums redesigned to "prove" student achievements will be gutted, stripped down, homogenized.

So let's go back 10 and 20 years ago, for another trip around the mulberry bush …

In 1995, 1996 (don't ask) and again in 2005, we were mandated at Springfield College in Illinois to prove that [our] students were learning -- and we were warned by Cecilia L. López, then the assessment coordinator of the North Central Association, that things like grades and successful transfer rates didn't cut it anymore. In a paper ominously titled "Opportunities for Improvement: Advice from Consultant-Evaluators on Programs to Assess Student Learning," Lopez laid down our marching orders if we didn't want to lose our accreditation:

Evaluators note that information gathered on a number of forms assumed to be “measures” of student academic achievement by institutions does not in fact provide evidence of learning. One such non-measure is a questionnaire asking students if their personal goals for the course or major or program have been met. A second group of non-measures that institutions often mistakenly consider to be instruments that measure student learning are the measures and reports associated with program evaluation. … The fourth and most frequently submitted non-measure of student learning are grades and GPAs. Evaluators regularly stress that neither grades nor GPAs are adequate or reliable measures of student learning across an undergraduate major or graduate/professional program of study.

Which might explain why my eyes glazed over when I read the Obama administration is considering a "framework" for rating colleges and universities on criteria of affordabilty, access and "performance," or student outcomes.

"Over all," says Michael Stratford of Inside Higher Ed, "the department’s approach in the outline appears to be moving away from a system that lets students and families draw comparative value judgments between colleges and closer to something that resembles a set of minimum standards for institutions."

OK. Just like Common Core and Race to the Top. And, before that, No Child Left Behind. And, before that, mandated busywork circling the mulberry bush all the way back to the Professorenzetteln (professor's notes) required in 1556 and 1607 by the Holy Roman Empire.

But there's something I wish the experts would keep in mind. Mulberries, as Wikipedia reminds us, do not grow on bushes. They grow on trees.