More Tests?

Margaret Spelling, U.S. Secretary of Education, spoke in Kansas City on June 5, 2007. Among her ideas about higher education, she wants to measure what college students learn. Her reasoning is basically that higher education costs a lot of money and that the Federal Government spends a lot of money on higher education, therefore higher education should be accountable for the outcomes produced by them thar inputs. OH, please! Let's not have federally mandated testing on the scale that's performed for K-12. Let's not have a higher education parallel to the No Child Left Behind Act. What would we call such an act anyway?

I thought and still think that college professors, whether in elite universities or community colleges and all the institutions in between, do a good job of measuring what students learn what with pop quizzes, mid-terms and finals. We don't need the interference of the federal government in an evaluation of student learning, instructor teaching, seminar leadership, lecture hall PowerPoint presentations and library resources. Other ideas of Margaret's aren't so bad, like the simplification of federal aid applications and its process. But I ask, since she's been in office for several years now, why hasn't she accomplished any of her goals? Sounds like a lot of talk for the sake of a sound bite, rather than a dialogue for educators.